Preamble
This is the next and final instalment of the general Wisdom vs Science thread that has been running since I documented last year’s ISSS workshop. It contains first level general agreement & immediate corollaries. I say final instalment, because if this truly reflects our general agreement, then any new threads will involve new topics that are specific next-level details in their own right.
We’re talking here within relatively sophisticated groups – concerned with systems & complexity, sciences, philosophies and management expertise & experiences, in contrast with our real target audience: Leaders who can effect desired global changes, and their public constituencies.
Agreement
We’ve ended up discussing the two words Science and Wisdom for short-hand, but let’s not forget these are standing in for a long list of different words about Explicit and Implicit forms of knowledge and processes. Fortunately, we’ve ended-up with a general (and obvious) agreement at a very basic level:
“Whatever the definitive properties, differences and relations between (so-called) Science and Wisdom, they are distinct things.”
That is, aka in my original terms, “There’s a #GoodFence between them”. A distinction we shouldn’t simply ignore or lose sight of, whatever our future intent & aspirations, tactical & strategic.
Corollaries
And there are corollaries of this simple agreed statement. As systems (thinking and doing) people:
We are interested in both, we value both.
We recognise many relations and overlaps between the two, so neither is independent of the other, and neither is simply a sub-set or super-set of the other. Our knowledge of the world is the complex combination of both.
And we therefore need to be careful if we use the language of one, that we are not accidentally dismissing or overlooking the other. We need inclusive language.
This was very explicitly my immediate workshop / presentation aim, based on just a couple of years of ISSS presentations and conversations (on top of 50+ years of wider experience and research). That we don’t let the language of one become conversation killers of the other (*1).
Conclusion
THE END. That would be “mission accomplished” as far as my original workshop intent. As a sophisticated group, with the above understandings in mind, our ongoing and future dialogues will all help evolve better models and processes to achieve our combined aims?
One thing we clearly need next, beyond the general agreement above, is next level detail, better, more definitive descriptions and understandings of those properties, differences and relations between the Science / Explicit and the Wisdom / Implicit knowledge of and processes in the world(*2).
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Notes:
(*1) At one point I also unfortunately introduced the language of “camps” either side of that #GoodFence. For a sophisticated group as ourselves, this is clearly not a real division, not a dichotomy. We do actually understand and generally appreciate both. But, there has been a history of science vs post-modernism and science vs ideologies “wars”, which can remain history within our sophisticated groups, yet remain relevant in responses to the language we choose externally. Conversely, outside in our target audience, there is a very strong cultural expectation for argument and justification based on the explicit even when argued rhetorically and politically. Worse still, a significant number of those whose explicit focus is the science exhibit a strong and “scientistic” tendency against anything that doesn’t meet their (objective, logical, repeatable, quantifiable) scientific standards.
(*2) This is “all our projects” and involves every sphere of management, organisation, process, procedures, methods, models, frameworks, meta-models, sciences and philosophies, including ontology, epistemology, ethics and even metaphysics. My own focus on elaboration are (a) an architectural, perspective, about models, meta-models, frameworks that represent (b) an epistemology of that combined knowledge about the world that guide our actions in the world. Since that combined knowledge is more than physical science, a metaphysics is inescapable. (Further elaboration here is more than one thread of correspondence, for me it’s my whole research and writing project(s). This is why my original workshop aim was just one very small point of general linguistic agreement, but I’m obviously happy to respond to any specific queries about the epistemological architecture I have in mind, given that agreement. And indeed, I will anyway pick-up separate threads prompted by responses so far – they are grist to my project for which I am grateful.)
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