Alan Rayner’s Inclusional Science

I’ve been communcating with Alan Rayner on and off the Friends of Wisdom e-mail discussion group. I find we have a common understanding on many issues, and Alan is a particularly poetic writer, so a joy to read.

Recently he shared copies of his paper “Inlcusional Science – From Artefact to Natural Creativity” (no link available yet) Here some selected quotes that intersect with my interests here …

My Catch-22 of breaking the “self-fulfilling” objective loop …

Egged on all the more by research funding agencies, assessment exercises and pressures to publish or perish, scientific enquiry becomes ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. We set out to concoct and test ‘falsifiable’ and thereby axiomatic hypotheses, with minds so closed off from indefinable possibilities that we can and do ignore observations that ‘don’t fit’ with our presuppositions. Meanwhile we pay little or no attention to where and how these hypotheses and presuppositions arise in the first place.

My “definition is death” – “careful with that razor, Occam” theme … and my “give excluded middles a chance” mantra …

In my experience, to call for definitions to be relaxed in a culture that is addicted to definition is to come into close encounter with stony ground, if not something like the fury of a toddler threatened with separation from its favourite toy or security blanket ! … principal among objectivity’s objections to inclusionality is that the razed down simplicity that comes from defining things will ‘get lost’. Personally, I rather wish that it would ! But, seriously, this objection illustrates the addictive, all or none quality of false dichotomy: either we have total definition or no definition. Definition is something we must have if we are not to get totally lost in a sea of troubles. We exclude between two stools the dynamic ‘middle ground’ synthesis of ‘neither entirely one nor the other’ …

My views on the divisive distraction of unneccesarily hyper-objective distinctions …

By excluding that which it defines itself not to be, objective science may not only alienate itself from the public whose appreciation, understanding and money it craves, but may also greatly diminish its own opportunities for creative evolution and correspondence with other human endeavours. Such exclusion is evident in the ‘Two Culture’ split between ‘Art’ and ‘Science’ notoriously brought to light by C.P. Snow (1959, 1963; see also Petroski, 2005), and the increasingly cantankerous collision between Darwinian evolutionary science and religious ‘Creationism’ or ‘Intelligent Design’ theory. In a non-linear inclusional perspective, there is no need for this split and the nastiness it engenders: the split is an artefact of definitive logic.

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