Content          Problem Statement & Objective      Origins                        Theoretical Inadequacies  Methodology           Etymology                Know                        Knowledge                      Wit                                 Related Words Deductions Epistemology       The Ancients         The Scholastics   Deductions                 Transdisciplinary Induction      Reflections on Dominant Disciplines      Economics       Cultural            Institutional         Legal       Philosophy                Aesthetics    Epistemology & Science Psychology                  Analytic                     Cognitive                      Gestalt                         Science                         Economics                      History                           Philosophy                         Sociology                      Technology                      Lead In                                  Acknowledgements     Endnotes            References

Methodology

1.12  For my purposes, methodology is the organized means by which knowledge about something is acquired.  That ‘something’ may be the subatomic roots of a chemical reaction, property rights among Fourth World peoples, altered states of consciousness, the history of the automobile, the meaning of truth, love, beauty, destiny, etc.  In each case, however, the organized means to acquire knowledge are different as are the rules of evidence.  When the ‘something’ is, however, knowledge itself, one faces a meta-methodological dilemma.  Understanding a system requires a perspective or vantage point higher than or conceptually above the sub-system under investigation (Loasby 1971, 863). [E]  How can one attain a position that transcends knowledge?  How can one know all the domains and forms of knowledge and the related faculties for its acquisition?  Such questions border on metaphysics and revelation - regions of thought explicitly excluded from mainstream economic theory with its calculatory rationalism. 

1.13  Knowledge, and the methods to acquire it, have been the subject of continuing concern since the dawn of human consciousness, i.e., since the phylogenetic instant of self-awareness that marks the arrival of our species homo sapien (literally, ‘the man that knows’) on planet Earth and that subsequent and recurring ontogenetic instant when each of us, over the generations, emerges out of infancy into maturing self-consciousness.  How, who (in a psychiatric sense), what, where, when and why do we ‘know’?  What is the relationship between knowing and memory?  Where does knowledge go when not in thought?  Does what we know correspond to an objective, external or eternal truth or reality?  Or, is it only relative, subjective and contextual to our specific time, space and personality?   Is it truth or falsehood?

1.14  Two traditional paths have been followed to answer such questions.  The first is the branch of linguistics called etymology - the origin and meaning of words.  The second is the ancient branch of philosophy called epistemology – the theory of knowledge.  I will briefly sketch my reading of both in the hope of initiating the law of primacy, i.e., that which happens first colours what happens next.  In the main body of the thesis, this law will be expressed in different forms, e.g., with respect to techno-economic regimes as path dependency and, with respect to culture as tradition. I then define my methodology: transdisciplinary induction.  

Etymology

1.15  Etymology is the study of the origin and evolution of words especially their changing meaning or ‘sense’ through time.   A word, of course, is part of a language that in turn is the traditional foundation of a ‘nation’ or a ‘people’, e.g., the Chinese, English, French, German or Japanese language, nation and/or people.  In turn, the word ‘language’ derives from the Latin lingua meaning ‘tongue’, i.e., speech or “oral expression of thought or feeling”. (OED, language, n 1, I.1.a)  In addition to differing lexicons or vocabularies, languages are differentiated by their grammar and syntax, i.e., the ordering of words.  Furthermore, when reduced to writing, languages are differentiated by alphabet or script, e.g., Chinese or Mandarin, Cyrillic, Roman, etc. and, arguably, mathematics.  Spoken and written language is a primary distinguishing feature of our species.  It is the principle, but not the exclusive, means by which human knowledge is exchanged between individuals and generations.  Sometimes, however, language is treated as synonymous with knowledge which leads to transmission of knowledge by other media of communications being ignored.

1.16  Since the mythic Tower of Babel, language has served to separate peoples and nations.  Within a nation, a common language serves to build community, trust and understanding; between nations differing languages create alienation, confusion, oppression and/or suspicion.  Some have suggested that differences in written alphabets cause fundamental differences in perception, i.e., what and how we know.  Thus Marshall McLuhan, following the lead of his mentor, economist Harold Innis (Innis 1950, 1951), noted that we recognize a fundamental difference between the perceptions of literate and preliterate peoples but we do not generally appreciate the effect of differing alphabets.  According to McLuhan the phonetically literate person of today lives in a ‘rational’ or ‘pictorial’ space.  The discovery or invention of such a cognitive space - uniform, continuous, connected - was an environmental effect of the phonetic alphabet in the sensory life of ancient Greece.  This form of rational or pictorial space is an environment that results, according to McLuhan, from no other form of writing, e.g., Arabic, Chinese and Hebrew. (McLuhan, Fiore 1968: 7; McLuhan and Logan 1977). 

1.17  If the primary vehicle for the creation and transmission of knowledge – language – is subject to systemic bias then what one means by the word ‘knowledge’ will tend to be biased according to one’s language.  Accordingly, the comparative etymology of the word ‘knowledge’ in all major languages, e.g., Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian and Spanish, is required to provide a fuller insight into the true nature and meaning of knowledge in the global economy today.  Ideally, a comprehensive comparative etymology would embrace all secondary, declining and extinct languages.  For purposes of this thesis, however, I restrict myself to English and the origin, meaning and biases associated with three words - know, knowledge and wit.  I will also briefly survey related words generally adopted into English from other languages.  I draw primarily upon the Oxford English Dictionary on-line (OED 2003) except for the word ‘science’ whose etymology I derive from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary on-line (MWD 2003).

Know

1.18  The word ‘know’ takes the form of a verb and two nouns in English.  As a verb, it has ancient Teutonic and Aryan roots but is retained only in English.  It shares its root with ‘can’ (as in ‘know-how’) and ‘ken’.  It has also absorbed the territory of the archaic English verb ‘wit’, the root of the German wissen – to know.  In fact, the English verb ‘know’ covers meanings expressed by two or more verbs in other Teutonic and Romantic languages, e.g., in German wissen, kennen, erkennen, and (in part) können; and in French connaître and savoir.

1.19  The OED proposes two different interpretations. Some scholars, it notes, propose two distinct acts of knowing: knowing by the senses and knowing by the mind. The first means to perceive or apprehend; the second, to comprehend or understand.  The first derives from the Old English ‘know’ while the second derives from the archaic verb ‘wit’.  Alternatively, other scholars have proposed that the only proper object of knowing is a fact or facts derived by reason (OED Signification 2003) in contrast with  ‘to believe’ and its sense of emotional rather than intellectual certainty (OED, know, v, III.10.a). [F]

1.20  The verb ‘know’ has five branches with 56 different meanings and sub-meanings.  Each branch begins at about the same time in history.  Within each branch meanings are generally presented in the OED sequentially through time.  (OED, Preface to the Second Edition (1989) General explanations, III. The signification, or senses)  The first branch (I) is rooted in the Old English ‘know’ and involves knowing by the senses primarily meaning ‘to perceive’.  The second branch (II) corresponds to the French connaître and the German kennen meaning ‘to be acquainted with’ including sexual intimacy.  The third (III) is rooted in the archaic English verb ‘wit’ and involves knowing by the mind corresponding to the French savoir and the German wissen meaning ‘to be cognizant of’.  The fourth (IV) is rooted in the Old English verb ‘can’ meaning ‘know how’.  Finally, the fifth branch involves use of ‘know’ with prepositions such as know about, know of, etc.

1.21  ‘Know’, as a noun, take two forms.  The first is rooted in the early Middle English cnaw and is related to contemporary use of ‘acknowledgement’ and ‘confession’.  The second is a recent formulation meaning ‘in the know’.

Knowledge

1.22  The word ‘knowledge’ takes the form of a verb and noun.  The OED notes that the origin and relationship between ‘knowledge’ as a verb and noun is problematic but concludes that the verb appeared first.  As a verb ‘knowledge’ has ten meanings and sub-meanings.   The oldest has specific significance for a knowledge-based economy meaning ‘to own the knowledge of’.  The others concern ‘acknowledge’ and professional recognition, e.g., in medicine and law.

1.23  As a noun ‘knowledge’ has three branches and twenty-five meanings and sub-meanings.   The first branch (I) involves the early sense of ‘know’ as a verb, i.e., acknowledgement, recognition and legal cognizance.  The second (II) involves later uses of the verb and involves (i) the fact or condition of knowing as in ‘acquaintance’ including sexual intimacy; and (ii) the object of knowing as information, intelligence, the sum of what is known, branches of learning including the arts and sciences, and a sign, mark or token of identity.  The third branch (III) involves the use of the noun ‘knowledge’ in combinations such as knowledge power and knowledge base, i.e., the underlying set of facts, assumptions, and inference rules used in a given discipline of thought.

Wit

1.24  The word ‘wit takes the form of three verbs, a noun and a pronoun.  The first use of the verb ‘to wit’ is archaic except in law where it stands in a formula after the place name of the venue for a trial.  In general, its archaic meaning of ‘cognizance’ or ‘knowledge of’ has been absorbed by the verb ‘to know’.  The second use of ‘to wit’ is obscure in origin meaning ‘to bequeath’.  The third use is current and relates to ‘playing the wit’. 

1.25  The OED traces four branches of ‘wit’ as a noun with thirty-four meanings and sub-meanings.  The first branch (I) denotes a mental faculty.  The first meaning is ‘the seat of consciousness or thought, the mind…’ (OED, wit, n, I.1).  The second involves the faculty of thinking while the third involves faculties of perception “classified as outer (outward) or bodily, and inner (inward) or ghostly” (OED I.3.a).  The fourth and final meaning under the first branch concerns the condition of understanding or mental capacity, e.g., sanity as being ‘in one’s right wit’.  The second branch (II) involves ‘wit’ as a quality, e.g., of great mental capacity, wisdom, quickness, quality or lively fancy.  The third branch (III) is chiefly obsolete involving senses corresponding to the Latin scientia and sentential.  Meanings include learning, departments of knowledge or science as well as the way of thinking corresponding to ‘mind’.  The fourth and final branch (IV) involves the use of the noun ‘wit’ in combination with other words such as at my wit’s end, wit-loss and wit-jar “an imaginary vessel humorously feigned to contain the wits or senses” (OED, wit, n, IV.14.e).  As a pronoun, ‘wit’ has an obscure relationship to the pronoun ‘we’ as in ‘we two’.

Related Words

1.26  There are other words in English related to ‘knowledge’.  In general, they are derived from other languages.  They can be grouped according to ‘know by the senses’ and ‘know by the mind’.  The first category – to know by the senses – includes the words: apprehension, conception, perception and science.  Apprehension derives from the French meaning to seize or grasp.  Conception derives from the Latin concipere ‘to conceive’ that comes from ‘to take in’ and, as I understand it, colloquially, meant ‘to grasp firmly with the hand’ or, in Sicilian, ‘to steal’.  Thus ‘a concept’ is a grasping and manipulation with a mental hand. Perception derives from the Old French out of the Latin meaning ‘to take or receive’.  Science literally means ‘to know’ and derives from the Latin scientia compounded from scindere ‘to split’ or ‘to know’ together with the Latin suffix entia that forms nouns of quality (a word derived from the Latin for ‘kind’), i.e., science involves splitting into kinds, types or taxonomies. (MWO, science, n, 2003)  Arguably, this is the etymological root of reductionism in contemporary natural and engineering science. 

1.27  What all four share in common is a grasping and manipulation of the world – inner or outer.  In terms of evolution, using its opposable thumb, humanity reached out to shape the material world to compensate for its elemental frailty – no great size, no claws or talons and tiny canine teeth.  To eat and survive predation, the human brain reached out with finger-thumb coordination to grasp and shape parts of the world into tools with which to then manipulate other parts, e.g., to kill game or plant seeds.  It appears, from the fossil record, that the opposable thumb preceded, and in a path-dependent manner contributed to, the subsequent and extraordinarily rapid evolutionary growth and development of the human brain itself.  ‘To know by the senses’ involves translation of this original experience of external manipulation into internal psychic or mental manipulation.  This sense of ‘to know’ relates to its fourth branch (OED, know, v, IV) rooted in the Old English verb ‘can’ meaning ‘know how’.

1.27  The second category – to know by the mind – includes the words: comprehension, cognition, thinking and understanding.  Comprehension derives from the Latin, and like apprehension, originally meant to seize but in later refinements in Latin and in English took the meaning ‘to grasp with the mind’ (OED, comprehend, v, Etymology).  Cognition derives from the Latin meaning “to get to know”.  Its original English, and present philosophic meaning, is roughly “[t]he action or faculty of knowing; knowledge, consciousness; acquaintance with a subject”. Suggestively, both the adjective and noun ‘cognate’ involve common descent either of a language or a bloodline.  Thinking derives from the Old English and means “formation and arrangement of ideas in the mind”.  Understanding derives from the Old English and is equivalent to ‘comprehension’

Deductions

1.28  From the above, I draw three deductions.  First, as a verb ‘to know’ has absorbed many meanings of the archaic verb ‘to wit’.  Thereby, ‘to know by the senses’ has become confused with ‘to know by the mind’.  As a noun, however, ‘wit’ survives defining the seat of consciousness of a natural person.  This distinction between knowing through the senses and knowing through the mind plays, as will be argued below, an important part in the classical and continuing distinction between the Liberal and the Mechanical Arts. 

1.29  Second, if closely related languages such as French, German and Scandinavian use different verbs for ‘to know’, then one can reasonably conclude they possess many nouns of subtle meaning not available in English. These meanings become lumped together in English in a single word ‘knowledge’ that has become pregnant with meaning and numinous with purpose.  English thus exhibits a comparative economy of words and therefore of meaning for the word ‘knowledge’. 

1.30  If one extends this English etymological economy to more distant languages using scripts other than the Roman alphabet, then the distinct and subtle differentiations of ‘knowledge’, e.g., in Cantonese, Hindi, Mandarin, Russian, Thai, etc., may simply not be capable of translation.  It becomes ‘local’ knowledge specific to a nation and available only for domestic exploitation in a knowledge-based economy.  All polymorphous forms and linguistic expressions of ‘knowledge’ are the raw inputs (and a final consumer output) of a global knowledge-based economy.  Given the rate at which human languages are becoming extinct, however, many meanings of ‘knowledge’ are simply being lost every year and forever. (Sampat 2001)

1.31  Third, in addition to absorbing the meaning of ‘to wit’, ‘know’ in its fourth branch (OED, know, v., IV) has also absorbed the meaning of the Old English verb ‘can’ as in ‘know how’.  Current discussion of the knowledge-based economy, as I will argue below, is rooted in ‘know how’ and variants on this theme like ‘know who’, ‘know what’, ‘know where’, etc.  In this sense, a better description would be ‘the can-do economy’. 

1.32  One last etymological facet of ‘knowledge’ is its contrasting meaning with respect to ‘ignorance’, ‘belief’ and ‘opinion’.  Ignorance means lack of knowledge. If one accepts ‘knowledge’ as deriving from reason then ‘belief’ must emerge from some other faculty to be held with emotional certainty (OED know, v., 10a).  Similarly, while opinion may derive from reason and/or other faculties it is held as a probability, not a certainty (OED opinion, n., 1a).  Opinion, specifically public opinion, results in “the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment.” (Lippman 1922, 15)  In passing the OED also defines economy, economist and econometrician but not economics.  Economy is defined as management of the household and an economist as manager of the household.  Econometrics is defined as application of mathematics to economic data or theories.  While economics is not defined, political economy is: “originally the art or practical science of managing the resources of a nation so as to increase its material prosperity; in more recent use, the theoretical science dealing with the laws that regulate the production and distribution of wealth.” (OED, economy, 3)

 

Epistemology

1.33    Epistemology is that branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge and knowing, or, the theory of knowledge.   To the degree that such matters are rooted in the biological nature of homo sapiens then to that degree epistemology is an individual and social imperative of the most ancient vintage.  Traditionally in the West, however, epistemology begins with the ancient Greeks, and for purposes of this Introduction, ends just before the Renaissance in the so-called Scholastic Period of Western thought.  In the main body of the thesis, epistemology will pass through the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, the Republican Revolutions of the 18th, the Industrial Revolution of the 19th and the Technological Revolution of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The Ancients

1.34    The thought and insight of five ancient Greeks – individually and collectively – continue to shape and mold our understanding of knowledge: Pythagoras, Protagoras, Plato, Aristotle and Epicurus.  I will briefly survey their findings and comment on their absorption into Christian pedagogy after the fall of the Western Roman Empire to Germanic tribes including those destined to become the English-speaking peoples.  This shift from epistemology to pedagogy reflects the fact that knowledge, and the theory of knowledge, is formally transmitted from one generation to the next through education or pedagogy that becomes institutionalized if a culture survives long enough, e.g., Plato’s Academy.  In a manner of speaking, pedagogy is the flip-side of epistemology.

1.35  Pythagoras of Samos, who lived around 530 BCE, is a quasi-mythical figure who penned no written work but contributed perhaps the single most important gift of the ancient to the modern world: the cognate relationship between matter and mathematics. Pythagoras perceived it in:

·  the geometry of the circle, triangle and square in two-dimensions, subsequently extended by Archimedes (287 BCE – 212 BCE) and Euclid (250? BCE) to the three-dimensional space of volume and by Ptolemy (127-145 CE) to the four dimensional space of astronomy;

·  in the balance, harmony, melody, pitch and resonance of musical time; and,

·  in the mystery of numbers as mathemata, or the “science of learning” (Catholic Encyclopedia, Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism, 1997).

1.36  Unlike many natural & engineering scientists of today, however, for Pythagoras this cognate relationship demonstrated the ‘intelligent design’ of a creator.   The Church Fathers admitted Pythagoras and maintained his mathematical and musical epistemology [G] in Christian pedagogy.  Of course, the Church Fathers interpreted this relationship subject to Christian Revelation.  The Four Apostles and the Trinity are examples of Christian numerology or ‘magic numbers’.

1.37  Protagoras the Sophist (485-410 BCE), in contrast, was an agnostic.  Questions about the gods did not concern him because he considered them unanswerable.  Instead he began his work Truth with: “Of all things the measure is man …” (Poster 2002).  It is from this axiom that the humanism of the Renaissance arose – Man, not God, is the measure and Man is mutable, God is not.  Truth, beauty, justice, virtue and even perceived states of the world (is it hot or cold?) are, according to Protagoras, known only relative to the individual observer.  What matters is not the inherent worth of any observation or argument by one or another observer, but rather their persuasive artistry or dialectic skill in making their case.  Grammar and rhetoric were summed up by Protagoras in orthoepeia or the study of the correct use of words.  These were his weapons of inquiry.  Students learned how to attack and defend ‘positions’.  As noted by Fuller: “… the Greeks themselves may have well thought about warfare as dialectics continued by other means.” (Fuller 2000, 43).  While the agnosticism and relativism of the Sophists were rejected by the Church Fathers, Sophist methods – grammar and rhetoric – perhaps echoing Biblical emphasis on ‘the Word’ were adopted and maintained in Christian pedagogy.

1.38  Plato (428-348 BCE) was a theist who believed the external world was a shadow play of Universal Forms contained deep within the human psyche or soul.  This is somewhat analogous to the Brahmin concept of Atman and Brahman wherein Atman is a sliver of the godhead Brahman within each human being.  Everything one knows is relative to ultimate and perfect ideals that exist outside of Nature.  It is through logic and reason, according to Plato, including the use of Pythagorean mathematics that knowledge is acquired.  This leads, however, to the Paradox of Inquiry explored by Plato in the Meno: one must already know about something in order to inquire about it. And this prescience, according to Plato, is contained in the immaterial soul which has pre-natal acquaintance with the Transcendent (Brickhouse & Smith 2002). The ‘otherworldliness’ of this Platonic view appealed to the Church Fathers who emphasized the relative importance of the ‘next world’, particularly in the darkest moments of the Middle Ages.  In later theological and philosophic debate this school of thought became known as ‘Nominalism’.  Not just Nature, however, was a poor imitation of God’s true domain – heaven - so were artificial things wrought by human hand which were viewed as profane bordering on the sacrilegious.   Under the Church Fathers, the Mosaic injunction against graven images accentuated this tendency leading to various Iconoclastic heresies that have plagued the Church and that did not end with the schisms between Latin/German Catholic and Greek/Slavic Orthodox and then Catholic and Germanic Protestant Churches.

1.39  Aristotle (384-322 BCE), also a theist, argued that the shadow play takes place in the mind and universal forms exist in an external, objective reality – Nature which is of divine creation.  The only things that can be ‘known’ are those things that can be observed.  In subsequent theological debate this school of thought became known as ‘Realism’.  In this view anything wrought by human hand is a poor imitation of Nature.  Plato and Aristotle agreed, however, on the Pythagorean axiom; both were theists and both believed that logos or logic (reason) was the preferred way to know.  Other faculties or ways of knowing – intuition, emotion and sensation – were inferior functions that would lead one astray from true knowledge.  Both also agreed that the practice of ‘wisdom for hire’ by the Sophists was immoral and dangerous with Plato concluding that the war against Sparta was lost because of the Sophists. (Fuller 2000, 45)  And, as with Plato, the Church Fathers absorbed the teachings of ‘the Philosopher’, as Aristotle was known in Christian pedagogy, subject, of course, to revelation.

1.40  Epicurus (341-271 BCE) was an atheist and argued that there was no shadow play (inside or outside); there was no god: there was only sensation.   His was a radical materialism of atomic theory and allowed for no god or any ultimate principle other than pleasure and pain and the knowledge of the pleasure and pain life brings.  In this sense, Epicurus echoes the ‘life is pain’ principal of Buddhism.  And like Plato’s Paradox of Inquiry, Epicurus assumed one had to know before one could inquire.  Instead of the soul, however, he proposed ‘preconceptions’ such as ‘body,’ ‘person,’ ‘usefulness,’ and ‘truth’ formed in one’s material mind as the result of repeated sense-experience of similar objects. Ideas are formed by analogy between or compounding such basic concepts. (O’Keefe 2001)

1.41  Without the moral restraint of religion to limit pleasure-seeking, Epicurus proposed a doctrine of ethical hedonism.  His atheistic, materialistic views, however, were equally unacceptable to pagan theists and to the Church Fathers.  In fact his own work did not survive the fall of the Empire and it is mainly through De Rerum Natura by the Roman poet Lucretius (99-55 BCE) that Epicurus’ views survived to the Middle Ages and beyond.  Surreptitiously, however, his work inspired both the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century and Jeremy Bentham’s 18th century ‘felicitous calculus’ of human happiness - the foundation stone of economic consumer theory. His philosophy, known as Utilitarianism, has been called “the shallowest of all conceivable philosophies of life” (Schumpeter 1954:132-4).

1.42  In summary, the ancient Greeks and, through them, the Romans believed that knowledge was found either/or in numbers, words, internal or external universals of divine invention, or the sensation of pleasure and pain (the last doctrine being rejected by the Church Fathers).  These insights were formalized into a pedagogic curriculum used in the ancient, medieval and, in modified form, in the modern world.  This was the Liberal Arts of which there were seven: grammar, rhetoric, and logic (the trivium) and geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy (the quadrivium).  The word ‘liberal’ derives from the Latin liber or free because this knowledge was restricted to ‘free men’ who did not have to earn a living; it was not for commoners and slaves. (Catholic Encyclopedia, The Seven Liberal Arts, 1997) [H] 

The Scholastics

1.43  This begs the question: what are the illiberal arts?  What form of knowledge do they involve?  The slave economy of the ancient world supported an elite, including that of democratic Athens, which focused on the abstract or ‘higher’ things of life.  Working with the head and mouth was ennobling; working with the hands, demeaning.  Even writing was, until the bureaucratic Roman Empire, considered suitably only for scribes.  (Fuller 2000, 46)  Artisans and workers practiced what would become known as the Mechanical Arts; nobles and the rich practiced the Liberal Arts.

1.44  While they existed in the ancient world, the first reference to the Mechanical Arts was made by John the Scot (805–877 CE) who received patronage from Charles the Bald, a Carolingian king of France (Walton 2003). In On Divine Predestination he argued reason and revelation were both sources of knowledge but reason was preferred in any conflict between the two. This work was condemned by two Church councils.  His other major work On the Division of Nature was declared heretical and his pantheism (God is All) was deemed contrary to Christian doctrine.

1.45    In spite of his heretical status, John’s recognition of the Mechanical Arts reflects an implicit Christian belief in the equality of souls – noble or commoner.  This was reinforced by the self-sufficiency of the monastic tradition that conserved some of the ancient knowledge after the fall of Rome.  This spiritual egalitarianism, of course, ran counter to pagan antiquity in which some men could be declared gods in their own lifetime while lesser beings were playthings, subordinates with no independence.  This Christian belief found full religious expression in the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century and political expression in the Republican Revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries which overthrew the culture of subordination inherited from the Germanic conquest of the Western Roman Empire and that had been maintained for centuries in the guise of aristocracy.

1.46    It is perhaps more than coincidental that roughly at the time John the Scot named the Mechanical Arts, the etymological distinction in Old English between knowing by the mind (from the archaic ‘to wit’) and knowing by the senses (from the archaic ‘to know’; para. 1.18) emerged.  While John did not name the individual Seven Mechanical Arts, they were subsequently defined as weaving, blacksmithing, war, navigation, agriculture, hunting, medicine, and the ars theatrica. 

1.47   In spite of their identification, the Mechanical Arts remained subject to epistemic devaluation because of political subordination of commoners to nobles and because of theological concerns. For example, “[i]n the sixth century, St. Augustine believed that the mechanical arts (both technology and magic) both sought to gain control over nature, hence perverting God’s design, and were therefore both anti-Christian.” (Walton 2003)  And from Aristotle, it was concluded that anything crafted by the human hand was a poor imitation of divinely created Nature.  The contribution of the Mechanical Arts, in both ancient and medieval times, was inferior imitation of Nature. This changed with the Renaissance and the subsequent Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes or the battle of the Ancients and the Moderns marking the beginning of the 18th century Enlightenment and the end of the Renaissance (Kristeller 1952, 19). 

1.48   The Liberal Arts provided the curriculum of the self-governing university, i.e. independent of Church and State, that emerged in the Occident during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of the common era.  At its beginnings, the university was an incorporated association of teachers, as in Paris, or of students, as in Bologna (Schumpeter 1954: 77-78).  Oxford University, the first English university, was founded in 1167 C.E., modeled after the University of Paris.  The university broke the monopoly of knowledge held by the Church and its monasteries.  The university began to assemble libraries of its own including works not approved by the Church.  Secular monarchs granted the universities their charters (similar to guilds) then cultivated and supported these new institutions as sources of talent to balance the influence of the Church.  Before long, scholars and students grouped themselves into faculties, according to the different branches of knowledge.  The original branches or faculties were based on the seven Liberal Arts consisting of the trivium and the quadrivium.  The practices of medicine and law were subsequently admitted.  Their ‘practical’ status, however, made them somewhat distant from the main academic body.  Not admitted, excepting medicine, were the Seven Mechanical Arts of weaving, blacksmithing, war, navigation, agriculture, hunting, medicine, and the ars theatrica.  From that time to the present, the university has enjoyed unparalleled social and political autonomy.  This autonomy is reflected in tenure, i.e. lifelong appointment, justified to permit scholars to pursue their intellectual interests free from the threat of dismissal for unpopular political or religious views.

Deductions

1.49  From the above, I draw three deductions.  First, the ancient and scholastic worlds bequeathed a mixed bag of knowledge units – numbers, words, internal and/or external forms and sensations.   This has led to knowledge being fragmented, segregated and specialized, e.g., between the Liberal Arts (knowing with the mind) and the Mechanical Arts (knowing with the senses).  With the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century this fragmentation or fissioning accelerated with new disciplines, sub-disciplines and specialties. This has, it will be further argued, led to the increasing incommensurability of knowledge in the modern world.  This is the inevitable negative side of the division and specialization of knowledge.

1.50  Second, as will be demonstrated below, it was not until the late 18th century that Baumgarten created aesthetics – the “theory of sensuous knowledge, as a counterpart to logic as a theory of intellectual knowledge.” (Kristeller 1952, 34).  It was only then that sensation gained epistemological entry to the Liberal Arts - first as a new philosophical school and subsequently as the ‘beaux arts’ or Fine Arts.  Nonetheless, as will be argued, in English-speaking cultures: gentlemen still don’t work with their hands except as a hobby or therapy.

1.51  Third, as will also be demonstrated below, coincidental with Baumgarten’s efforts, Jeremy Bentham was reducing Epicurus’ sensation, through the Roman poet Lucian, into a ‘felicitous calculus’ of pleasure and pain measured in ‘utiles’ that provides the foundation for mainstream consumer theory and, indirectly, of the theory of the firm.  All knowledge is thereby converted in a materialistic measure of pleasure and pain – the two sovereign rulers of the state.  In this view, a knowledge-based economy is one of pleasure and pain.  There are no higher purposes.  Where Marx the materialist failed, Bentham the utilitarian was triumphant: consumerism reigns in the global knowledge-based economy.

 

Transdisciplinary Induction

1.52  If a holistic vision of a global knowledge-based economy – as opposed to a ‘know-how’ or ‘can-do’ economy - is to be developed then: (i) incommensurability must be mitigated; (ii) the uncertain nature of knowledge clarified; and, (iii) the materialistic bias of the pleasure and pain economy transcended. To do so, I will apply transdisciplinary induction.

1.53  The prefix ‘trans’ derives from the Latin meaning “across, to or on the farther side of, beyond, over”.  In biochemistry and biology, however, it has the additional meaning of ‘transfer’. (OED, trans-, prefix, 10. Biochem. and Biol.)  I will use it in this sense to transfer findings about knowledge from other disciplines into economics.  In addition, as an adjective it conveys the sense ‘beyond, surpassing, transcending’, as in transhuman.  I will use it in this sense in order to raise the concept of a global knowledge-based economy beyond the limitations of mainstream economics.

1.54  The word ‘discipline’ derives from the Old French meaning “instruction of disciples”.   Discipline is concerned with the practice or exercise of a disciple in contrast to ‘doctrine’ which is “the property of the doctor or teacher” who is concerned with abstract theory (OED, discipline, Etymology).  Put another way, discipline concerns what is practiced and doctrine concerns what is taught and thought, i.e., a body or system of principles or tenets.

1.55  For my purposes, discipline will be defined as “a department of learning or knowledge; a science or art in its educational aspect”. (OED, discipline, n, 2)  Such departments tend to be institutional, not just abstract.  Since the ancient Greeks and Plato’s Academy, they have been reified, i.e., an abstraction made concrete, as organizational and physical structures with plant and equipment.  Entry and exit from the discipline is hierarchically controlled and the doctrine, or body of knowledge, is taught to initiates whose behaviour and conduct is disciplined by superiors.  Once admitted, initiates rise, over time, up the hierarchy to teach what once they were taught, to administer the organization and/or to add to the body of knowledge.  This sense of the word ‘discipline’  corresponds to: “[t]he system or method by which order is maintained in a church, and control exercised over the conduct of its members; the procedure whereby this is carried out; the exercise of the power of censure, admonition, excommunication, or other penal measures, by a Christian Church”.  (OED, discipline, n, 6a)

1.56  In the Middle Ages, this was the pattern in both the Liberal and the Mechanical Arts. Specialized faculties and departments of knowledge in the medieval university were paralleled by the guilds and their ‘Mysteries’ (Houghton 1941).  What differentiates modern disciplines from medieval ones is their emphasis on the addition to rather than interpretation of an existing body of knowledge.  This has led to further fissioning of knowledge into an ever growing array of sub-disciplines and specialties.  Each has its own differentiated theory, language, practices, instruments and talent.  Each tends to bifurcate itself into theoretical and practical branches, e.g., economic theory vs. economic policy.  Furthermore, the specific taxonomy of disciplines, sub-disciplines and specialties depends on the specific knowledge domain and nation, e.g., the French university syllabus in Sociology is different from the British.

1.57  This process of the splitting off (the Latin meaning of the word ‘science’) represents the division and specialization of knowledge in action.  It has the benefit of allowing ever more detailed examination of a phenomenon but at the cost of incommensurability, i.e., the inability to communicate knowledge to the uninitiated.   It has the associated cost of resistance to heterodox approaches and external audit, e.g., interdisciplinary studies.  In a manner of speaking, what is gained in depth and detail is lost in breadth of vision.  By examining findings in a number of different disciplines in different knowledge domains, transdiciplinary induction tries to break down barriers and make available arguments and evidence about, in this case, knowledge about knowledge and its implications for our understanding of the implications of a global knowledge-based economy.

1.57  In logic, induction refers to reasoning from the specific to the general in contrast to deduction which refers to reasoning from the general to the specific.  The word ‘induction’, however, derives from the French and means, among other things, “[t]he action of introducing to, or initiating in, the knowledge of something” (OED, induction, 2).  It is in this sense that transdisciplinary induction involves introducing to economics argument and evidence developed in other disciplines of thought.  Induction also carries the sense of inducing change by indirection, e.g., in electricity and magnetism, it means “[t]he action of inducing or bringing about an electric or magnetic state in a body by the proximity (without actual contact) of an electrified or magnetized body” (OED, induction, 10).

1.58  If induction carries the sense of increase, then deduction carries the sense of decrease.  In fact, the word ‘deduction’ derives from the French meaning “the act of deducting”.   Put another way, deduction involves simplification of the complex; induction involves the complication of the simple, in this case, the single word ‘knowledge’.  Deduction serves as the basis of reductionism in the natural and engineering sciences as well as the social sciences.  Induction provides the basis of holism in ecology wherein a change in one component at one level of an ecosystem can induce changes throughout the system.  The word ecology derives from the same Greek root as economics meaning ‘house’.  While economics involves management of the household, ecology involves living or dwelling in that household.

1.59  The theoretical inadequacies of mainstream economics result from the dominant role of deductive logic in the discipline.  It is a strength and weakness.  In the case of knowledge, deduction has, at least for the moment, simplified itself into a dead end.  It can not explain a global knowledge-based economy.  Induction, on the other hand, specifically transdisciplinary induction, promises new arguments and evidence. These may provide new principles from which the deductive process may profitably begin again.   For example, what are the economic implications of knowledge defined as fact derived by reason vs. belief derived as emotional certainty vs. opinion derived as probable certainty?  What different industries coalesce around these definitions?

1.60  In short, transdisciplinary induction involves harvesting argument and evidence from as wide a range of disciplines as possible in order to holistically define the theoretical contours of a phenomenon, in this case, the competitiveness of nations in a global knowledge-based economy.  These findings will be grafted on to a skeleton of mainstream economic theory to induce growth, development and extension of that theory.

1.61  Like any methodology, transdisciplinary induction (henceforth ‘TI’) has weaknesses as well as strengths.  Its strength is in the breadth of vision it can contribute.  Its weaknesses, however, are many. First, it relies on language which can articulate some but not all knowledge, e.g., so-called ‘tacit’ knowledge that by definition is not or cannot be codified into language (M. Polanyi 1962a).  Furthermore, as suggested above, any language, in this case English, has a limited vocabulary and accordingly fails to differentiate all the different forms or modes of knowledge.  And, of course, language itself mediates but imperfectly between thought and expression.

1.62  Second, TI is akin to sophistry: one builds the strongest case from supporting evidence and argument generally ignoring or deflecting refuting evidence.  TI is therefore inherently subjective and dependent on the experience, skill and ethics of its advocate.

1.63  Third, TI is also like medieval scholasticism relying on authority. While evidence is gathered from experts, their contributions are usually subject to dispute and debate internally within their respective disciplines.  Furthermore, I gather their evidence using my own reading of their work. (Loasby 1967, 172-173) [I]  Phenomenologically, however, I do not believe there is a choice.  Each TI researcher will be strong in some fields, weak in others.  True polymaths are probably extinct.  Experimenter expectation can also be expected.  And in this regard, Kuhn suggests that even the choice by natural scientists of specific normal science puzzles is influenced by their culture, experience and language (Kuhn 1962, 128).

Reflections on Dominant Disciplines

1.64  As with etymology, ideally a comprehensive survey of all disciplines of thought with respect to ‘knowledge’ is required.  For my purposes, however, I restrict myself to argument and evidence found in four dominant disciplines and thirteen of their related sub-disciplines.  The four are: Economics (cultural, institutional & legal); Philosophy (aesthetics, epistemology & science); Psychology (analytic, cognitive & gestalt); and, Science (economics, history, philosophy & sociology). 

1.65  Economics (a social science), Philosophy (a humanity, and indirectly through aesthetics an Art); and Psychology (a social and, through neurophysiology, a natural science) are recognized disciplines in most universities.   Science is not.  Rather investigation of science, as opposed to scientific investigation, is presently dominated by history (a humanity), philosophy (a humanity) and sociology (a social science).  In the last decade, some effort has, however, been made towards a new ‘economics of science’ (Dasgupta & David 1994; Stephan 1996).   

1.66  In what follows I briefly survey the dominant disciplines from which argument and evidence are to be harvested. 

Economics - Cultural, Institutional & Legal

1.67  Economics can be defined as the study of the principles governing the allocation of scarce means among unlimited and competing ends (analytic definition); or, the study of humanity’s activities in satisfying its wants, needs and desires (descriptive definition).  The first captures the sense of economics as a science of choice concerned with constrained maximization (of utility or profits) in static equilibrium between available means and attainable ends.  At the extreme, this leads to econometrics and sophisticated mathematical modeling including ‘game theory’.  The second or descriptive definition captures the sense of economics as moral philosophy concerned with identification and satisfaction of human wants, needs and desires.   At the extreme, this branch leads to ideology, e.g., Marxism and Capitalism, that propose apparently mutually exclusive political economic outcomes.  For half a century, these two specific ideologies threatened the world with a fifteen minute warning of nuclear winter.   If knowledge is power then power flows from a plethora of sources.

Cultural Economics

1.68  Cultural Economics is the most recent sub-disciplinary addition (mid-1990s) to the discipline.  For the American Economics Association, cultural economics is categorized as:

Z000 - Other Special Topics: General

Z100 - Cultural Economics: General
Z110 - Economics of the Arts
Z120 - Religion
Z130 - Social Norms and Social Capital; Economic Anthropology

Z-190 – Cultural Economics: Other.

                                                              http://www.econlit.org/econlit/elsubz.html.

1.69  There are two dimensions to cultural economics.  The first is that maximizing or economic behavior takes place within the context of culture and law.  At the extreme, if one ignores culture, one ends in the cannibal’s cooking pot.  If one ignores the law, one ends in jail.  Neither is a ‘maximizing’ outcome.  The second concerns Art as a factor of production and a final consumption good.  Beyond the vast global entertainment industry, the Arts include the amateur, fine and heritage arts as well as the applied, decorative or design arts that pervade every aspect of the economy from automobiles and aircraft to entertainment and education to health care and highways to temples of worship and tourism (Chartrand 2000).    

1.70  From cultural economics, argument and evidence will be presented addressing a global facet of the knowledge-based economy.  Cultural goods and services are carriers of ‘values’, a form of knowledge distinct from the utilitarian function of a coffee pot, automobile or bank account. The importance of ‘values’ is apparent in two ways.  First, and most blatant, there is the ‘clash of civilizations’ in which language, culture and religion have become the tectonic plates of global conflict. (Huntington, 1993) [J]  Second, more subtle and simmering differences and disputes, long suppressed by allies and adversaries in their coordinated bi-polar global struggle during the Cold War are re-surfacing after a fifty year quiescence.  These include the debate about ‘cultural sovereignty’.  One side argues that national and regional identity is based upon a distinct set of values embodied in cultural goods and services. Even in the United States, some are raising this argument as foreign interests acquire American cultural enterprise. The other side argues for the ‘universality’ of human values. This ‘global village’ argument contends that experiences shared on a global scale through communications media transcend differences among citizens of separate nations or regions. Some observers suggest this vision is becoming a reality and point to developments in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China as responses to values of freedom, dignity and prosperity transmitted through penetrating networks of global mass media and communications.

1.71  In terms of the competition of nations, cultural sovereignty involves the struggle to be heard at home and abroad above the booming voice of the American entertainment industry that has succeeded in penetrating the cultural marketplace of every nation on earth.  The one remaining superpower is also a global cultural colossus spanning East, West, North and South.  Fuelled in part by the peculiar pricing methods used in the entertainment arts, i.e. a rate per viewer rather than the production cost per unit, the high production standards embodied in American entertainment programming are the standard demanded by audiences around the world.  As audience dollars flow to ‘American’ programs they flow out of the country leaving the local arts industry poorer – financially and culturally in that local production is not encouraged.  Out of a 1998 International Meeting on Cultural Policy in Ottawa, hosted the Government of Canada, a new international institution was formed to deal explicitly with questions of cultural sovereignty:  the International Alliance of Culture Ministers (IACM).  Led by Canada, France and Sweden.  The IACM (since renamed the International Network on Cultural Policy - INCP), began with some 20 member states (down to 13 at the Sixth INCP Annual Ministerial Meeting in Croatia, 2003) is dedicated to turning the tide of American cultural product and programming (the United States is not a member).

1.72  There are two other aspects to the cultural sovereignty debate.  First, each developed nation state owns and regulates (subject to international treaty) the electromagnetic spectrum and related media of communications including broadcast licensing within its borders.  Each consciously plans and decides how this ‘spectrum’ resource will be allocated to further the national purpose, i.e., what knowledge will be disseminated. Second, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) recognizes that a country can control the flow of cultural materials in and out of its borders.  In Islamic countries, the GATT ‘morals clause’ is used to stop the flow of much Western media with its alien portrayal of women.  Other specific GATT provisions permit countries to impose quotas on movie screenings and broadcast programming to assure ‘national content’ is available to citizens.  (Chartrand 2002)

Institutional Economics

1.73  Institutional Economics is categorized by the American Economics Association under two headings: B250 - History of Economic Thought since 1925: Historical; Institutional; Evolutionary; and B520 - Current Heterodox Approaches: Institutional; Evolutionary. This school of thought was founded by American economists Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, W.C. Mitchell and Clarence Ayres.  Arguably, however, it includes European economists Max Weber, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Selig Perlman and Joseph Schumpeter whose work stressed the influence of class, technological change and institutional setting on economic behaviour (Schumpeter 1950).  This tradition has been fragmented in recent decades by a ‘New Institutionalism’ (Coase 1998), Legal Economics and Evolutionary Economics.

1.74  The unit of analysis in Institutionalism is the routinized pattern of collective human behaviour, i.e., an institution defined as the mechanism that converts individual into collective action.  Institutions minimize decision costs, e.g., multiple transactions in a market are possible due to well defined rules and routines.  Such routines vary between sectors, e.g., between educational, legal, military and religious institutions, and they vary between nations.  In Institutional Economics, knowledge is treated as institutional ‘know-how’ specific to a place and time.  Like the mainstream, Institutionalists consider the competitive marketplace the most efficient and effective mechanism ever devised for economic production and consumption.  However, they also recognize: the trade union as a legitimate political institution functioning in the economic arena (Commons 1909); the impact of culture, custom and tradition (Veblen 1899); and, the effect of law on the nature and form of economic behaviour (Commons 1926). 

1.75  A similar legal and cultural relativism is also part of the legacy of Canadian economist Harold Innis.  He recognized that all scholarship must be grounded in analysis of the radical particularities of time and place, history and geography (Carey 1981: 79).  Through his study of communications media, Innis identified a relationship between culture and communications.  (Innis 1950, 1951)  A culture is extensive in time, i.e. it has duration, to the extent its dominant communications medium is durable, e.g. stone, clay or parchment.  Alternatively, a culture is extensive in space but limited in time if its dominant communications medium is easily transported, e.g. papyrus and paper.  Using this hypothesis, Innis explained the rise and fall of empires throughout history.  One of Innis’ colleagues, Marshall McLuhan, took this relativism, first to the medium is the message, and then to human consciousness altered by the emergence of new electronic communications media (McLuhan 1978). 

1.76  Institutionalism is characterized by cultural, historical and legal relativism, inductive methodology and general systems analysis.  On the other hand, mainstream economics is characterized by positivism, deductive method and mechanistic systems analysis.  In essence, two questions separate Institutionalists from the mainstream.  First, can economic behaviour be reduced to quantitative expression?  Second, even if it can, do we possess or are ever likely to possess the necessary technology of measurement?

Legal Economics

1.77  Legal Economics is classified by the American Economics Association as: K000 - Law and Economics: General.  While intellectual property rights (IPRs) such as copyrights, patents, registered industrial designs and trademarks fall under this heading, the A.E.A. does not formally identify these legal forms of knowledge.  In fact, they constitute the legal foundation for the industrial organization of the knowledge-based economy – both national and global. 

1.78      Until the TRIPS Agreement of 1995, IPRs (and therefore knowledge) were not subject to traditional international trade negotiations.  Rather, intellectual property was subject to specialized international conventions such as the Berne and Rome copyright conventions.  These conventions require “national treatment”, i.e. treat foreigners the same as nationals.  Conventions do not, however, require harmonization of rights.  Accordingly, if a given nation chooses to limit protection for its creators, then no greater protection is available to foreigners.  Within that limit, however, nations are free to design an IPR regime consonant with its distinct legal and historical traditions and national policy objectives. 

1.79  While TRIPS has established minimum standards for trade in IPRs (including its restriction to commercially relevant IPRs), national treatment remains the bottom-line.   Nation-states are actively engaged in the competitive construction of IPR regimes designed to foster and promote the competitiveness of their nation in a global knowledge-based economy.

Philosophy: Aesthetics, Epistemology & Science

1.80  Philosophy, in its original and widest English meaning is: “[t]he love, study, or pursuit of wisdom, or of knowledge of things and their causes, whether theoretical or practical” (OED, philosophy, n, 1a).  Derived from the Greek, the word is composed of two terms: philos meaning love; and, sophia meaning wisdom.  To the ancient Greeks, however, philos arose “in the heart of our blood” (Hillman 1981, 3) because the heart (and lungs), not the brain, was the centre of consciousness.  Similarly, sophia meant “skill of the craftsman” (Hillman 1981, 30.  The introduction of slavery in ancient Greece led, however, to separation of the theoretical from the practical.  By the time of Aristotle, philosophy was restricted to “knowledge of the highest objects” and “[t]his split between wisdom and practical action still detrimentally determines all later Aristotelian-influenced metaphysics, whereas sophia originally implies that thought and action lie together in any single move of the aesthetic hand.”  (Hillman 1981, 30)  When Greek philosophy was appropriated by Christian revelation, the Church Fathers maintained this separation reflecting their preference for the ethereal after life to the sensuous present.

1.81  In the medieval university, the seven liberal arts formed the core of ‘undergraduate’ education.  Postgraduate study involved natural, moral, and metaphysical philosophy, or the three philosophies. It is from this tradition that the degree of Doctor of Philosophy continues to be granted by today’s universities. (OED, philosophy, n, 2)  As will be seen, there were two subsequent changes in this pedagogic pattern.  The first occurred in the 15th century with the artist/engineering/scientist of the High Renaissance discovering (or re-discovering) perspective in painting leading to creation of the arts academy.   The second involved Robert Boyle who in the 17th century theologically rationalized the Scientific Revolution so that natural philosophy was gradually displaced by experimental science until, in the 19th century, the German experimental or research university displaced the Scholastic one in much of the world. 

Aesthetics

1.82  The philosophical split between head, heart and hand (and the types of knowledge associated with each) appear early in philosophy with respect to questions of beauty and its expression through Art.   Beauty to the ancients (and Scholastics) involved kosmos – the right ordering of the multiple parts of the world (Hillman 1981, 28).  This sense of right ordering was expressed in Pythagorean terms of numeric balance, harmony, resonance, etc.   It found expression in all aspects of life including the built environment. [K]

1.83  Nonetheless, the means by which kosmos was achieved, Art, or in Greek techne, like Sophistry, was viewed as dangerous by Plato who feared “… 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).  Art was to be censored and controlled in Plato’s Republic. [L]

1.84  For Aristotle, Art was not subversive but rather pedagogic, specifically educative of the emotions.  It allowed katharsis, i.e., the purging of emotions.  Nonetheless, Art was, for Aristotle, as for Plato, mimesis, i.e., an imitation of Nature.  Therefore it was inferior.  Furthermore, excepting music and poetry, the production of the performing and visual arts was suitable only for the lower classes.  Aristotle wrote about the ars theatrica including books on tragedy and comedy. Comedy was lost with the fall of the Western Roman Empire.  Its alleged re-discovery fuels Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, in which Brother Jorge’s fear of the power of comedy to endanger the authority of the Church feeds a medieval tale of murder and the destruction of a great library - the collected enlightenment of an age - by the fires of censorship (Eco 1980).

1.85  The subordination of Art to ethics, morality, politics and the Church continued until the Renaissance.  The clearest sign is that works of Art were seldom signed by their creators before the Renaissance.  Instead they were dedicated to God or the commissioning patron.  It was not until Baumgarten’s new ‘science of sensuous knowledge’, in the early 18th century, that Art (and its epistemological expression – aesthetics) separated from morality becoming a distinct branch of philosophy called ‘aesthetics’.  Nonetheless, the concept of ‘aesthetic distance’ continues to segregate sensation into superior and inferior forms.  Hence the ‘distant senses’ of sight and sound are admitted as worthy of philosophical consideration but taste, touch and smell are considered aesthetically inferior.  (Berleant 1964) [M]

Epistemology & Science

1.86  With the segregation of the Mechanical Arts to the lower classes, epistemology was restricted to “knowledge of the highest objects”.  This involved playing with Pythagorean mathematics, Sophistry, Platonic forms, Aristotelian observation and deductive logic, all subject to revelation as defined by the Church.  In effect, epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and the philosophy of science were one and the same.  Science literally means ‘knowledge’.  While the Liberal Arts were made at home in the university, the guilds with their ‘mysteries’ were home to the Mechanical Arts.  Using ‘trial and error’ they developed ‘the experimental method’ in the late Middle Ages and, together with a concept of ‘progress’ and contribution to the craft paved the way for the Scientific Revolution.  (Zilsel 1945)

1.87  The classical problem in epistemology is the relationship between sensation, perception and comprehension.  Sensation is what the nervous system - through touch, taste, smell, sight and sound - tells our brain; perception is the Mind’s interpretation of that information (knowing through the senses).  These need not be the same.  With reflection perception may eventuate in comprehension (knowing through the Mind).  The ancients, even though they believed the heart to be the organ of cognition, faced the same dilemma as brain theorists today: what one person feels from contact with a given and constant sensory source may differ from what another feels, i.e., the problem of subjectivity. 

1.88  As will be demonstrated, the Scientific Revolution through scientific instruments liberated ‘knowing through the senses’ from subjective human mediation.  They provide consistent and objective numeric measurement of states of the physical world.  Acquisition of consistent sensory measurement provides inductive or experimental evidence about a phenomenon from which general principles can be derived and subsequently tested against fresh instrumental measurement.  As will be seen, what such instruments tell us about the world is often at odds with our common sense.

Psychology - Analytic, Cognitive & Gestalt

1.89 Psychology is “[t]he science of the nature, functions, and phenomena of the human mind” or what was once called ‘the soul’. (OED, psychology, 1a)   In turn, Mind means: “[t]he seat of awareness, thought, volition, feeling, and memory; cognitive and emotional phenomena and powers considered as constituting a presiding influence; the mental faculty of a human being (esp. as regarded as being separate from the physical); (occas.) this whole system as constituting a person’s character or individuality.” (OED, mind, n, IV 19a).  As has been seen, the Old English noun ‘wit’ also means “[t]he seat of consciousness or thought, the mind.” (OED, wit, n, I 1).  To the degree this seat of awareness or consciousness is related to ‘wit’, it is etymologically related to knowledge, i.e., it is the seat of knowledge.  But who or what sits on that seat?  Who knows?  Who, in the archaic sense, owns the knowledge? (OED, knowledge, v, 1)

1.90 The word ‘psyche’ derives from the Greek meaning soul, spirit or Mind.  This entity was connected by the ancients to ‘physis’ meaning Nature, or more specifically matter.  It is from this word that the term ‘physics’ derives.  The relationship between the seat of consciousness and matter is an ongoing concern to philosophers, psychologists and psychiatrists.  Is Mind an entity distinct from matter; or, is it an epiphenomenon of matter; or, is matter an epiphenomenon of Mind?  If distinct, we live between two worlds, one of spirit and one of matter, a duplex.  Those who so believe are dualists in the tradition of Descartes.  It is among the Dualists that most theists find their home.  If Mind is an epiphenomenon, however, then the world is composed only of matter and consciousness is a byproduct.  Those who so believe are materialists among whom atheists find their home.  If, on the other hand, matter is an epiphenomenon then the world is a byproduct of Mind.  Those who so believe are monists in the tradition of Plato and the Pantheists – God is All.

1.91 Whatever its causal source, Mind is empirically distinct from the human brain.  Whether an independent entity or operating software or a divine spark, Mind is the seat of knowledge flowing as a stream of consciousness or hidden, tacit in the depths of the unconscious as memory - an obsolete meaning of the word ‘mind’ (OED, mind, n, I 2).  Mind defines us as sentient or ‘knowing’ beings.  No other creature on the planet, no artificial intelligence, no computer possesses Mind - only the individual human being has a wit.  In this sense, all knowledge is ultimately personal. (M. Polanyi 1962a)

1.92 But how does Mind work?  That is the question faced by psychology and to which it has answered in many different ways including: associationism, behaviorism, functionalism, gestalt, psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung, Adler) and structuralism.  Three sub-disciplines will supply the main crop of arguments and evidence to be harvested for the  thesis: analytic, cognitive and gestalt.

Analytic

1.93 Alternatively called complex, depth or Jungian psychology, analytic psychology is founded on the work of the Swiss German psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961).  A psychiatrist is a psychologist with a medical doctorate.  Jung broke with Freud over Freud’s insistence on the primacy of the sexual drive and Jung’s belief in acausal or synchronistic phenomenon, i.e., phenomena connected in time but not by cause and effect. (Jung 1960)  Jung did, however, accept the reality of the unconscious, the role of dreams and the efficacy of psychotherapy.   In a way, Freud did to psychology what Marx did to economics – create a revolution.  Before Freud, the Enlightenment reigned; there was a reasoning Mind and superstitious fears.  After Freud, there was a reasoning ego and an unconscious Mind helping or hindering rationality but, at least at times, beyond ‘rational’ control.

1.94 Jung begins with the psyche or Mind rooted in physis, i.e., the physical world of matter.  This connection was speculatively explored in Jung’s collaboration with Nobel Prize physicist Wolfgang Pauli (Jung & Pauli 2001). [N]  Mind itself, however, consists of two communicating parts - the conscious and unconscious – fuelled by libido.  Unlike Freud, Jung believed libido is not just of sexual origin.  Rather, it is a generic energy fuelling all human drives and instincts, e.g., to eat, to drink, to commune with others, and, to know.  Art, dreams, fairytales and myths are the vehicles through which the unconscious communicates with consciousness.  Jung believed that the conscious and unconscious work in a compensatory manner.  If one side appropriates too much libido, a compensatory process sets in to re-adjust the balance.  The classical example is the ‘mid-life crisis’ of the 20th century businessman who formed the bulk of Jung’s therapeutic practice, unlike Freud who is famous for treating hysteria in women.  After a career of using the conscious mind to obtain material benefits and social status, at mid-life, emotional, non-material or spiritual needs may assert themselves.  This may take psychological form as a neurotic crisis including alcoholism or it may take physical form, for example, as an illness limiting career advancement and forcing introspection.

1.95 Mind is populated by complexes, hence one name for analytic is ‘complex’ psychology.  Complexes act as foci for libido.  If sufficient libido is attracted to a complex it becomes ever more conscious.  The dominant complex is the ‘ego’, a word derived from Latin meaning “I”.  (OED, ego, 1)  It is this complex that occupies ‘the seat of consciousness’.  If ego looks outward towards the world of matter/energy and society it is ‘extraverted’; if it looks inwards towards the inner world of spirit, thought or emotion, it is ‘introverted’; and, if it looks Janus-like both ways, it is ‘centroverted’.  An individual tends to be either extraverted or introverted.  In terms of knowledge, this orientation roughly corresponds to the faculties of perception identified by the archaic noun wit: “[a]ny one of certain particular faculties of perception, classified as outer (outward) or bodily, and inner (inward).” (OED, wit, n, 3a)   Centroverts are rare and ideal. (Neumann 1954, 39) 

1.96 The ego is not, however, the only complex occupying Mind.  Below ego there is a cast of archetypal characters competing for libido.  These include the anima or feminine representation of the male’s unconscious identified in alchemy as Regina – the Queen, the animus or masculine representation of the female unconscious identified in alchemy as Rex – the King (Jung 1954), the shadow, hero, eternal child, persona, wise old man or woman, etc.  Such archetypical figures exhibit themselves in fairytales, myths and motion pictures, e.g., Lord of the Rings and Star Wars.  These archetypes or complexes were demonstrated by Jung to exist in all cultures in all periods of history.  They constitute ‘the collective unconscious’ of humanity. [O]  (Sharp 1991)  In a manner of speaking they represent alternative roles a human being may play in life.  The stream of ego consciousness is coloured by these unconscious complexes depending upon how much and when libido is attracted to them.  In many ways they act like ‘the humours’ of the Ancients and Scholastics determining temperament. [P]

1.97 As ego consciousness becomes aware of the interference of a complex with its objectives, a confrontation begins.  It may end in a struggle of ‘wills’ that leads to a ‘breakdown’, or it may resolve itself in a covenant negotiated using ‘active imagination’, whereby a complex becomes ‘constellated’ on the psychic sphere of attention and coordinated with ego.  The ascendancy of ego consciousness in the modern world was traced by Erich Neumann, a colleague of Jung, in his study: The Origins and History of Consciousness (1954).  For Neumann, the ancient myths and religions show progressive development of the ‘hero’ as the carrier of individuality, i.e., of ego consciousness.  Ego consciousness thus results from an evolutionary struggle of mythogemic complexes for dominance of Mind.  A mythogem is the common core of dreams, fairytales and myths.  They can also be called archetypes or complexes, of which the ego is but one and all are engaged in a continual struggle for dominance of the ‘seat of knowledge’. In this struggle, symbols are the combatants and symbolic analysis is required to resolve any conflict.  It is Neumann’s description of symbolic analysis that inspired my concept of transdisciplinary induction.  [Q]

1.98 As it surveys its worlds – inner and outer, Mind (composed of ego and other complexes) acquires knowledge through four functions or faculties of knowing: Thinking, Intuition, Feeling and Sensation. (Sharp 1991)  Thinking and feeling are judgmental or decision-making faculties.  One or the other tends to be dominant in an individual while the other is suppressed becoming ‘the lost treasure’ or ‘pearl without price’ of myth.  Intuition and sensation tend to be subordinated to the dominant function.  There are, however, some individuals who are dominantly intuitive (such as the great religious leaders and spiritual prophets of history) or dominantly sensate (such as athletes).  Thus different individuals ‘know’ in different ways.  What is probably the most widely used psychological test in the world, The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator ®, uses the Jungian categories of extraversion/introversion and thinking/intuition/feeling/ sensation to assess and ‘type’ individuals, generally for pedagogic (how does one learn best) and training (what job suits one best) purposes.  This idea of multiple ways of knowing is compatible with Howard Gardner’s concept of multiple intelligences (he identifies eight different forms).  Gardner’s work is also widely used in pedagogic circles. (Gardner 1993)

1.99 Ego consciousness is therefore not the undisputed master of the ‘seat of knowledge’.  It competes for the throne with other complexes.  In a normal individual, ego maintains control and dialogues with the unconscious through dreams and various forms of active imagination.  When this dialogue breaks down and a complex begins to interfere with the life of the ego, a neurosis arises.  Unlike Freud, however, Jung believed a neurosis was not a ‘disease’ but rather a compensatory mechanism required to re-balance conscious and unconscious content particularly when the ego becomes ‘deflated’ by life circumstances or ‘inflated’ with its own importance. 

1.100 Beyond competition with other complexes, however, even when sitting on the ‘seat of knowledge’, the ego remains subordinate to a transcendent complex or function called ‘the Self’.  Ego sits somewhat like a medieval king reigning by the grace of God.  In effect, the Self subsumes all contents of Mind – conscious and unconscious.  The teleological purpose of the Self is ‘individuation’, i.e., the process of psychological differentiation to realize the uniqueness of the individual personality.  (Sharp 1991)  Its realization, seldom achieved in a human life time, is the full, complete, true and unique individual human being. 

Cognitive

1.101 If analytic psychology proposes a mental software package, cognitive psychology demonstrates the relationship between the software and the hardware of brain structure and function.  It is overtly materialistic in approach.  It was, however, only in the 20th century that the hardware question was meaningfully addressed by neurophysiology – the study of the brain and nervous system.  In simple terms, the human brain has, to date, been subject to a three-stage evolutionary stages.  First, there came the so-called Reptilian Brain whose nature is the subject of Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden (1977).  Sometimes called the ‘rectilinear or R-structure’ it includes the brain stem made up of specialized organs such as the medulla oblongata and the eyes.  It receives sensations from the nervous system – voluntary and involuntary - and regulates the involuntary nervous system.  Second, overlaying this primitive vertebrate brain is the Mammalian Brain or cerebellum with its distinctive lobes – left/right, front/back.  Finally, the cerebral cortex enfolds much of the previous two.  This is the grey ridged matter sometimes called ‘the human brain’ but which we, as a species, share with higher primates, whales and dolphins.

1.102 Research over the last hundred years has revealed a lateralization of brain function.  In the most general terms: the left lobe is responsible for speech; the right lobe for pattern recognition, the front or temporal lobes for higher brain function like reason and planning; the back or occipital lobes for human visualization, i.e., not just physical sight but also mental imagining. 

1.103 More controversial are findings of Wilder Penfield (1975) and Julian Jaynes (1978).  Penfield after fifty years of neurosurgery concluded that the brain stem contained what he called the centrencephalic system, or programmer of the human brain.  Thus, if different parts of the brain are damaged, particularly prenatal, the programmer can reassign tasks altering the normal pattern of functional lateralization.

1.104 In the case of Jaynes, his career as a neuropsychologist led him to believe that a currently inactive right lobe brain centre corresponding to Wernicke’s Area (one of three speech centres in the left lobe) was once active.  Dormant in contemporary humanity - except in artistic inspiration (the Muse), the voice of conscience (our better half) and schizophrenia, this right lobe centre was, according to Jaynes, once active and controlling of human behaviour.  Progressively up the social hierarchy, the voice of one’s master, lord, king or god was heard by this ‘bicameral brain’.  It held ancient humanity in thrall of a social or collective consciousness.  In this regard, Jaynes suggests that ancient edicts like Hammurabi’s Code were ‘heard’ rather than read, i.e., perceived by the ear not by the eye.  The resulting social cohesion accounts, according to Jaynes, for the incredible engineering feats of the Beaker People (Stonehenge), the ancient Egyptians, the Olmecs and Mayas.  This form of consciousness broke down with the synchronistic collapse of ancient civilizations in the Old World about 1500 BCE.  A similar collapse occurred in the New World empires during the 1500’s CE when the Spanish silenced the bicameral voices of the Aztec, Inca and other Amerindian civilizations by regicide.  Once the voices stopped, people did not know what to do except surrender.  An implication of Jaynes’ hypothesis is that ‘ego’ consciousness was not in the past and may not in the future be the occupant of the seat of knowledge.

1.105 No matter lateralization of function, the question remains how the various parts of the brain physically and functionally interact to produce what one calls consciousness or Mind?  Recent research suggests, for example, that the decision-making or executive function located in the frontal lobes is coordinated with an emotional response emanating from interaction of the cerebellum and brainstem (Freeman 1999).  As to how a macroscopic state called Mind results from the microscopic actions of brain cells or neurons, Freeman proposes “circular causality” which he defines as “the interrelations between levels in a hierarchy: a top-down macroscopic state simultaneously influences microscopic particles that bottom-up create and sustain the macroscopic state.” (Freeman 2000) [R]   A fuller exploration of circular causality and its correlates in economics – connective and cumulative causality - is discussed below (2.0 Operating Concepts).

1.106 In this discussion of neurons, lobes and brain function, one question still remains unanswered: where is knowledge?  It is at this point that argument rather than evidence holds sway.  In effect, it is supposed that specific bits of knowledge are biomolecularly encoded into neurons as memory.  Like muscle reflexes, performance (recall) is enhanced through use as other neurons become functionally, but not necessarily spatially, entangled with the recurring memory.  In an Epicurean manner, ideas, concepts and Mind are formed by analogy between or compounding of such engrammed memories. (para 1.40)

1.107 The concept that knowledge is encoded in neurons as memories that then collectively cascade upwards to form Mind is shared by three highly influential scholars: Gilbert Ryle (1949), Fredrick von Hayek (1952), and, the founders of gestalt psychology Wertheimer, Köhler, and Koffka. (Köhler 1947)

1.108 Gilbert Ryle was a British analytic philosopher who argued against dualism.  For him, Mind is a byproduct of matter and somehow knowledge is encoded into the physical brain.  His 1949 book The Concept of Mind provides the foundation for further investigation of knowledge in Fredrick von Hayek’s The Sensory Order (1952); Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge (1962a); and, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).  Similarly, the gestalt ‘isomorphism’ hypothesis:

claims an inherent similarity between the psychological patterns in perception, physical patterns in the structures of things, and physiological patterns in the central nervous system.  The great realms of being - anorganic nature, organic life, and conscious mind - meet in the C.N.S.  There is one world united by forms: morphic monism.  (Hillman 1980, 36, fn 52) [S]

Gestalt

1.109 Using a computer metaphor, if cognitive psychology provides the hardware and analytic psychology provides the software then gestalt psychology provides the display screen of knowledge, i.e., how knowledge is perceived by Mind.  Gestalt psychology was founded by Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler in Germany in the early 20th century. (Köhler 1959)

1.110 The word gestalt derives from the German and means: “[a] ‘shape’, ‘configuration’, or ‘structure’ which as an object of perception forms a specific whole or unity incapable of expression simply in terms of its parts (e.g. a melody in distinction from the notes that make it up).” (OED, gestalt)  If one looks at a tree one sees a whole, an entity, not a composite of leaves, branches, trunk and root.  If one shifts attention to a part, the whole is lost from view.  In effect, it is perception (knowledge) without reflection or projection.  By reflection I mean interpretation or ‘thinking about’ the meaning of the image.  By projection I mean ‘reading into’ the image that ex poste interpreted meaning.  Or, as Jung says: “[i]mage and meaning are identical; and as the first takes shape, so the latter becomes clear.  Actually, the pattern needs no interpretation: it portrays its own meaning” (quoted in Hillman 1980, 37).

1.111 As suggested in the OED definition, gestalt is found not just in the visual arts and nature but also in music and, if one accepts the  gestalt ‘isomorphism’ hypothesis (para 1.108), in the nervous system’s organization of knowledge.  The implication is that meaning or ‘knowledge’ can exist without language.  In fact, a gestalt is a type of knowledge that disappears under analysis or reductive methods.  This insight was exported into aesthetics and art criticism [T] as well as epistemology and the philosophy of science with significant effect.  

1.112 In the hands of Michael Polanyi, this insight allowed him to distinguish, in effect, between knowledge in the foreground of attention and knowledge in the background, i.e., tacit knowledge.  In turn, this permitted an assessment of their relative role and importance.  Using the example of hammering a nail, Polanyi saw knowledge of how to achieve the objective as foreground – hit the nail – being dependant upon performance of background, ‘tacit’ or unconscious ‘know how’ acquired through practiced hand-eye coordination. (Polanyi 1962a, 174-175)  Any reflection during the act reduces performance, in effect, shattering the gestalt.  Such tacit knowledge has become the focus of a sometimes heated debate about appropriate policies for the knowledge-based economy (Cowan, David & Foray 2000).  More discussion about tacit and Polanyi’s general concept of ‘personal knowledge’ will be presented below.

1.113 In the hands of Thomas Kuhn (1962), the gestalt is used to derive his highly influential concept of a scientific ‘paradigm’.  A paradigm is “[a] pattern, exemplar, example.” (OED, paradigm)  A scientific paradigm, however, consists of a set of integrated and self-reinforcing components including: theory; language (especially rhetoric, i.e., how to make an effective argument or proof); instruments; praxis or customary practice (in the use of relevant theory, language and instruments); and, talent.  The mutual reinforcement of these components converts them into a whole greater than the sum of their parts.  Thus a paradigm becomes an autopoietic or self-maintaining organization like a cell, organism or corporation as in Galbraith’s technostructure (Galbraith 1968).  It is within a scientific paradigm that ‘normal science’ functions, i.e., the normal way in which knowledge is acquired in the natural sciences.  Kuhn defines normal science as ‘puzzle solving’ within a paradigm.  Using a paradigm is like searching under a street light for something dropped in the dark, if it is there, it will be found.  Normal science practices under the street lamp; it does not roam into the dark.  That is the Kuhnian realm of extraordinary science during the post-paradigm or revolutionary period of the cycle (Kuhn 1962, 82-89).

1.114 In the hands of Brian Loasby (2003), gestalt psychology is combined with von Hayek’s cognitive psychology (1952), Smith’s division and specialization of labour i.e., knowledge, and Marshall’s treatment of knowledge as central to external economies enjoyed by the firm.  Loasby places pattern recognition not calculatory rationalism on the ‘seat of knowledge’.  The inherent energy efficiency of pattern recognition, relative to continuous calculatory rationalism, has, in evolutionary terms, made it the dominant knowledge faculty.  These patterns form ‘connections’ altering the structure of the brain.  Loasby derives this concept of connection from Adam Smith’s analysis of knowledge.  Such patterns when behaviourally shared by a number of individuals become what Loasby calls ‘routines’ or institutions, i.e., routinized patterns of collective behaviour.  More will be said of Loasby’s concept of knowledge in the main text.

 

Science: Economics, History, Philosophy & Sociology

1.115   As demonstrated above, the old English verb ‘to know’ absorbed territory previously occupied, and in other languages still occupied, by several other verbs.  In an analogous way, the word ‘science’ has progressively encroached on other knowledge domains, faculties and forms.  Over time acting like a Jungian complex, it has attracted more and more social resources until it pushed aside competitors such as the Church and became the dominant knowledge institution in the modern world.  In the process, the natural & engineering sciences appropriated the university itself making it their ‘natural’ home. (Polanyi 1960-61, 406)

1.116   While the word ‘science’ means knowledge, during the Scientific Revolution its sense was altered by the innovation of ‘experimental philosophy’ (Houghton 1941, 40) based on the use and application of scientific instruments.  In this regard, in 1833 natural or experimental philosophers were renamed ‘scientists’ by William Whewell in response to a request from the poet Samuel Coleridge (Snyder 2000). 

1.117   As will be demonstrated below, the innovation of scientific instruments resolved many epistemological problems associated with sensation, perception and comprehension.  At the same time, it created a new one.  As noted by Hayek, there is now a split between what our senses tell us about the world and what science says (Hayek 1952).  This disconnect between common sense and scientific meaning is captured in a recent New York Times op-ed article by Brian Greene, professor of mathematics and physics at Columbia University, treating Time:

… modern physics’ notion of time is clearly at odds with the one most of us have internalized.  Einstein greeted the failure of science to confirm the familiar experience of time with “painful but inevitable resignation.”  The developments since his era have only widened the disparity between common experience and scientific knowledge…  In my mind’s eye, I often conjure a kaleidoscopic image of time in which, with every step, I further fracture Newton’s pristine and uniform conception.  And in moments of loss I’ve taken comfort from the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a useful but subjective organization. (Greene 2004)

1.118   What von Hayek does not identify, however, is the agency responsible for this disconnect: the scientific instrument.  As long as sensory data is the basis for scientific investigation then all evidence is, by definition, mediated by a human subject.  Scientific instruments transcend the human senses extending beyond the subjectivity of the individual observer.  Once calibrated and set in motion a clock – atomic or otherwise – will tick at a constant rate per unit time until its energy source is exhausted.  Such measurement is achieved without mediation by a human subject.  It provides ‘facts’, not speculation.  It is the use and application of the non-mediated evidence generated by scientific instruments that separates the natural and engineering sciences from other knowledge domains such as the social sciences & humanities and the Arts.  Interpretation, however, remains problematic even in the physical sciences.

1.119   Nonetheless other knowledge domains aspired to the evidentiary certainty of the experimental sciences.  Many disciplines in what once was moral philosophy adopted the mathematical techniques of the natural & engineering sciences to become the social sciences.  In all such cases, however, they did so without instrumentation for the non-mediated collection of evidence relevant to their questions of concern. 

Economics

1.120   As previously demonstrated, in mainstream economic theory, knowledge is treated as a certain, culturally blind, monotonic, rational public good that enters the production function of a firm or nation-state only as an input not as a final output.  In the process, knowledge generates increasing returns to scale incompatible with the perfectly competitive ideal of mainstream theory.  

1.121   In Cultural Economics, knowledge is treated as ‘values’ embodied in cultural goods and services.  The dominant theme is cultural sovereignty.  In Institutional Economics, knowledge is treated as institutional ‘know-how’ of the rules and routines of an organization, nation or sector of the economy.  The dominant theme is collective action through reduced decision costs.  In Legal Economics, knowledge is treated as intellectual property rights designed to mitigate the ‘free rider’ problem by temporarily granting a monopoly to the creator of new knowledge in the form of copyrights, patents, registered industrial designs and trademarks.  Tension between encouraging production of new knowledge and the cost to society of monopoly is the dominant theme.

1.122   The economics of science began with studies of post-Sputnik shortages of skilled labour in the sciences (Blank and Stigler, 1957; Arrow and Capron, 1959); the production and distribution of basic scientific knowledge (Nelson 1959; Arrow 1962); and, the ‘spillover effects’ or un-appropriated benefits of science-based innovation (Griliche 1960).  It is only in the last decade, however, that economists have initiated formal study of the economics of science itself, i.e., the internal economy of the natural & engineering sciences. 

1.123    The seminal work is Dasgupta and David’s 1994 article: “Toward a new economics of science”.  Among other findings, they draw on sociologist of science Robert Merton (1973) about the role of priority and adherence to the norms of disclosure in the reward system of science to establish an internal market mechanism for the domain.  They concluded that “an individual’s reputation for ‘contributions’ acknowledged within his or her collegiate reference groups is the fundamental ‘currency’ in the reward structure that governs the community of academic scientists.” (Dasguota & David 1994, 498).  This quasi-market system goes some distance in confirming Michael Polanyi’s comparison of self-coordination of individual scientific effort and the market. (Polanyi 1962b) [U] More findings from the ‘new economics of science’ will be presented in the main body of this thesis.

History

1.124   History is that “branch of knowledge which deals with past events, as recorded in writings or otherwise ascertained; the formal record of the past, esp. of human affairs or actions; the study of the formation and growth of communities and nations.”  (OED, history, 3)  In the West it is usually divided between the Ancient (before the fall of the Western Empire in 476 C.E.), Medieval (from the fall to the Age of Discovery in the 15th century); and Modern (from discovery of the Americas to the present).  History follows Time’s Arrow from the Past into the Present.  In this sense it is linear and a form of knowledge also derived from the ancient Greeks.  While they believed history was the special domain of the Muse of History, Clio, it was The Histories of Herodotus, born about 480 BCE (Herodotus 1963), and narrative of The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (411 BCE) that gave birth to this linear concept of history rather than the cycles of myth that characterize the historiographies of other ancient peoples.

1.125   Since publication, after his death in 1831, of Hegel’s The Philosophy of History (1837), each period of history and especially its art has been characterized by a zeitgeist or “[t]he spirit or genius which marks the thought or feeling of a period or age.” (OED, zeitgeist) Arguably, the zeitgeist of the modern age is science, specifically experimental science.  While science, as a word, means knowledge, its Latin root means ‘to split’ and in the experimental sciences this splitting takes the form of ‘controlled conditions’ under which only one phenomenon is studied, in isolation, at one time.  The remarkable ability of this method to generate new knowledge about the world has been the subject of numerous historical studies of the great discoveries and discoverers of science.  In this sense the history of science is the narrative of how new knowledge has been acquired in the context of its time.  Findings of historians of science will be presented in the main body of the thesis. 

1.126   There is, however, a special relationship between science and history other than linear narrative.  Thus one can speak of ‘history in science’, i.e., the use of history within science tracing progress through time.  This dimension is noted by Thomas Kuhn, in his history/philosophy/sociology of the natural sciences, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when he writes:

The depreciation of historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession, the same profession that places the highest of all values upon factual details of other sorts.  Whitehead caught the unhistorical spirit of the scientific community when he wrote, “A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost.”  (Kuhn 1962, 138)

1.127   The process of paradigm shift or revolution in the natural sciences, according to Kuhn, is accompanied by textbook revisionism. Specifically, the findings of past paradigms are edited or ‘crunched down’ to reflect continuity with the most recent paradigm thereby contributing to the sense of the linear accumulation of knowledge. [V]  In this sense Kuhn’s ‘metahistorical’ model of science is archaic, a throw back to “the man of the traditional civilizations [who] accorded the historical event no value in itself; in other words, he did not regard it as a specific category of his own mode of existence.  (Eliade 1954, 141). [W]

Philosophy

1.128   Philosophy, as the love, study or pursuit of knowledge, was significantly affected by the innovation of experimental science.  Where once only observation and logic were the path to knowledge, instrumentally controlled experiments now generate systematized, retrievable and replicable information, without intermediation by a subjective human being.  In effect, scientific instrumentation extends the human senses beyond what Kuhn calls ‘casual observation’ of the muddled middle (where individual human beings live) (Kuhn 1962, 15).  They extend our senses to both macro- and micro-scopic nature and provide spectral scans exceeding the ‘human’ range and precision of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell.  In a way, scientific instruments realize a Platonic ideal: “belief in a realm of entities, access to which requires mental powers that transcend sense perception.” (Fuller 2000, 69)  Furthermore, the ‘language’ of these extended senses also realizes another ancient Greek ideal, this time that of Pythagoras (about 530 B.C.E.), in that scientific instruments communicate in numbers.  Interpretation, however, remains a human, not a machine function.

1.129   In the early 1920s, in a Vienna Circle, the marriage between Hegel’s Absolute Idealism and experimental science, specifically physics, led to a new philosophy, logical positivism, with its de facto motto: The only statement that is true is a statement that can be tested.  The epistemological wave created by this statement spread to the social sciences, e.g., Milton Friedman’s The Methodology of Positive Economics. (Friedman 1953)  This Platonic philosophy abstracted from experimental science its mathematical logic and ignored the instrumentation that makes experimental science possible.  It strived to discover a language in which, from first principles, all could be known and explained. 

1.130   When this distancing from Aristotelian empiricism, i.e., observation, which is the heart of experimental science, was pointed out to the Circle, its name was changed to logical empiricism but its heart remained true to Plato.  One regular guests at the Circle, Edgar Zilsel, refused to join because only logic and numbers were admitted rather than the empirical historical record of experimental science.  Zilsel’s work will be reported in more detail below.

1.131   While logical positivism finds its roots in physics, the philosophy of biology is driven by the concept of evolution and has yet to acquire the ‘standing’ of physics.  There are two reasons.  First, biology’s relative lack of mathematical modeling and instrumentation left it the ‘poor sister’ and it spoke in quasi-metaphysical terms of teleology, vitalism and dualism.  Two things changed this situation in the last fifty years.  The first involves physical instrumentation that has gone through generations of improvement since the revolution in solid state physics, i.e., the transistor, in the 1950s.  The recent development of the gene sequencers and related instrumentation is dramatically increasing biological knowledge. (Hood 2002)

1.132   The second is emergence of genomics, the science of molecular genetics.  Genomics also began about fifty years ago with the ‘gestalt’ discovery by Watson and Cricks of the DNA double helix.  Their suggestion that it could split into complementary strands established the physical basis for the encoding and transmission of genetic information within an individual organism and between generations.  In this regard, the New York Times on June 13, 1953 ran “Clue to Chemistry of Heredity is Found” calling DNA “a substance as important to biologists as uranium is to nuclear physicists.” (Overbye 2003).

1.132   Linking these two developments is the informatics of DNA that is based on the quibit (0, 1, 2, 3) rather than the binary bit (0, 1).  The shear volume of information generated by genomic research is such that the information technology industry is investing heavily in the development of customized hardware and software (Reuters, January 11, 2002).  Together with environmental knowledge, what philosophy will make of this ‘new biology’ only the future will tell.

1.133   Second, relative to physics and the philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology remains constrained by religious opinion.  In the United States, for example, “[a] new Gallup poll shows that 48 percent of Americans believe in creationism, and only 28 percent in evolution (most of the rest aren't sure or lean toward creationism)… Americans are more than twice as likely to believe in the devil (68 percent) as in evolution.” (Kristof 2003).  The same poll showed that 46% of adult Americans claim to be ‘born again’ Christians.  In other words, revelation rather than reason is the faculty of knowing that still dominates popular understanding of biology.

Sociology

1.134   The word ‘sociology’ was introduced into English from the French sociologie coined by Auguste Comte (1798-1857) whose positivism was transcendent rather than logical in nature.  Its primary meaning is “[t]he science or study of the origin, history, and constitution of human society; social science.  Also, the study of social organization and institutions and of collective behaviour and interaction, including the individual’s relationship to the group.” (OED, sociology, 1a)  Its secondary meaning is “[t]he application of sociological concepts and analysis to the social context of other disciplines or fields; a particular sociological system.” (OED, sociology, 1b) 

1.135   With respect to the relationship between sociology and science, there are three facets of importance to my thesis.  First, the sociology of knowledge cum Mannheim has increasingly been displaced by a Weberian sociology of science, specifically of experimental or reductive science.  Second, sociological research into the relationship between science and other social sectors, e.g., the economy, culture, history, politics and religion, may be called the ‘weak program’.  Third, sociological research into “The Republic of Science” (M. Polanyi 1962b), i.e., how the scientific community operates, can be called the ‘strong programme’. (Pels 1996, 30)  Findings from all three strands will be reported in the main body of the thesis.

Technology

1.136  In addition, scientific knowledge as measuring and monitoring the natural world has, through scientific instruments, become entwined in the popular imagination with technology as the manipulation of that world.  This leads to the assumption that experimental science generates technology.  While a relationship between science and technology exists, it is not, as will be demonstrated, a determinant one.  For example, there is a “reciprocal relation between science and technology, involving the research front of one and the accrued archive of the other” but which is “nevertheless sufficient to keep the two in phase in their separate growths within each otherwise independent cumulation.” (Price 1984, 568)  In addition, many different forms of knowledge are required to generate the physical technologies and techno-economic systems that dominate modern world.  Among these, flowing from the arts, crafts and engineering, is ‘design’.  In many ways, design knowledge results in kosmos – the right ordering of the multiple parts of the world (Hillman 1981, 28).  Design knowledge will be treated in the main body of this thesis.

 

Lead In

1.137  This completes my interdisciplinary tour d’ horizon.  In the next chapter I will outline the major operating concepts harvested from the dominant disciplines that will be applied in the main body of the text.

Acknowledgements

 

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