David Ing: "How does #SystemsThinking relate to #Pragmatism? …" - Qoto Mastodon

David Ing @daviding@qoto.org

How does #SystemsThinking relate to #Pragmatism? Within #PhilosophyOfScience, #CWestChurchman and #RussellLAckoff continued the #experimentalism of #EdgarASinger to put nonrelativistic pragmatism at the core of systems thinking in an entanglement of facts and values.

https://coevolving.com/blogs/index.php/archive/nonrelativistic-pragmatism-and-systems-thinking/

(1) Knowing facts presupooses knowing values. (2) Knowing values presupposes knowing facts. (3) Knowing facts presupposes knowing theories. (4) Knowing theories presupposes knowing facts. Hilary Putnam (2015) CC-BY David Ing (2023)

July 9, 2023 at 10:22 PM · · · ·

Contingently i-RON-ick @ironick17@mastodon.online

@daviding
Wonderful intellectual history of systems thinking pragmatic roots. These two views of freedom seem deeply resonant:

(4) Freedom: the recreative and aesthetic ideal. This ideal recognizes as fundamental to mankind the necessity for regeneration: a dissatisfaction with what has been accomplished, and a strong intention for new and as yet unattained ends. The ideal is one of perfect regeneration for every attained step. In a sense it is an ideal of freedom of man from attained goals, conservative aims, “peace of mind,” and the like.

“[T]he point of human life is ‘to make and understand an indefinite number of novel claims, frame an indefinite number of novel purposes, and so on, subjecting oneself to constraint by the norms implicit in a vocabulary [which] at the same time confers unparalleled positive freedom—that is, freedom to do things one could not only not do before, but could not even want to do’ (Rorty quoting Robert Brandom).”

Framed in terms of Rorty’s view of pragmatism as a philosophy of hope, one may more fruitfully say the point of humanity is to send hope in new directions: everchanging hope springs eternal in the human breast, if you will.

New paradigms, new cultural norms, new political structures, etc., ramify hopes in new directions. The goal is not merely to imagine things we’ve never imagined before, or know things we’ve never known before, but to hope for things we’ve never hoped for before.

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