The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
On Methodology
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3. Thomas Kuhn’s Pelican Brief |
Harry Hillman Chartrand February 10, 2003 |
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1. TRANSDISCIPLINARY INDUCTION
For
my purposes,
Transdisciplinary Induction (TI):
a)
involves movement
from the general to the specific back to the general;
b)
where specifics
are arguments, findings and theorems developed by specialized researchers and
scholars working in a growing and evolving population of disciplines and
sub-disciplines constituting what I have classified, under the term ‘pragmatic
epistemology’, as the three primary contemporary knowledge domains (NES, HSS
and the Arts); and,
c)
the general is both an initial working hypothesis and a final
argument, finding or thesis of a transdisciplinary
researcher. Specifics are collected and
compiled and used to refine and develop the initial hypothesis into a final
thesis. Selected specifics then serve
as evidence for the hypothesis.
Adam
Smith suggested that division and specialization of labour
is limited by the extent of the market.
The market for knowledge, i.e., the knowledge-based economy, has grown
dramatically – in fact, globally - and the resulting division and
specialization of knowledge has become extensive. Smith also suggested there were dangers associated
with the over-division and -specialization of labour
including what Marx would later call ‘alienation from the means of
production’. In the case of knowledge
this has meant a narrowing of breadth and an increasing of depth so that the
individual has become increasingly alienated (or dis-interested)
in all but a narrowing horizontal range of the knowledge spectrum. To mitigate these dangers and to foster the
integrity of human knowledge, various scholars in various disciplines have
proposed varying methodologies. Six
whose works have inspired TI include:
i – John R. Commons: whose ‘historicism’ draws upon the
evidence and evolution of the Past – economic, legal, philosophical,
psychological, social and technological – to construct an integrated institutional
view of the Present.
He also highlighted the critical role of intellectual property rights in
the evolution of what has become known as the knowledge-based economy;
ii – Fred Emery
& Eric Trist: whose concept of ‘overlapping
temporal gestalten’ requires the Present to be viewed
as being a fabric woven out of values and behaviours
rooted in and growing out of different points in the Past. In addition, their concept of ‘emergent
processes’ governing the appearance of new institutions through the stages of
concealment, parasitism and overt competition with a host highlights a likely mechanism
for both the Zilsel
and Merton Hypotheses (vi – below);
iii – Eric Jantsch: whose
‘systems philosophy’ requires a trinary perspective -
mythological, rational and evolutionary – of ‘Big R’ reality and implies a ‘trialectic’ rather than a dialect methodology. Trialectics
requires thesis and antithesis to be viewed through the eyes of an active
participating ‘subjective’ observer so that the resulting synthesis is
reflected in three rather than two dimensions;
iv – Carl Gustav Jung: whose complex psychology requires
the circumambulation of a phenomenon from a range of differing views and at
progressively higher stages of development, reminiscent of the ‘pedagogic spiral’;
v - Magorah Maruyama: whose
concept of ‘paradigmatology’ requires one to become
adept at manipulating and rotating disciplinary lenses to gain a broad spectrum
view of situational reality;
v – Jean Piaget: whose concept of inter-disciplinary
research encourages the extraction of ‘thematic models’ from one discipline and
their application in others, e.g., from physics to economics, and vice versa;
and,
vi – Edgar Zilsel: whose
concept of the coincidence of class interests at a key point in time – high
artisans, humanists and university scholars – giving birth to the Scientific
Revolution of the 17th century and, at least in that knowledge
domain, resolving the ancient Western
schism between the Mechanical and the Liberal Arts – between head and hand. To this Zilsel Hypothesis must be added the Merton
Hypothesis that it was the coincidence of interests of a
To
these six, I now add a seventh, Thomas
Kuhn’s Pelican Brief.
What
all seven share in common, in my opinion, is
recognition of what I call Pascal’s Third Infinity. In the
ancient and medieval worlds, there were the macro- and micro-infinities of ‘As
Above, So Below’. Anywhere, however, along the continuum between
micro- and macro-infinity, one can chose any one of an infinite number of places
from which to move off horizontally – left or right - into the Third Infinity
of Complexity. Like a moving transept on
a Christian Cross, the Third Infinity defines Modernity. TI, and each of the seven methodologies
defined above, is intended as a means to bring some order to the chaos which is
the dynamic complexity of contemporary human knowledge.
In
a way TI is like the sophistry of the Law in that one builds the strongest case
possible from available evidence and argument while ignoring or deflecting
refuting evidence. TI is therefore
inherently subjective and dependent on the skills and defects of the advocate.
In
another way TI is like medieval scholasticism relying on authority as
evidence. Phenomenologically,
I do not believe there is currently another choice. Each TI researcher will be strong in some
fields, weak in others. True polymaths
appear 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 to solve is influenced by their culture, experience and
language.
TI
is to be applied in three ‘overlapping temporal gestalten’:
a) in the short-run, in my written comprehensive Thomas Kuhn’s Pelican Brief - that
serves as the focus of this interrogation;
b) in the
intermediate run, in my thesis: the Competitiveness
of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy that contends it is the
unique dynamic tension and the resolution of this tension between the NES, the
HSS and the Arts that determine competitiveness in a new economy ; and,
c) in the
long
run, as a tiny step towards the re-integration of human knowledge following a
near ‘apocalyptic’ schism between Marx and Markets and in the face of rising
‘troubles’ as an older, more elemental, schism surfaces to again bedevil
humanity – secularism & theocracy – both at home and abroad.
On
a somewhat lighter note, I like to call myself a ‘secular humorist’, that is,
one who laughs at human pretensions, including one’s own, in the face of an
infinite eternity beyond which may well lay manifold others in what has been
called the Multiverse
by Astronomy - the Queen of the Natural Sciences while wearing the Crown of
Astrophysics on her head. The King, of
course, remains Physics with the Pretender Biology nipping at his heels while
the Jester, Chemistry, proudly prances in the sure and certain knowledge that
all three must fall at his feet when confronted with any constructivist
application. This leaves undefined, of
course, the role of the Court in which this dramatic comedy (sometimes
approaching farce) is played out – including the Barons, Dukes and Earls of the
HSS and the Arts as well as the gapping Commoners who pay the bill for this
play as both consumers and taxpaying citizens.
3. THOMAS KUHN’S PELICAN BRIEF
Thomas Kuhn’s The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions was chosen as an appropriate object of
my written and oral comprehensives for four reasons.
First, Structure
has reshaped the academic landscape becoming “…one of the most cited works in
the humanities and social sciences, and one of the few major works in these
fields that have been received sympathetically by natural scientists.” (Fuller 2000; 1). Structure
is therefore so widely known that it could, I hoped, be safely assumed that all
members of this Committee – an international political economist, a geneticist,
a marketer, a philosopher, physicist and sociologist would have some working
knowledge of its contents. As such Structure has attained transdisciplinary status and is an appropriate object for
TI investigation.
Second, Structure
provides an entré to the history, philosophy and
sociology of science that appear to be the dominant contemporary
epistemological sub-disciplines within their respective host disciplines and
sub-domains – the Humanities (history and philosophy) & the Social Sciences
(sociology). In turn, this makes Structure an appropriate object for TI
investigation.
Third, a detailed analysis of Structure lays the foundation for the third epistemic strand of my
thesis – the NES. Previous work provides
me with such a working foundation for both the Arts and the Social
Sciences. Additional work is being
conducted concerning the Humanities. It
is my thesis, of course, that it is the interaction or, more accurately, the interphasing of
the three primary knowledge domains that determines the competitiveness of
nations in a global knowledge-based economy.
Fourth, Structure
permits an assessment of the applicability of the “normal science” paradigm to
all three primary contemporary knowledge domains – the Natural &
Engineering Sciences (NSE), the Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS), and the
Arts.
Structure proved an appropriate object for TI
investigation. Its many ‘barbed’
references – succinct yet pointed - to aesthetics, economics, history,
psychology, philosophy, sociology as well the Natural Science disciplines of astronomy,
biology, chemistry and physics provided multiple ‘hooks’ upon which to hang TI findings. Aesthetics, psychology and sociology were the
non-NSE disciplines most used by Kuhn – especially the latter two. In the process of investigation, Kuhn’s
argument was neither falsified nor verified but rather, I believe, amplified by
appending views derived from these and other disciplines. In conclusion, the strengths and weakness of
Kuhn’s normal science of puzzle-solving was assessed when applied to the other knowledge
domains, i.e., the HSS and the Arts.
Having completed
and submitted Thomas Kuhn’s Pelican Brief
as my written comprehensives, three significant findings have subsequently emerged.
In
the Brief, I drew thematic models from
physics and biology to compare a Kuhnian normal
science paradigm respectively to the quark field effect and metabolism. I have been searching for a more succinct or
elegant term for this ‘whole, greater and different, than the sum of its
components’ effect (synergy seems dated).
I believe I have found it in the work of neuroscientist Walter J.
Freeman. The term is ‘circular
causality’ defined, at the neurophysiological level
of brain function. “…Circular causality expresses 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.
The state exists over a span of inner time in the system that can be collapsed
to a point in external time. Events in real time are marked by changes in the
state of the system, which are discrete.”
This
causal principle may allow me to convincingly deal with ‘transcendent’ or ‘unconscious’
forms of social knowledge. These include
such unplanned, i.e., arational, institutions as the price system in
the tradition of von Hayek in economics, and power in the tradition of Bertrand
de Jouvenel in political science. It may even permit a reasoned linkage to be
made between the archetypes of complex psychology and ‘unplanned’ social
knowledge structures.
b) Economics as ‘
Almost
in passing Kuhn suggest that of disciplines in the other knowledge domains –
the HSS and the Arts, economics comes closest to being a ‘normal science’. I believe
I now understand why.
First,
economics is taught, at the introductory and intermediate levels in
universities around the world, using text books that present a standard
Neoclassical Model. The texts are so
similar that to my knowledge they sometimes share the same chapter titles and
illustration numbers. Furthermore, this
standard model can be taught, separately or together, graphically, verbally
and/or mathematically. And, as in the
revisionism of normal science, this economic model is presented as the logical
outcome of all the efforts of all economists since before the beginning of the
formal discipline itself.
Second,
the ‘gestalt’ nature of graphic modeling in economics, for example the Marshallian scissors of supply and demand, comes near to
the Euclidian perfection required of ‘Big S’ science by Descarte.
Third,
economic unlike other social processes generate quantitative data as part of
their normal operation, i.e., prices and quantities bought and sold on markets. This provides the highest caliber
quantitative evidence, flawed though it is for numerous reasons, of any of the
social sciences, humanities or arts.
Socially, it comes closest to the unmediated sensory data provided by
physical instrumentation in the NES.
The
OECD in assessing the knowledge-based economy identifies two specific forms:
tacit and codified. After completing the
Brief, I can now add a third: tooled
knowledge.
Codified
knowledge refers to books, journals, libraries and data bases from which
someone with appropriate training can extract knowledge. It corresponds to what Carl Sagan called ‘extrasomatic
knowledge’, i.e., knowledge embodied in material form and transmitted outside
of the human body from individual to individual and generation to
generation.
Tacit
knowledge, which is identified by Kuhn as deriving from Polanyi,
is experiential knowledge such as ‘lab bench knowledge’ in biotechnology. It involves ‘know how’. It is knowledge possessed
by an individual but that can not be codified.
Tooled
knowledge refers to knowledge embodied in instruments and capital
equipment. It addresses and resolves one
of the longest running controversies in economics: the labour
theory of value. From Adam Smith to
Marx, the value of a good or service was to be measured by the labour value it contained.
·
constrained
utility maximization (subject to price and income constraints) by the consumer
measuring ‘willingness’ to buy, a.k.a., demand; and,
·
constrained profit maximization (subject to cost and technical
constraints) measuring ‘willingness’ to provide, a.k.a., supply.
Marx
did not accept this ‘new’ theory and the labour
theory of value played a central role in the hot and cold war conflicts between
Marx and Markets during much of the 20th century.
Related
to the labour theory of value is the theory of
capital, specifically what constitutes capital?
While some commentators suggest there is no theory of capital (and hence
no economic science) others (specifically the Austrian economist Bohm-Baverk) suggest capital formation involves what is
called ‘round-about-means of production’. In this view an existing piece of
capital equipment is seen to embody successive generations of labour leading to the current ‘state of the art’. The impossibility of measuring that
historical accretion of labour has been demonstrated
by, among others, Professor Dooley of USAK.
If
one, however, replaces labour as the input by
knowledge, then capital becomes not hours of labour
but rather specific knowledge - protected by IPRs or
in the public domain - and embodied in instruments and capital plant & equipment. In this view, if scientific instruments have
extended the human senses along the micro-macro-continuum, then capital plant
and equipment have extended the human grasp horizontally
out into the material world. At the push
of a button, a machine or mechanism does work that untold generations of humans
did by hand. Of course, tacit knowledge,
i.e., a living breathing human being, is required to activate tooled knowledge,
to know which buttons to push and in what order. Similarly, tacit knowledge is required to decode
codified knowledge so that it becomes operational. In this sense, without the active mediation
of a human being, codified and tooled knowledge remain dumb artifacts like a
recording without a playback device. It
is for this reason, the need for the tacit knowledge of an
individual to unlock codified and activate tooled knowledge, that I am completing
a background article to my thesis: A Labour Theory of Knowledge: Reason, Revelation, Sentiment
and Sensation.
Accordingly,
knowledge takes three ‘economic’ forms, i.e., forms that can be bought and
sold, in markets:
·
the tacit
knowledge of an individual hired as proprietor, employee or contractor;
·
codified
knowledge transformed temporarily into
marketable property through intellectual property rights like copyright,
patents, registered industrial designs and trademarks but destined to become
part of the public domain; and,
· tooled knowledge embodied in scientific instruments and capital equipment.