The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
|
10.1 Domains |
Epithet
The medieval
university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old
knowledge.... The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new
knowledge.
Thomas Henry Huxley
(1825–1895)
Within the
university ... you can study without waiting for any efficient or immediate
result. You may search, just for the sake of searching, and try for the sake
of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would call playing. It’s
perhaps the only place within society where play is possible to such an
extent.
Jacques Derrida
(1930-2004) |
1. If ideology is the science of ideas then epistemology is the theory of knowledge and pedagogy is the theory of teaching. There are, of course, many different theories of both. Accordingly, ideology may be seen as an overarching limb from which hang so many epistemologies like fruit on the fabled tree of knowledge while pedagogy is the seed of its replication and transmission. What they share – ideology, epistemology and pedagogy - is a sense of the social. By contrast, the etymological WIT (knowing by the Senses, Mind, Doing & Experience) and psychological PSI (knowing by Reason, Revelation, Sentiment & Sensation) share a sense of the individuation of the natural Person. This highlights Bronowski’s portrayal of humanity as a ‘social solitaire’ (1973) or Grene & Depew’s “reflective privacy” (2004, 336). With respect to the latter, the individual human being can withdraw from society into a personal private psychic space where time flows backward, forwards and sideways, where space expands and contracts without physical movement, where one knows oneself cum Heidegger’s Being and Time. And, it is here (and in one’s body) that personal & tacit knowledge lives. It is only here that knowledge truly exists – personal & tacit.
2. Nonetheless, it is through sharing knowledge between Persons - through speech, codification, demonstration and/or tooling - that socially useful categories of knowledge – epistemologies – evolve to become the social genetic transmitted to future generations through pedagogy. For my purposes there are two primary epistemic/pedagogic categories: Domains and Practices. I will define and examine each in turn. Before doing so, however, a brief history of the Western university is in order.
3. The university both links and separates Domains and Practices. Arguably, the stereotypical medieval university was organized into three Domains: natural and moral philosophy and metaphysics or theology. To these liberal arts Domains, the Practices of law and medicine were from the outset appended. Together, these constituted the university.
4. This structure changed very slowly following the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. With religious wars waging, the university – Protestant and Catholic – were busy defending religious doctrines and resisted the new experimental philosophy. In effect, the university remained a training ground for elites in traditional and proper ways of knowing. The first significant change occurred in the early 19th century with the first research university at the University of Berlin (1809). The efforts of Wilhelm von Humboldt
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transformed the mandate of the university from interpretation of old to generation of new knowledge. In the process, the experimental natural sciences made the university their home.
5. Thus from the 17th century, the experimental sciences existed outside the university proper acting like an ‘emergent process’ (Emery & Trist 1972, 24-37). First through concealment and latter by parasitism, the natural sciences gradually entered the university, absorbed more and more of its resources (financial and human) until finally it became what it is today – arguably the dominant Domain. In the process, the old ‘natural philosophy’ faded away, replaced by a triumphant experimental philosophy or instrumental experimental science
6. In this regard, Michael Polanyi asserts that the university is the ‘natural’ home of the natural sciences (M. Polanyi 1960-61, 406). He argues that the source of new knowledge in other Domains is primarily outside the university in the ‘real’ world. This he considers appropriate because the natural sciences concern the objective unchanging laws of nature while other Domains are subject to the artificial laws and exigencies of the human condition. I will not, at this time, however, venture further into the changing structure and mandate of the university. Rather I will now re-focus on the epistemological dimension of knowledge.
1. The word ‘domain’ means “a sphere of thought or action; field, province, scope of a department of knowledge, etc.” (OED, domain, n, 4a). A Domain has two characteristics. First, as a province, it is hierarchically subject to the twin powers of Science by Design. Their influence, however, fluctuate over time, e.g., over functional time between periods of normal and revolutionary science (Kuhn 1996) and over chronological time as in the shifting balance between Church and State in Western history. They also vary between the disciplines, sub-disciplines and specialities that make up a knowledge Domain.
2. Second, each Domain “as a sphere of thought or action” has a specific PSI, i.e., configuration of Reason, Revelation, Sentiment and Sensation, accepted as methodologically appropriate for the acquisition of knowledge. This externalizes the dominance and subordination of faculties of analytic psychology demonstrated in the last chapter. It is also analogous to the configuration of a personal computer where usually there is a primary dominant/subordinate pair and a secondary dominant/subordinate pair of drives. The primary configuration will, for my purposes, serve to differentiate Domains, i.e., using their PSI configuration.
3. In a process I call ‘pragmatic epistemology’, the Nation State has created, above the university, specialized funding agencies to foster and promote distinct knowledge streams.
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These now form part of the national innovation system even though many pre-date the NIS concept by two or three generations (OECD 1997).
4. In Canada, relevant agencies include the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canada Council for the Arts (CC). In other English-speaking countries, the pattern is a variation on this theme. In the United States, there is a National Science Foundation embracing the natural & engineering sciences and the social sciences; a National Endowment for the Humanities; and a National Endowment for the Arts. In the United Kingdom there are, in effect, separate councils for each of the natural sciences, the engineering sciences, the social sciences, the humanities and the arts.
5. Such grant-giving councils are economic agents that direct public monies towards development of new knowledge – both for its own sake as well as for its contribution to the economy. In this sense they are political economic institutions. Which companies or troupes, programs, projects or individuals to support is generally decided by peer evaluation including grants made by individual officers who act, in effect, as one-person juries (Chartrand 1987a). Councils tend to reflect the political communities of interest active within each Domain. This grant-giving system parallels the practice of peer review of disciplinary journal articles. For my purposes, I identify three contemporary Domains:
· The Natural & Engineering Sciences (NES);
· The Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS); and,
· The Arts.
6. In the sixth century before the Common Era, the Chinese sage Sun Tzu suggested in his classic The Art of War that a battle may be won before it is fought through a clear understanding of the terrain (Sawyer 1994). The terrain of a knowledge-based economy is dominated by these three glacier-clad mountains. Each rises up above the lowlands and valleys of the economy. Each has its own historical and institutional foundation; each reaches to a summit of excellence - individual and institutional. In the NES and HSS, the traditional institutional peak is the university. In the Arts, it is the fine arts academy, museum, music conservatory or production company.
7. It is in these artistic, cultural and scientific ‘ivory-towers’ that most new knowledge is created, collected, compiled, conserved and/or coalesced into a nation’s knowledge base. From their icy peaks rivers and streams of knowledge flow down winding circuitous paths or through channels chiseled deep into the historical bedrock of a Nation-State. In the valleys and lowlands their waters merge, mingle and mix to irrigate all sectors of a nation's economy.
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8. Beyond the pragmatics of contemporary institutional structures, this trio is consonant with traditional pedagogy and epistemology. With respect to pedagogy, the NES corresponds to the natural philosophy of the medieval university; the HSS to moral philosophy; and, the Arts correspond to metaphysics and theology. In effect, theology, the institutional homeland of Revelation, the controlling faculty of Western knowledge for centuries, has been reduced to a Sentiment within the university, i.e., a human value studied under the Humanities. Art, meanwhile, has donned the cloak of intuition and the associated god-like ex nihlio powers of creativity.
9. With respect to epistemology, since at least the time of Galileo a traditional distinction has also been made between primary, secondary and tertiary elements of knowledge, or experience. Primary knowledge concerns facts or quantities such as size and extension in space, number, weight or mass, motion and time. These elements of knowledge are regarded as belonging to the ‘real’ or physical world. They are accessible to observation, experiment and measurement. This is the domain of the NES.
10. Secondary knowledge, or qualities, pertains to sensations such as colour, taste, smell and form as well as larger concatenations of these qualities. Qualities are held to exist only in the mind of the observer, i.e. they are produced by the perceiving mind out of physical experience; they do not exist in the objective world. Accordingly, even if qualities are real, they are not directly accessible to the scientific method (Sloane 1991). This is the domain of the Arts.
12. Tertiary knowledge, or values, are not perceivable from the outside world but are rather innate ideas, divinely implanted or invented by the subjective observer (Griffin 1991). Being purely subjective, values (or morals) are not directly accessible to the scientific method. This is the domain of the HSS. In what follows, I will outline the natural history of each domain and demonstrate their PSI configuration of faculties.
10.1.1/ Natural & Engineering Sciences
1. There are three primary natural science disciplines – biology, chemistry and physics. Each breaks out into an ever widening range of sub-disciplines and cross-disciplines, e.g., biochemistry. In each there are distinct engineering specialties, e.g., chemical, genetic, mechanical and, electrical engineering. It is from these that, today, most physical technology flows. Price has argued that the relationship between science and technology is that of the research-front of one being related to the previous generation or archive of the other. Thus science operates with the previous generation of technology while technology operates with the previous generation of scientific knowledge (Price 1965, 568).
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2. Arguably, the success of the NES in generating new knowledge can be attributed to three factors. First is the Pythagorean Effect, i.e., exploitation of the cognate relationship between mathematics and the world of matter and energy. Second is the Instrumentation Effect, i.e., scientific instruments generate evidence not requiring intermediation by a human subject and providing readings at, above and below the threshold of native human sensibilities. In effect, this lends metaphysical legitimacy to the NES. Scientific instruments, as previously noted, realize the Platonic “belief in a realm of entities, access to which requires mental powers that transcend sense perception” (Fuller 2000, 69). Furthermore, the language of scientific sensors realizes another ancient Greek ideal, that of Pythagoras, by reporting nature by the numbers. Third is the Puzzle-Solving Effect of ‘normal science’ (Kuhn 1996) which permits vertically deep insight into increasingly narrow questions, i.e., depth at the cost of breadth of vision.
3. Knowledge in the Natural & Engineering Sciences is fact-based and subject to objective, value-free testing in which replicability of results is the test. It is concerned with objective truth, understanding and manipulation of the physical world. It exhibits decreasing tolerance through time for difference and error as old knowledge is progressively and reductively displaced by the new, i.e., NES knowledge progresses vertically up the ladder of time.
4. Expressed in terms of analytic psychology, the NES assigns dominance to Reason while Sensation and Revelation (intuition) are subordinate and Sentiment suppressed. Using the computer drive metaphor, the primary dominant is Reason and the primary subordinate is Sensation. The secondary dominant is Revelation or intuition while the secondary and repressed subordinate is Sentiment. It is the primary configuration of Reason/Sensation that characterizes the NES – measurable quantity.
5. In the NES, Sensation is thus in the service of Reason embodied in scientific instrumentation that completely isolates or distances the observer from the observed and from the passions of flesh and spirit. This contrasts with the Arts in which Sensation is dominant subordinating Sentiment to produce sensual or aesthetic effects on a flesh and blood audience. The contrast is one of the extroversion/introversion of Sensation. In the NES, Sensation is directed outward into the physical world by Reason. In the Arts, Sensation is directed inward into the psychic world by Sentiment. The result James Hillman calls The Thoughts of the Heart (Hillman 1981).
6. When applied for utilitarian purposes, NES knowledge generates physical technology, i.e., the ability to manipulate matter and energy to satisfy human want, needs and desires. The impact of the experimental method in the NES has, as previously noted, been impressive in evolutionary terms. In twenty-five generations we have literally
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enframed our planet enabling ourselves of its bounties, making them ready at hand to serve our purpose, from the deepest oceans to the outer reaches of the solar system.
10.1.2/ Humanities & Social Sciences
1. Much has been and more will be said about the Scientific Revolution and its implications for a knowledge-based economy. One seldom hears, however, about the preceding ‘Humanist’ and subsequent ‘Social Science’ revolutions. Yet they happened and they too have significant implications. The Humanist Revolution of about 1400 C.E. pre-dates the Scientific Revolution by some two hundred years which, in turn, pre-dates the Social Science Revolution of roughly 1800 by about two hundred years. This sequence is not necessarily co-incidental. One revolution builds upon the foundations laid by its predecessor. The sequence may or may not continue with the year 2000 marking, perhaps, the dawn of the Genomics Revolution. We will know only with historic hindsight.
2. The Humanist Revolution was a revolution of the mind leading to our modern concept of the individual as the legal and ethical foundation of democratic society. But, as will be seen, like the subsequent Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, the Humanist Revolution happened despite the university, not because of it.
3. From an economics perspective the Humanist Revolution was the result of two factors: (i) a sudden decrease in the supply of labour, specifically of educated labour; and, (ii) growing demand for such labour by two competitors – Church and State.
4. After the first Crusade in 1095 C.E., Western Europe gradually stabilized over three hundred years into a highly structured feudal system of subordination. The last wave of ‘barbarians’, the Vikings, had been successfully assimilated into Christendom. Pressures eased from the Islamic south and east with Mongol hordes reaching the borders of Egypt. In the north-east, the same Mongols halted in and then withdrew from Hungary to southern Russia in 1241-2 where descendents of the Golden Horde live to this day, i.e., the Crimea Tartars.
5. Except for dynastic disputes and those between the Papacy and the titular Western Holy Roman Emperor, Western Europe experienced a period of relative peace and prosperity known as the High Middle Ages. One was born, however, into a designated slot in a geographically-limited life from which there was no escape except the Church and death. The peasant was subordinate to the lord of the manor who, in turn, was subordinate to the Crown, who, in turn, was subordinate to God. Guilds, municipal, trading and other corporations received exclusive grants of privilege from the Crown in return for oaths of fealty and tribute. The first universities were created at this time and in this same manner. The English family names ‘Smith’ and ‘Cooper’ sum up this system – one was known by
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one’s trade or ‘mystery’ not bloodline per se: a Smith being a metal worker of some sort and a Cooper being a barrel maker. Social space as in traditional Japan was fully defined (Kahn 1970). Everyone knew their place. Status fraud was a crime. This caste system might have lasted much longer had not two historically coincidental developments shocked the system.
6. First was the rise of the secular state beginning in Italy where government took the form not only of monarchy but also of commune, republic and, of course, the Papal States. Humanists first appeared here marking the beginning of the Renaissance about 1400. Their predecessors were notaries and public officials of the many Italian city states including Rome, capital of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. One branch – accountants – introduced the double entry ledger that supported the commercial revolution in the West’s trade with the East. Another branch included the secretaries, speechwriters and diplomats of princes, popes and dukes as well as the republics or communes of Florence, Genoa and Venice. While some attended the new universities most were of common rather than noble birth.
7. Unlike northern Europe, the increasingly urban Italians looked out every day to see clear evidence that their fame and fortune was as nothing compared to the ancients. This led to a search of the past for examples of greatness to make comparisons with their patrons. Humanists produced “hymns to the gods and praise of famous men” as required by Plato (The Republic, Book X, 1952: 433-434). Fame was what patrons wanted and fame was what Humanists gave and, by association, they thereby received. This focus on fame distinguishes the Humanists of the 14th through 16th centuries from the natural scientists of the 17th who were concerned with contributing ‘knowledge-for-knowledge’s-sake’. This tradition, it has been argued, was established by late medieval ‘Mechanics’ who in journals dedicated their knowledge to the future growth and improvement of their craft, not to personal fame or fortune (Zilsel 1945).
8. Nonetheless the Humanists initiated serious epistemological investigations, some of which eventually entered the university, e.g., philology or comparative linguistics that, in a certain sense, was the first social science. While some Humanists attended university, they were not part of the university. Their natural environment was secular, not scholastic or religious. In effect, Humanist separated secular human life, especially politics, from religion, e.g., Machiavelli (1469-1527).
9. The second shock to the system was the Black Death which ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, two generations before the Renaissance. Originating in China and Inner Asia, the plague was transmitted to Europe when a Kipchak army, besieging a Genoese trading post in the Crimea, catapulted plague-infested corpses into the town. The disease then spread to the Mediterranean ports and beyond (Encyclopedia Britannica, “Black Death”, 2003).
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10. While mortality rates varied the monastic communities had the highest incidence of victims. The ranks of the Church were decimated, e.g., the papal court at Avignon was reduced by one-fourth. In general, talent in all skilled trades became scarce; wages went up; and, the social status of the individual climbed gradually breaking the feudal chains of subordination giving birth to Capitalism. Fifty years later, unlike their medieval predecessors, Renaissance artist/humanist/engineer/scientists signed their works inaugurating the Western ‘cult of the genius’.
11. Humanism assumed that Man not God is the measure of all things. It declined as an epistemological force, however, for three reasons. First, it was identified with the Republic and when the political fortunes of Italy turned and French and German armies marched in, many Humanists found switching allegiances ethically difficult. Second, the vernacular – Italian, French, English and German - began to displace Latin but the Humanist’s bond with the glories of the past, Latin & Greek, proved difficult to break. Third, the Religious Wars of the 16th and 17th centuries beginning with Luther’s posting of his ‘Ninety-five Theses’ on the door of the Castle Church, Wittenberg on Oct. 31, 1517, put God back in the driver’s seat (Zilsel [1943] 2000; Cochrane 1976, Grudin 2003).
12. After the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, the various Humanities were, in effect, absorbed by the university under Moral Philosophy. Today, the Humanities consist of a wide range of disciplines and sub-disciplines including: folklore, history, language & literature, linguistics, philosophy, religious studies and women’s studies (Chartrand 1980).
13. The modern social sciences arose out of two forces. First, the cult of the genius found expression in two individuals (excluding Marx and Freud) – Adam Smith (1723-1790) and Auguste Comte (1798-1857). Smith gave birth to economics out of moral philosophy. Writing in 1969, economist Kenneth Boulding could observe:
Adam Smith, who has strong claim to being both the Adam and the Smith of systematic economics, was a professor of moral philosophy and it was at that forge that economics was made. Even when I was a student, economics was still part of the moral sciences tripos at Cambridge University. It can claim to be a moral science, therefore, from its origin, if for no other reason. (Boulding 1969)
14. Comte gave birth to sociology by way of the natural sciences and in the process spawned Positivism. This, in turn, led to the Logical Positivists and the Vienna Circle of the twentieth century in the philosophy of science with epistemological consequences previously noted. For Comte, all sciences pass through a theological then metaphysical stage before entering a final positive or ‘mathematical’ stage. In the case of both Smith and Comte, it took until the last quarter of the 19th century before the university formally admitted economics and then sociology.
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15. The second force leading to the emergence of the modern social sciences was the apparent success of the experimental instrumental sciences and the accelerating progress of technology. In Smith’s case this connection with the natural sciences is made in his early essay of about 1750: Principles which lead and direct Philosophical Enquiries, illustrated by the History of Astronomy (Thomson 1965, 213). This success also led the poet Coleridge to ask the philosopher of science, William Whewell, to rename natural philosophers. In 1833, he did so, coining the term ‘scientist’ (Snyder 2000).
16. There were, however, two contrary tendencies. The first was towards a unified single social science, e.g., the sociology of Comte. The second was towards specialization. In the end, the second triumphed. Today the Social Sciences breakout into a very wide range of disciplines and sub-disciplines funded by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada including: administrative studies, archaeology, communications & journalism, criminology, demographics, economics, education, geography, industrial relations, information science, law, library science, political science, psycholinguistics, psychology, recreology & physical education, science policy, social work, sociology and urban & regional studies (Chartrand 1980).
17. The Humanities and the Social Sciences (HSS) seek knowledge about the human world. Whether the question is alienation, ethics, history, metaphysics, monopoly, political power or religion; the HSS are concerned with human values. Applying the psychological PSI, HSS assign dominance to Sentiment with Reason and Revelation subordinate and Sensation suppressed. The primary dominant is Sentiment, the primary subordinate Reason; the secondary dominant is Revelation, the secondary and suppressed subordinate, Sensation. It is the Primary relationship: Sentiment/Reason that characterizes the HSS - values. In both the Humanities & Social Sciences, the pursuit of fame has given way as public motivation to contribution to knowledge.
18. Knowledge in the Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS) is value-based and subject to mixed value-free/normative testing in which historical context plays a critical role. It is synthetic in that it seeks reconciliation between objective and subjective truth. It exhibits shifting tolerances through time as old knowledge is recycled in a pedagogic spiral to which new knowledge is added. New knowledge therefore does not necessarily displace old knowledge and revisionism is common, i.e., seeing old things in new ways as well as seeing new things in old ways.
19. The limited success of the HSS in generating new knowledge compared to the NES can be attributed to the absence of the Pythagorean, Instrumentation and Puzzle-Solving Effects noted above. First, while there may be some relationship, there is no apparent cognate relationship between mathematics and human behaviour. Second, HSS evidence –
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in its collection, compilation and analysis - is subject to intermediation by human subjects all along the evidence trail, limiting objectivity. Third, with the pedagogic exception of economics and its Standard Model, there is no generally accepted paradigm in any HSS discipline corresponding to ‘normal science’ that, according to Kuhn, is required for efficient puzzle-solving.
20. When applied, HSS knowledge generates organizational technology, i.e., the ability to shape and mold human communities, enterprises, institutions and societies. This includes the entrepreneurial and managerial knowledge to combine capital, labour and technology into intermediate and final goods and services designed to satisfy human want, needs and desires. It more generally involves management and organization of the firm and Nation-State. It addresses questions about how to motivate workers and managers and how to marry them with financial capital as well as physical plant and equipment. The search for the best in organizational technology is sometimes called In Search of Excellence (Peters & Waterman 1982). In effect, the HSS provide the epistemological basis for governance.
21. The effects of organizational technology have been made explicit by Harvey Liebenstein’s discovery of ‘X-efficiency’, i.e., consumption in the act of production. Liebenstein estimated that poor motivation of workers and managers costs the USA between 20 to 40% of gross national product (Liebenstein 1966, 1968, 1972, 1974, 1978, 1981, 1992). Similarly, it is generally recognized that the post-war success of the Japanese economy is attributable to superior organizational technology reflected in successful product innovation. By contrast, the historical inability of Canadian firms to successfully innovate is an example of poor organizational technology (Economic Council 1985). The contribution of organizational technology to innovation has also been highlighted in the World Competitiveness Report (WEF/IMD 1992).
1. The contemporary Arts consist of four primary disciplines and their sub-disciplines including: the literary, media, performing and visual arts. Each uses a distinct medium of expression: the written word; the recorded sound and/or image; the live stage; and, the visual image, respectively. Each discipline is composed of distinct sub-disciplines and schools. Each has a five stage production cycle: creation, production, distribution, consumption and conservation. And each takes on five distinct functional forms including: the amateur, applied, entertainment, fine and heritage arts (Chartrand April 2000).
2. The Arts have troubled western civilization from the beginning. Plato thus warned:
… we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praise of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into
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our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State (Plato, Book X, 1952: 433-434).
3. It is ironic that it was not Art but Economics using Bentham’s hedonic calculus that made pleasure and pain “the rulers of our State”. Fear of Art was reinforced, not diminished, with Christianity. As one of three monotheist religions subscribing to the Mosaic Code (the others being Judaism and Islam), it explicitly prohibits worship of graven images. Among all three ‘peoples of the book’, so named in Islamic tradition, censorship of the image traces back to Moses and the Golden Calf. In the book (the meaning of the word - Bible), the Word is sacred but the image is at best profane; at worst, evil incarnate.
4. Metaphysic suppression was reinforced by social suppression: the Arts were for the Mechanical not the Liberal or ‘free’ classes of society. Other than ‘hymns to the gods and praise of famous men” Aristotle tasked the Arts with imitation of Nature. After the fall of Rome a second task was added: imitating the Art of the Ancients. By both tests, the Arts of the Middle Ages failed.
5. Once the Renaissance imitators using perspective successfully approximated the original – natural or ancient - the Arts, specifically the visual arts, attained a significantly higher social status and the visual artist attained to celebrity. Thus in 1563 in Florence, under the personal influence of Vasari “the painters, sculptors and architects cut their previous connections with the craftsmen’s guilds and formed an Academy of Art (Accademia del Disegno), the first of its kind that served as a model for later similar institutions in Italy and other countries” (Kristeller 1951, 514). Recognition reflected, however, not just the result but also their method: geometric perspective. The artist/humanist/engineer/scientist was a geometer, a mathematician, an image captured in Dürer’s 1514 engraving of Melancolia holding a protractor in his right hand with his chin supported by his left, a pose reminiscent of Rodin’s much later statue The Thinker (1880). In a manner of speaking, that which allowed music to become a Liberal Art – its Pythagorean or mathematical connexion – was demonstrated in the Visual Arts.
6. Imitation continued to be the test until the late 18th century when the Fine or Beaux Arts coalesced and were rationalized through Baumgarten’s philosophy of aesthetics - his new science of sensuous knowledge to balance logic as the science of intellectual knowledge (Kristeller 1952, 35). The word aesthetics itself derives from the Greek aisthesis - the activity of perception or sensation - which at root means “taking in” and “breathing in” - a “gasp”, the primary aesthetic response (Hillman 1981). In effect, Baumgarten liberated the Arts from epistemological subordination to Church and State.
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7. The successful imitation of Nature by the Arts combined with the success of the NES in revealing her secrets led to what is known as “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” or the battle of the Ancients and the Moderns. This marked the beginning of the 18th century Enlightenment and the end of the Renaissance and of traditional Humanism (Kristeller 1952, 19). Who are superior, the Ancients or the Moderns? The answer: the Moderns.
8. In the Arts, Sensation is the primary dominant that subordinates Sentiment while Intuition is the secondary dominant that subordinates Reason. The primary configuration Sensation/Sentiment characterizes artistic knowledge – quality. As noted above, the reversed position of Sensation - subordinate in the NES but dominant in the Arts - reflects extraversion versus introversion of Sensation. It also highlights four essential differences. First is the use of concepts versus precepts.
Whereas Art begins with desired effects and finds causes to create these effects and no others, Science starts with presumed causes and seeks effects to confirm or negate these causes. Art organizes ignorance by precepts while Science organizes knowledge by concepts (Nevitt 1978, 7).
9. A second difference is that new knowledge in the Arts does not necessarily displace the old. Rather King Tut still sells; Shakespeare is still performed; Bach is played more today than in the 17th century. New works are, however, being added all the time to the inherited repertoire if they pass the test of time. Thus artists, unlike scientists, face competition not just from their peers but also from their long-dead predecessors. At the same time, Egalitarian Realism or poke-in-the-eye art including such icons as Mapplethorpe’s homo erotica photographs and Andres Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ found an audience during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s (Chartrand 1991). These correspond to the so-called ‘Science Wars’ of the same period (Fuller 2000).
10. Third, subject to Reason in the NES, Sensation is restricted to ‘what is’. In the Arts, Sensation is dominant and an avant garde has existed since the mid-19th century that seeks change-for-change’s-sake; it seeks novelty (Scitovsky 1976). The Arts embody the impulse toward the new and original, a self-conscious search for future forms and sensations to the point that the idea of change and novelty overshadows the dimensions of actual change. The artist no longer, as in the past, simply affirms a moral-philosophic tradition but rather searches for a new sensibility, a search which society actively encourages. It has been said that what is imagined in the mind of the artist today becomes the reality of tomorrow (Bell 1976, 33-35). It is in this sense that Revelation or intuition is the secondary dominant in the Arts.
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11. Fourth, the role of Reason as dominant in the NES made entry into the university natural. In the case of the Arts, however, with the exception of music (due to its Pythagorean connection with mathematics) and literature (rhetoric and grammar), the Arts were not part of the ancient or medieval liberal arts curriculum (Cantor 1969: 66-67). The Arts were and still are considered ‘crafts’, i.e., they involve experiential learning. This is epistemologically critical – knowing by doing. It was not until the Renaissance that the fine art academy was established as a formal center for visual art education, separate and distinct from the university (vom Busch 1985, 3). In theater and dance, there was no formal training in any English-speaking universities until the late 19th century and the fine arts were not fully admitted until after the Second World War (Robinson 1982, 178-179, 191-192). Once admitted, however, they had a dramatic effect on both the university and Anglosphere society in general (Toffler 1965). The traditional independent status of the music conservatory within the university is further evidence of the separate institutional pattern of learning pursued in the Arts.
12. Artistic knowledge is concerned with subjective truth; a search for a sense of kosmos or the right ordering of the multiple parts of the world. It is holistic in aesthetic contemplation or gestalt. Testing is purely personal and subjective: ‘It works for me!’ It tends towards increasing tolerance of differences, styles and tastes. It is value laden, not value free.
13. When applied, artistic knowledge generates aesthetic or design technology, i.e., the ability to manipulate sensation through emotion or how we feel. The Arts provide the ‘technology of the heart’. The arts industry includes all profit, nonprofit and public institutions including incorporated and unincorporated enterprise as well as self-employed artists that: (a) use one or more of the arts as a primary factor of production, e.g. advertising, fashion, industrial and product design; (b) use one or more of the arts as a tied-good in consumption, e.g. home entertainment hardware, magazines and newspapers; and/or, (c) produce one or more of the arts as their final output, i.e. create, produce, distribute and/or conserve goods and services in the literary, media, performing, visual and/or heritage arts. Using this inclusive definition, I have elsewhere estimated that the American arts industry accounts for between 6% and 8.5% of Gross National Product, i.e. all goods and services consumed in the United States but not necessarily produced there (Chartrand April 2000).
14. Unlike physical and organizational technologies, however, design technology primarily affects the demand-side of the economic equation. In effect, design technology involves the use of the Arts to manipulate the aesthetic or emotional responses of consumers. In this sense, it is the technology of the human heart primarily appealing to emotion not to reason. It is thus more sensitive to culture, custom and tradition than physical technology.
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This fact, together with the injunction against the study of consumer taste – “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum” (Stigler & Becker 1977) - explains why there has been little investigation by mainstream economics and why Art is simply ignored in the Standard Model.
15 Aesthetic design is fundamentally different from technical or functional design such as a more efficient automobile engine. It contributes ‘elegance’ defined as simple but effective or “the best looking thing that works” (Cwi 1985). If a consumer does not like the way a product looks, he or she may simply not try it. In effect, design technology involves marrying aesthetic to utilitarian value.
16. Beyond consumer goods, design technology plays a critical role in advertising and forms the foundation for the entertainment industry. It is generally forgotten that within the ecology of capitalist realism, advertising is the lubricant of the market economy. And advertising, to a great extent, is the application of the literary, media, performing and visual arts to sell goods and services. Actors, dancers, singers, musicians, graphic artists, copywriters, and editors are employed to sell everything from fruit to nuts; from cars to computers, from beer to toilet paper. Traditionally, mainstream economics has viewed advertising (with the exception of pure information) as unproductive because it manipulates consumer wants through non-rational techniques. Such manipulation reduces consumer sovereignty.
17. Entertainment art generates enjoyment, amusement and recreation. In the entertainment arts, America currently leads the world. Thus entertainment programming (film, recordings and TV) has been reported as the second largest net export of the United States after defense products (The Economist March 11, 1989, 65-66). In a global knowledge-based economy, the Arts involve both economic and geo-political competitiveness.
18. If the relationship between science, technology and the university has been problematic in the Anglosphere, the relationship between Art and the economy has been even more so. Until 1814 the Statute of Artificers regulated training and employment of artisans in the craft guild tradition. In that year, responding to laissez-faire economic policies, the British Parliament abolished the statute. In short order, the guild system collapsed and the labor market became flooded with unskilled workers. By 1835 the competitiveness of top-end British products, particularly textiles, had declined to the point that the British Board of Trade appointed a select committee to investigate the problem and recommend remedies. The committee called for the direct application of art in manufacturing in order to maintain competitiveness with European rivals, especially Lyons in France and Munich in Germany. The result was the first school of design at South
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Kensington in 1836 (Savage, 1985, 94-97). It is interesting to note that the curriculum was designed to ensure lower-class craftsmen trained therein would never aspire to become artists who, by definition, were gentlemen (and later gentlewomen) of the Royal Academy of Art.
19. Similarly, in 1870, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts became the first American state to make art education a requirement in the public schools with passage of the Drawing Act. The Act originated through pressure by Boston manufacturers who argued that European students were trained in design and drawing and therefore American manufacturers suffered a competitive disadvantage (Freedman 1985, 21). Within two decades, the same argument served to introduce art education in Canadian schools (Chalmers 1985, 108). During this period, the most eminent of contemporary economists of the day, Alfred Lord Marshall, explicitly recognized the importance of art to economic life, even if he questioned the moral results of art education:
Education in art stands on a somewhat different footing from education in hard thinking: for while the latter nearly always strengthens the character, the former not infrequently fails to do this. Nevertheless the development of the artistic faculties of the people is in itself an aim of the very highest importance, and is becoming a chief factor of industrial efficiency… Increasingly wealth is enabling people to buy things of all kinds to suit the fancy, with but a secondary regard to their powers of wearing; so that in all kinds of clothing and furniture it is every day more true that it is the pattern which sells the things. (Marshall 1920, 177-178)
20. Since the Great Depression of the 1930s, however, the economic importance of design, and therefore the contribution of art to national income, has, in effect, been forgotten in the Anglosphere. Partially this reflects the dubious morality of the artist reflected in Marshall’s words. It also reflects the pedagogic triumph of the Pestalozzian rational for art education, namely creativity and expression, which displaced the economic rationale in the 1930s (Betenas 1985, 99-101).
21. It also reflects, however, a general shortsightedness on the part of contemporary economists and other social scientists concerning the nature and implications of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution not only transformed production, it transformed the nature of consumption with mass advertising, the department store, fashion, and the mail order (McCracken 1988, 4). Lack of study means little existing empirical evidence about the impact of art on competitiveness. Nonetheless, its impact is, from time to time, still recognized:
There is, then, another aspect to culture, namely good taste, good design and creative innovation, that should enable smaller industrial economies to compete effectively in the world economy.... In this endeavor, higher quality implies an organic relationship between business and engineering, on the one hand, and design and craftsmanship, on the other.... High
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quality products, technologies, plants, homes, cities and locales require the presence of creative artists of all kinds. To increase the long-run supply of artists ... governments must support the artists and the arts. The long-term return from investment in artists and the arts is real and substantial. In the absence of strong public support of this sector, Canada will not reap these benefits. Governments at all levels should increase their contribution to their respective arts councils. (Royal Commission, 1985, 115-116)
1. If Domains are concerned with the growth of knowledge then the Practices are concerned with its application in satisfying very specific and pressing human wants, needs and desires. For my purposes, a practice is the “carrying on or exercise of a profession …, esp. of law, surgery, or medicine; the professional work or business of a lawyer or medical man” (OED, practice, 5). I extend this definition to include other traditional and contemporary professions such as accountant, architect and engineer.
2. In turn, a profession is a “vocation in which a professed knowledge of some department of learning or science is used in its application to the affairs of others” (OED, profession, III 6). Put another way, practices “link bodies of knowledge to forms of action” (Layton 1988, 92). I will, however, narrow this definition to exclude the now obsolete definition of profession as “the function or office of a professor in a university or college; … public teaching by a professor” (OED, profession, IV 7).
3. Application of professed knowledge to satisfy the needs of others involves knowledge in action that accounts for theory, the client/patient relationship and ethics, i.e., “the science of morals; the department of study concerned with the principles of human duty” (OED, ethics, II 2). Professional ethics, of course, are a socially conditioned and historically relative.
4. This distinct form of knowledge may be called ‘praxis’, a term with a colourful history of its own. It was coined by the alchemist, metaphysician and subsequent saint, Albert Magnus, about 1255 C.E. He derived it from a Greek noun of action meaning “doing, acting, action, practice” (OED, praxis, Epistemology). It was re-coined by Cieszkowski in 1838 to mean “the willed action by which a theory or philosophy… becomes a social actuality.” It was then adopted by Marx in 1844 for whom it explained “how knowledge could give power” not through thought like Hegel but through the will. In this sense, praxis approximates design in its emphasis on intent (OED, praxis, 1 c). It also reflects knowing by doing, not just by the senses or mind. Practice as experience is another facet of praxis as knowledge. More generally, praxis means the “practice or exercise of a technical subject or art, as distinct from the theory of it” (OED, praxis, 1a). For my purposes it will mean
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‘knowledge in action’. In this regard, it is important to remember that knowledge can be used as a verb as well as a noun (OED, knowledge, v)
5. The Practices centre on the self-regulating professions such as accounting, architecture, dentistry, engineering (applied), law and medicine. Practices engage knowledge in real life situations while Domains involve knowledge creation or interpretation, e.g., knowledge-for-knowledge-sake or art-for-art’s-sake. Praxis is not academic speculation. It is not knowledge as a noun but as a verb affecting the lives of real people. As in aesthetics and science, however, the Practices observe a professional distance from their subject but it is the very subjective human being. And unlike the atoms, cells and the physical structures of the NES, people can and do sue for ‘malpractice’. In fact, malpractice and product liability lawsuits are a hot button political issue in the United States due to their alleged negative effect on American competitiveness.
6. The Practices draw, merge, mingle and apply knowledge and methodologies beyond those internal to their experience from all three Domains in varying combinations, e.g., the use of actors by medical schools to prepare future physicians to face the emotional realities of patients. Another example is the Art of Dentistry. Unlike academic disciplines, e.g., economics, final certification or ‘licensing’ is not granted by the university but rather by an independent professional society, e.g., a College of Physicians and Surgeons. This partially reflects the fact that praxis cannot be fully codified, i.e., written down. Put another way, there is a gap between graduation and professionalism that must be filled before being licensed to practice independently. This gap is reflected in the requirement, in all Practices, of some kind of compulsory apprenticeship, articling or internship.
7. In many ways, the Practices are descendents of medieval guild mysteries operating in the Mechanical Arts. More so than academic disciplines, the Practices control entry and exit, set rates, supervise initiates and regulate practice. In the case of medicine and law they were also the first practical subjects to be admitted to the university. Some Practices are also associated with grant-giving or funding agencies such as the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (formerly the Medical Research Council of Canada) and the National Institutes of Health in the United States.
8. Guilds originally received their charters from the Crown granting them monopoly rights in return for fealty and sometimes tribute. Today the Practices are regulated by the State, but as with business law (Commons 1924), most traditional customs and privileges of the Practices are effectively enshrined, preserved and protected by legislation under Common Law.
9. As private institutions serving the public purpose – including health, education and welfare as well as wealth and legal rights – the Practices have seldom been acknowledged as
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critical players in the competitiveness of nations in a global knowledge-based economy. How they should be regulated and held accountable is, however, an important question for public policy in general and for development of an effective national innovation system in particular. As demonstrated by Birkenshaw, Harden and Lewis (1990) in their review of Government by Moonlight: The Hybrid Parts of the State in the U.K., USA, France, Germany and Austria, there are different ways in which this may be done. More will be said below.
10. Before ending this chapter with a reconciliation of Domains and Practices, I wish to profile one of the most important and relatively recent additions to the Practices – Engineering. This will highlight the different types of knowledge involved in the Practices and differences in national treatment. Engineering, as a formal practice, did not emerge in the English-speaking world until the mid-19th century. It is the offspring of an epistemological ménage à trois of craft technology, mathematics and the natural sciences. It continued the empirical and experimental traditions of the crafts including architecture but replaced rule of thumb mathematics first by statistics (Layton 1976, 692) and, much later, by calculus. Thus, “American engineers were still debating in the 1920s whether students needed to learn calculus” (Kranakis 1989, 18). It also absorbed the findings of the natural experimental sciences.
11. This order of epistemic integration differs from continental Europe where in France, for example, scientific engineering emerged a hundred years earlier with a requirement for training in the calculus at specially created academic institutes such as the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées (1747) and the Ecole Polytechnique (1794). As a Practice, however, it was restricted to public engineering of armaments, canals, fortifications, roads, etc., and did not extend to private industrial production (Finch 1952). In France too, rules of thumb, craft laws and design principles rather than mathematics continued to dominate industrial production.
12. Engineering in the Anglosphere (Bennett 2000) remains much more of a ‘self-regulating profession’ than an academic discipline as in Europe. Furthermore, emphasis has historically been on industrial research, particularly in the United States, in contrast to theoretical studies in France where an industrial research tradition did not develop until well into the twentieth century (Kranakis 1989, 7)
1. Excepting the Humanities & Social Sciences, both the NES and the Arts exhibit significant praxis. In the case of the experimental instrumental sciences this includes designing and building instruments as well as their operation. In the Arts, praxis creates the
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illusion of verisimilitude. This facilitates what the poet Samuel Coleridge called the temporary or willing ‘suspension of disbelief” required of an audience. And like the Practices artistic knowledge is intended to affect natural persons in their daily lives. Professional ethics in the Arts, however, are radically different than in the Practices, e.g., to deliberately shock and disturb a client is not normally accepted in the Practices; it is in the Arts, e.g., The Shock of the New (Hughes 1981).
2. There are also borderline cases such as geography and psychology sometimes function like Practices. In the case of psychology, for example, professional practice outside the university is common. Applied psychologists work in business, education and government conducting employee and student testing and placement, e.g., The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator ®. Furthermore, psychiatry clearly crosses the border into medical practice. In the Occupational Classification Manual for the Canadian Census of 1971 ten different occupations in psychology were identified as being applicable to any industry (DBS 1971, 63). Similarly, practicing geographers can be found outside the university working in urban and transportation planning departments of governments as well as environmental departments and agencies of both business and government. Furthermore, geography’s link with geology can also cross over the border into the NES.
3. When it comes to economics the border lines become even more obscure. Economists are employed by for-profit and non-profit enterprise as well as government. In the Occupational Classification Manual for the Canadian Census of 1971 thirty-two different occupations in economics were identified as being applicable to any industry (DBS 1971, 63).
4. Thus the borderline between Domain and Practice is more an osmotic membrane than an impenetrable barrier. Knowledge from Domains seeps into the Practices and praxis seeps into Domains. This is consonant with the interpretation of knowledge as a biological rather than mechanical phenomenon. With respects to Domains and Practices, this mutability can be expressed in the form of two related Qubits of knowledge – the EPI and the PED.
1. The EPI is a four-fold measure of knowing via the Natural & Engineering Sciences (NES), the Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS), the Arts (literary, media, performing and visual) and the Practices. The EPI can be expressed as some function of NES, HSS, Arts and the Practices. In brief, the NES generate knowledge about the physical world of matter and energy; the HSS generate knowledge about being human - individually and collectively; the Arts generate knowledge about human emotion; and, the Practices apply knowledge from
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the first three to answer practical and pressing problems of daily human life. The three Domains – at their professional peaks - generate new knowledge as ‘knowledge-for-knowledge-sake’ or ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ while the Practices apply knowledge to solve practical human problems.
1. While the EPI provides a qubitic measure of epistemological knowledge, another Qubit can be identified at the pedagogic level. Knowledge can thus be classified according to its domain/practice, discipline, sub-discipline and specialty. This quartet constitutes the Qubit PED.
2. In the previous two chapters I individuated the content of knowledge as an etymological WIT (by the senses, mind, doing, experience) and psychological PSI (Reason, Revelation, Sentiment, Sensation). In this chapter I socialized the content of knowledge as an epistemological EPI (NES, HSS, Arts, Practices) and pedagogic PED (domain/practice, discipline, sub-discipline, speciality). In the next chapter I will legalize knowledge as property that can be bought and sold and yet eventually enters an immense and ever growing public domain - available without charge to any and all – which constitutes our social genetic inheritance and the legal foundation of our democratic freedoms.
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The Competitiveness of Nations