Woermann and Cilliers posit four mechanisms that reinforce and promote the critical attitude: provisionality, followed by transgressivity, irony, and imagination. To my mind, mechanism is an unfortunate term, as none of the four seem mechanical; rather, I would call them heuristics, having more to do with experimentation in contact with the real, as Deleuze and Guattari say it, than with a device…
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Loading...Well, I intended to write a practical view of the rhizome in my last post, but I basically ended up giving my take on the place of the rhizome metaphor in the general development of Western thought over the past few centuries.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...In their article Complexity and transdisciplinarity – Discontinuity, levels of Reality and the Hidden Third (2012, Futures 44, 711–718), Paul Cilliers and Basarab Nicolescu discuss the implications of emergence for boundaries. They say that:
The properties of a complex system are not confined to the properties of the individual components in isolation.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...Next, I want to work through an article by Paul Cilliers called Knowledge, limits and boundaries (2005, Futures, 37, 605–613). Prof. Cilliers is mostly exploring the concept of knowledge, but he makes some observations about how knowledge is entangled with boundaries and limits that can help us understand better the problematic nature of data security.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...As my own views about education continue to emerge, I understand them best within the context of the conversation about complexity—complexity as a large, transdisciplinary conversation that has been emerging for centuries, but that was made unavoidable by the emergence of relativity and quantum physics at the beginning of the 20th century.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...In my last post, I quoted Marion Brady’s observations about the transdisciplinary nature of thought and learning, what he calls Theory R: “Theory R requires students to make connections, to perceive relationships, and to synthesize ideas. It sends students searching the far corners of their minds without regard for the artificial, arbitrary boundaries imposed by academic disciplines.”…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...So I’ve distinguished the Real from Reality and accepted that most of the Real is hidden, probably forever and not just from me but from my entire species, both because we physically cannot encounter it all and because, even if we could, we can’t hold it all.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...A fourth concept that Morin discusses in The Reform of Thought is the system, or organization. If I understand Morin correctly, then he means by system any self-organizing entity that pulls itself together in such a manner that allows it to function as an entity and that provides the organized substrate for the emergence of properties and capabilities not necessarily inherent in the individual …
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...I’ve been thinking of boundaries as included middles, or zones of engagement, which transcend the separation of entities into discrete units required by the classical logic of the excluded middle—A is A, A is not non-A, and there is no entity T which is both A and non-A.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...A second characteristic to emerge from thinking of boundaries as included middles is circular causality, or the feedback loop. In The Reform of Thought (2008), Morin begins his explanation of circular causality by quoting Pascal: “I hold knowing the whole to be impossible if I do not know the parts nor can I know the parts if I do not know the whole.”…
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