The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
November 2002
Harry Hillman Chartrand
Thomas Kuhn’s “Pelican Brief”
c) Exogenous Factors
2.78 The sealed Pelican was, of course, subject to one external influence – heat. The influence of heat changed the character of the prima materia. Outside the normal science paradigm there are also factors influencing its operation. While he makes only passing reference Kuhn indicates they can seriously affect, for better or ill, the operation of his paradigm – depending if it is a paradigm or post-paradigm situation. Four will be examined. They are:
iii - External Forces; and,
2.79 Kuhn makes seven references to aesthetics. He notes that the only person with whom he successfully communicated his concept (before publication) was a philosopher concerned with ethics and aesthetics, Stanley Cavell, of Berkeley (1962, xiii). The closest, however, Kuhn comes to a definition is: “These are the arguments, rarely made entirely explicit, that appeal to the individual’s sense of the appropriate or the aesthetic - the new theory is said to be “neater,” “more suitable,” or “simpler” than the old.” (1962, 155). He also notes the role aesthetics may play in the conversion of talent to a new paradigm (1962; 156, 158). But what is aesthetics? (Appendix and Table 1: Aesthetic 7 = 6/1/0, % 86/14/0)
2.80 The dictionary defines aesthetics as a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. Etymologically, it derives from the Greek aisthesis which means at root “taking in” and “breathing in” - a “gasp”, that is the primary aesthetic response. (Hillman 1980, 30).
2.81 As to the relationship of aesthetics and beauty, the word kosmos, in Greek, means the right placing of the multiple things of the world; not a Star Trek universe out there where no one has gone before. This right placing of the multiple things is beauty - the comely or harmonious coming together of parts. And the means by which this right order is brought about is Art. In fact, the only contemporary word retaining this original Greek meaning of kosmos is cosmetic, a gift of the Goddess Aphrodite. This right ordering of the universe also had, originally, a moral imperative: kalon kagathon - the beautiful and the good. Thus the sense of wholeness, of rightness is aesthetic knowledge. And of this, the poet wrote:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
John Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn, Stanza 2.
2.82 It is primarily in the Arts that imagination comes fully into its own. It through Art that imagination is seen as that grasp of wholeness in all its qualitative relationships. It is a way of seeing and feeling things as they compose an integral whole. The whole person is involved, for imagination is what happens when varied materials of sense quality, emotion, and meaning come together in a union that makes a new birth in the world (Sloane 1991, 38). Or, as Griffin writes: “Creativity is that process or activity by which ‘the many become one, and are increased by one’” (Griffin 1991, 10). With respect to Structure, artistic creativity connects to the natural sciences through ‘natural laws’. While the scientists is faced by an established set of natural laws over which he or she puzzles, the artist carries on the alchemistic tradition of creating new worlds through creation ex nihilo, i.e., out of nothing like God (Nahm 1947). For the artists such laws are to be transcended, e.g., portraying three dimensional reality in a two dimensional space.
2.83 It is, however, when a work of art is confronted by a human subject that a direct connection can be made with Kuhn’s use of ‘gestalt’. There is both gestalt psychology and gestalt aesthetics.
Gestalt Psychology
A school of psychology that originated in Germany in the early 20th century: Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka were its founders. It regards mental processes as wholes (gestalts) that cannot be analysed into smaller components. According to this theory, when something is learned the individual's entire perception of the environment has been changed.
The Macmillan Encyclopedia 2001, Market House Books Ltd 2000
Gestalt Aesthetics
A term imported into modern art criticism from psychology. Gestalt psychology, founded by Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler, holds that the parts are determined by the whole, and that all experience, including aesthetic experience, is related to certain basic structures which cannot be subdivided. Gestalt criticism is opposed to the idea of empathy, and holds that we do not ourselves project aesthetic and emotional qualities into the work of art, but find them there waiting for us. Defenders of minimal art claim that the spectator finds a 'good Gestalt' in the most primary forms.
The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms, Thames & Hudson Ltd, 1984.
2.85 It is this sense of ‘rightness’ that characterizes the aesthetic experience. It is ‘pre-analytic’, that is, it precedes analysis. The gasp when examined breaks down into parts and the ‘wholeness’ of the experience, the magic, disappears. Aesthetically this observation can be applied to both Kuhn’s 1969 Postscript and 1990 The Road since Structure. In response to his critics Kuhn attempts to analyze what is an aesthetic and intellectual gestalt – the paradigm of normal science and scientific revolutions. In the process the tightness, the rightness of his concept is torn asunder and replaced by a ‘disciplinary matrix’ (1969, 182).
2.85 Aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy appeared in the late 18th century with the German philosopher Baumgarten (Kristeller 1953, 35). It is important to note that “[t]he original meaning of the term aesthetics as coined by Baumgarten… is the theory of sensuous knowledge, as a counterpart to logic as a theory of intellectual knowledge.” (Kristeller 1953, 34) As observed above part of the aesthetic problem lays in differentiating between the distant senses of sight and sound and the near senses of touch, taste and smell (Berleant 1964). To the degree that aesthetics restricts itself to the distant senses, the effect of scientific instruments in extending or ‘distancing’ the human senses offers a link with what on the surface appear two distinct knowledge domains.
2.86 Another part of the problem, however, lay in separating aesthetics from ethics, i.e. separating the beautiful from the good. In fact, the separation of knowledge domains from ethics (specifically from the Christian Church) is a repeated pattern in the development of knowledge in the West. In a sense it involves the ‘objectification’ of knowledge previously considered ethical or religious in nature. Thus the emergence of the Humanities in the 15th and 16th centuries marked the separation of politics from ethics. This eventually led to the secular nation-state. In the 17th century, nature was separated from ethics by Robert Boyle. This led to the ‘Scientific Revolution’. In the late 18th century, the Arts separated from ethics. This led to modern aesthetics and a separation of the beautiful from the good. In the late 18th and early 19th century, society was separated from ethics with the emergence of the social sciences, e.g., Adam Smith and Comte. It could, by extension be argued that in the late 20th and early 21st centuries life is being separated from ethics through biotechnology. It would be interesting to contrast the ethical debates surrounding these preceding schisms of knowledge from ethics with the contemporary debate surrounding biotechnology.
2.87 To return, however, to the separation of the beautiful from the good, this led first to the Romantics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries followed by the ‘Art for Art's Sake Movement’ in the late 19th century that consciously and deliberately separated the Arts from an increasingly industrialized, ‘de- humanized’ society (Henderson 1984: 46). This led the high arts and the artist to become increasingly isolated from mainstream society (Bell 1976: 13-14). Similarly, Structures (as well as the work of Polanyi) appears as an apologia for an incipient ‘Science-for-Science’s-Sake Movement, a movement which, as will be seen below, has been significantly weakened since Kuhn penned his original text in 1962.
2.88 While Kuhn explicitly excuses himself from treating the biological sciences (1962, xi), he uses the term or variations on ‘evolution’ twenty-eight times. Such references are most frequent in the 1990 “The Road since Structure” where there is a reference to evolution on one page in five. To the degree evolution involves a self-contained organism functioning in an external environment, it implies external factors and forces with which normal science must deal. The closest Kuhn comes to a definition is when he denies teleological purpose in the development of normal science: (Appendix and Table 1: Evolution 28 = 20/2/6, % 71/7/21).
The developmental process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings - a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything… Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal? If we can learn to substitute evolution-from-what-we-do-know for evolution-toward-what-we-wish-to-know, a number of vexing problems may vanish in the process. (1962 170-171)
2.89 He goes on argue that “the resolution of revolutions is the selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science.” (1962, 171) He suggests that successive stages in this evolution process lead to “an increase in articulation and specialization… without benefit of a set goal, a permanent fixed scientific truth, of which each stage in the development of scientific knowledge is a better exemplar.” (1962, 171-172)
2.90 It is, however, in “The Road since Structure” that what was but one of a number of metaphors (e.g., crisis, normal science, revolution) for the growth of scientific knowledge becomes the centerpiece for his proposed future analysis: “Basically, I shall be trying to sketch the form which I think any viable evolutionary epistemology has to take. I shall, that is, be returning to the evolutionary analogy introduced in the very last pages of the first edition of Structure, attempting both to clarify it and to push it further.” (1990, 6, italics added). He goes on to say: “scientific development must be seen as a process driven from behind, not pulled from ahead - as evolution from, rather than evolution towards.” (1990, 7) He then takes the evolutionary argument and applies it to “the incommensurability between the theories of contemporary scientific specialties” (1990, 7). He concludes: “[o]ver time a diagram of the evolution of scientific fields, specialties, and sub-specialties comes to look strikingly like a layman’s diagram for a biological evolutionary tree. Each of these fields has a distinct lexicon, though the differences are local, occuring only here and there. There is no lingua franca capable of expressing, in its entirety, the content of them all or even of any pair.” (1990, 7-8)
2.91 A concept related to evolution is ‘emergence’. Kuhn references it or variations 62 times. As with evolution, there is a disproportionate frequency in the 1990 “The Road since Structure”. (Appendix and Table 1: Emergence 62 = 51/4/7, % 82/6/11, % baseline 79/16/5)
2.92 To better appreciate and understand the ways in which organizations adapt to a changing environment Fred Emery and Eric Trist published Towards a Social Ecology (Emery and Trist 1972). Of “emergent processes”, such as those suggested by Kuhn, they observe:
One suspects that the important social processes typically emerge like this. They start small, they grow and only then do people realize that their world has changed and that this process exists with characteristics of its own. Granted that there are genuine emergent processes (otherwise why worry about the next thirty years), then we must accept real limitations upon what we can predict and also accept that we have to live for some time with the future before we recognize it as such. (Emery and Trist 1972, 25)
2.93 Such processes require resources. In their early stages of development their energy requirements are met parasitically. i.e., they appear to be something else. It has, in fact, been argued that the Scientific Revolution was made possible by the support of certain Protestant churches trying to root their faith in God’s work called ‘nature’ and escape the words and opinions of popes, bishops and philosophers (Merton 1936; Jacob 1978; Jacob and Jacob 1980). This is a major reason why key emergents are typically unrecognized for what they are while other less demanding but novel processes are quickly seen.
2.94 As they grow, so do their energy and resource requirements. They nonetheless remain hidden from view by, in effect, sharing parts of existing institutions, e.g., Church-run universities. However,
[b]ecause it is a growing process, its energy requirements will be substantially greater (relative to what it appears to do) than the energy requirements of the maturer process which it apes. Because it is not what it appears to be, the process will stretch or distort the meanings and usage of the vocabulary which it has appropriated. (Emery and Trist 1972, 25)
2.95 At some point the energy and resource requirements of such emergent processes leads to symptoms of debility in the host structure that finds it increasing difficult to mobilize resources and meet new demands. As development continues symptoms of intrusion within the host structure appear and when the new structure becomes roughly equal in energy and resources with the host, mutual invasion occurs:
At this stage it should be obvious that there is a newly emerging system but mutual retardation and the general ambivalence and lack of decisiveness may still lead the new system to be seen simply as a negation of the existing system. (Emery and Trist 1972, 26)
2.96 Application of such concepts may yield significant insights into the development of scientific knowledge and especially the emergence of new sub-disciplines and specialties. But while Kuhn makes extensive use of both evolution and emergent processes, it is important to appreciate the ‘ahistorical’ nature of his paradigm.
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.” (1962, 138)
2.97 It is appropriate in this regard to appreciate that a sense of rectilinear history is itself a relatively recent concept. In this sense Kuhn’s ‘metahistorical’ model is quite ‘archaic’:
In short, it would be necessary to confront “historical man” (modern man), who consciously and voluntarily creates history, with the man of the traditional civilizations, who, as we have seen, had a negative attitude toward history. Whether he abolishes it periodically, whether he devaluates it by perpetually finding transhistorical models and archetypes for it, whether, finally, he gives it a metahistorical meaning (cyclical theory, eschatological significations, and so on), the man of the traditional civilizations 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 1974, p. 141.
2.98 If economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources in satisfying a changing, increasingly complex and growing array of human wants, needs and desires then:
a) politics is about the scarce resource “Power”, specifically the legitimate power of the State to exercise, in theory, a monopoly of coercive force, i.e., violence. This monopoly is directed towards the preservation and extension of the State against external and internal agencies that weaken or threaten it. To the degree such a teleological purpose is served, it has been named “The Minotaur” (De Jouvenel 1948);
b) religion is about the scarce resource “Faith”, specifically faith in a religio, a linking back to and future recovery of an original Creation in all its divine perfection, i.e., before the ravishes of time rusted and the corruption of humanity spoiled it. Epistemologically, in Western history, since the fall of Rome, there has been a progressive separation from religious ethics of emerging domains of knowledge – the Humanities, the Natural & Engineering Sciences, the Arts and the Social Sciences. If any Faith realized its belief, e.g., through the agency of (a) or (c), then all domains of knowledge would collapse under the umbrella of the winning Church. Even without all out victory, religion has and continues to place limitations (that vary between Faiths) on normal science, e.g., fetal tissue research ; and,
c) sociology is about the scarce resource “Cooperation”, specifically the cooperation of self-interested individuals acting in groups (collective action) to achieve common goals or objectives that may reward, transcend and/or threaten the narrow self-interest of the individual. The changing threshold between individual and society has led one observer to describe the human species as a “social solitaire” (Bronowski 1973). Both (a) and (b) can be viewed as resources applied to strengthen the ‘social’ side of the frontier and contain the ‘solitaire’ passions of human nature. Economics is another. By first satisfying the elemental needs of a solitaire for food and shelter against nature, economics creates a correspondence between the self-interest of the individual and the needs of society. As a society grows in number of individuals and complexity, economics struggles to satisfy a changing and increasingly complex array of wants, needs and desires, e.g., DVDs and Rebocks.
2.99 With only a passing reference to the external pressure for an improved calendar influencing Copernicus (1962, xii), Kuhn places the natural sciences inside a sealed Pelican immune to the forces of economics, politics, religion and society as a whole. In a detailed analysis of the origins and nature of Structure, Steve Fuller, among other things, finds it:
a) originated as a pedagogic teaching tool for the General Education in Science curriculum at Harvard. This explains its relatively non-technical nature as well as its subsequent appeal to humanists and social scientists;
b) was an apologia for the ‘dirty hands’ problem of ‘Big Science’ resulting from the Manhattan Project and application of normal science for purposes of a military-industrial complex that emerged during the Second World War in the United States. Hence there is no mention in Structure of the enormous resources required by ‘Big Science’, resources so great that the scientific community is simply unable, on its own, to provide them. If it is to get them from society, it must convince and then ‘pay the piper’ the minimum price possible and avoid external contamination of purpose. In this regard, it is appropriate to note that two years before Structure was published another American scholar released On Thermonuclear War (Kahn 1960); and,
c) was a protest by Kuhn against the changing practice of natural science, specifically “Big Science’ in physics, a discipline in which he was trained but never practiced (Fuller 2000, 388). In a way, Structure represents Kuhn’s attempt at religio, to return to ‘pure science’. His references (and objections) to the Orwellian nature of scientific pedagogy shows, however, that Kuhn’s does not seek a strict religio as such. In fact, his belief appears atheistic, materialistic or Epicurean in philosophical root. This is indicated by his comments about resistance of some scientists to Darwinian evolution because of its non-teleological nature, i.e., evolution from, rather than evolution towards, Structure is about change without purpose.
This need not be so for two reasons. First, even if evolution is ‘from’ rather than ‘towards’, one teleological characteristic of evolution remains: the ever increasing complexity of life. It is only ‘catastrophe’ that breaks the anti-entropic pattern of increasing complexity of living things. Second, ‘dirty hands’ is something that the Church has dealt with for millennia: from whence evil? Science, like God and like the Arts (Chartrand 1992), is not summum bonum, all good. Neither are they all bad. Thus Kuhn leaves unmentioned the technological spin-offs of normal science that have enhanced the material well being and contributed to the global dominance of the human species, i.e., normal science is a cultural artifact of evolutionary importance.
2.100 Kuhn explicitly draws upon gestalt and cognitive psychology. According to Fuller, however, he was also familiar with psychoanalysis, i.e., Freudian psychiatry, having taken treatment (Fuller 2000, 381, 2ff). His use of ‘gestalt switching’ to define the conversion process whereby a natural scientist moves from one paradigm to another demonstrates the influence of gestalt psychology. As noted above this also connects to his references to aesthetics through gestalt aesthetics. Structure succeeds, in my view, because of what I choose to call the ‘Rorschach effect’. In effect the ‘Rorschach Ink Blot Test’ involves a subject reading into an image what he or she wants to see, just like the alchemist huddled over a Pelican patiently observing the making of the Philosopher’s Stone. Fuller describes what I call the “Rorscach Effect” when he notes a:
common thread that runs through the formal and informal comments that people make about the book is that it is quite thin in their own field of expertise, but truly enlightening in some other field, one in which they have had an interest for a long time, but could not locate a suitable point of scholarly intersection. We might say, then, roughly speaking, that Structure has a philosopher’s sense of sociology, a historian’s sense of philosophy, and a sociologist’s sense of history. A text with these characteristics is assured a good reception just as long as the practitioners of the different disciplines continue talking only to their own colleagues and not to those of the field which Kuhn supposedly represents so well for them. At that point, the day when (if!) inquiry despecializes, the attraction of Kuhn will fade. (Fuller 1992, 174-175)
2.101 Until that day, however, the aesthetic success of Structure is assured. Kuhn achieves “what Joseph Campbell calls the moment of “aesthetic arrest,” the aesthetic attitude” (Henderson, 1984, 49). The connection between Kuhn’s psychological and aesthetic gestalts highlights what Henderson concludes about the relationship of an aesthetic:
affinity with a devotion to science which we know is one of the most sustaining aspects of any culture in maintaining a high degree of patient observation of the phenomena of nature, promoting mankind’s consciousness of its place in the world. Natural science is essentially dependent upon that type of observation by which the pure aesthetic experience is stabilized in an attitude from which fresh discoveries can be made. (Henderson 1984, 49)
2.102 It should be noted, however, in Henderson’s investigation of the four primary cultural attitudes: social, religious, aesthetic and philosophical, he excludes a ‘scientific attitude’:
I do recognize, however, that there is something unique in any evolved scientific attitude, which is neither philosophic nor aesthetic but only itself, and it is precisely this sense of uniqueness that we also find in the psychological attitude which animates the heuristic method of our present study. It may be that this method will reveal not only the existence of a psychological attitude but that of a scientific attitude of which the psychological is a part. But certainly, because of their so very recent appearance in history, we cannot claim for science or psychology the same epistemological authenticity that we can demonstrate in the four basic cultural attitudes as they originated and grew out of history into their contemporary forms. (Henderson 1984, 77)
2.103 The ‘newness’ and fragility of an incipient ‘scientific attitude’ is capture in Kuhn’s words:
Just how special that community must be if science is to survive and grow may be indicated by the very tenuousness of humanity’s hold on the scientific enterprise. Every civilization of which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws, and so on. In many cases those facets of civilization have been as developed as our own. But only the civilizations that descend from Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the most rudimentary science. The bulk of scientific knowledge is a product of Europe in the last four centuries. No other place and time has supported the very special communities from which scientific productivity comes. (1962, 167-168)
2.104 While the main 1962 text is gestalt in nature by the 1990 article “Road since Structure”, Kuhn seems to have adopted cognitive psychology in which ‘cognitive evolution’ plays the central role (1990, 11). Cognitive psychology is a materialist psychology in which the structures of the brain that are objects of observation. It is non-teleological, in keeping with Kuhn’s views of evolution and of normal science. This ‘conversion’ of Kuhn from gestalt to cognitive psychology is matched by his shift from a history of science perspective in the main 1962 text to a sociology of science in the 1969 Postscript.
2.105 One school of psychology not applied by Kuhn is, alternatively, known as analytic, complex, depth or Jungian psychology. This school provides the foundation for The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®, one of, if not the most, widely used psychological testing instrument in the world today. In short, the Jungian approach to knowledge is a binary, tri-directional, four-fold functional model of the human psyche (Fig. 4 - A Complex Psychology View of The Human Psyche) fueled by the compensatory flow of libido or psychic energy. There are five distinct features to the model:
a) Conscious/Unconscious (composed of distinct ‘complexes’ or ‘archetypes’ including the ‘ego’);
b) Introvert/Extrovert/Centrovert (direction of attention)
c) Intellect, Intuition, Emotion & Sensation (ways of knowing);
d) Individuation (teleological objective); and,
e) Compensation (flow of libido or psychic energy).
A Complex Psychology View of The Human Psyche
2.106 With the notable exception of teleological individuation, the Jungian model offers a number of ‘scholarly intersections’ to Structure. Extraordinary science depends on ‘intuition’ which Kuhn claims may never be understood (1962, 88-89). He relies on emotion in the guise of aesthetics which, in Jungian psychology, has been explored and striking ‘exemplars’ (1969, 187) or archetypes found. Their application to physics and the other natural sciences has been demonstrated explicitly by Card (Card, 1996) and implicitly in Holton’s analysis of ‘themata’ in scientific thought (Holton 1975). As for sensation, the Jungian model admits it as an equal ‘way or faculty of knowing’. Sensation, however, tends in an individual to be subordinated, as is intuition, to one of the two (usually) dominant ‘judgmental’ faculties: intellect or emotion. It is the unique way, and pattern within a culture, that the individual ‘blends’ these faculties that defines the individuation process and, perhaps, different human cultures.
2.107 The clearest if somewhat ‘obscene’ (originally meaning ‘behind the scene’) connection drawn to date between the intellectual and sensation faculties is found in the 1999 novel Pilgrim by Timothy Findley (an avowed Jungian). When Jung (in inner conversation), very late at night, tries to tell his wife Emma about a new theory (shortly after she has learned he is having an affair):
“Emma, please. Just stay awake long enough to hear one last thing.”
“Yes, Carl Gustav. But tell it quickly.”
Jung sat forward. He had - but why? - an erection.
You get too excited, Carl Gustav. You get too excited about ideas.
I can’t - I can’t help it. Oh, dear. Pray God she can’t see me.
It wouldn’t matter if she did. She isn’t interested. Not now.
I hadn’t thought I wanted to - but there it is. Jesus. Look at it.
1 don’t need to look at it. I can feel it. What you suffer from - amongst other things - is nothing less than intellectual priapism. It’s that simple. Get an idea - get an erection.
Stop.
2.108 On the methodological level, application of The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® could provide a quantitative means of answering at least some of Kuhn’s concerns about who becomes a natural scientist. Who will be most productive in normal or extraordinary science? Is there a balance or dynamic between the different types in science, Big and small? Furthermore, Kuhn himself seems sensitive to the ‘cultural matrix’ of a paradigm:
As a result of the paradigm-embodied experience of the race, the culture, and, finally, the profession, the world of the scientist has come to be populated with planets and pendulums, condensers and compound ores, and other such bodies besides. Compared with these objects of perception, both meter stick readings and retinal imprints are elaborate constructs to which experience has direct access only when the scientist, for the special purposes of his research, arranges that one or the other should do so.” (1962, 128)
2.109 However, just as Kuhn is concerned about preserving normal science from ‘reason for gain’, James Hillman is concerned about Jungian psychology. In his fascinating 1980 monograph: Egalitarian Typologies versus The Perception of the Unique, he explores another facet of gestalt – faces. He notes how applying Jung’s typology, e.g., The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® is in fact alien to the fundamental nature of depth psychology – the unique individual and the individuation process.
The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
November 2002