Preamble
This is the next instalment of my #MoreThanScience dialogue with the ISSS people.
I made a passing reference to a one-to-one dialogue with Gary Smith in this recent interlude, suggesting we were in a good place. The day after I posted that Janet Singer responded to my previous email which embodied this post from a couple of weeks earlier. In that same period between those two exchanges, the intermittent dialogue with Dave Snowden – on the same topic – also included an exchange with Dave (post and comments). Even my most recent post on more general reading mentioned where this #MoreThanScience issue was a blockage to my wider agenda.
I’m focussed on this one very small – linguistic technicality – point for now, not because it represents the object of my work, or any inherent or general pedantry – indeed vagueness is a virtue – but because not having some basic shared understanding here undermines the value of further dialogue about systems knowledge generally. And indeed Yiannis Laouris also shared more excellent contributions to that wider dialogue, to add to other previous materials already captured from him, Janet, Jessie and Gary – which I am just itching to develop and talk about.
And, let’s not forget from an ISSS perspective, all of this is follow-up to my workshop at DC 2024. It’s all connected and I owe some responses.
(Note – further followed-up at the ISSS2025 conference in Birmingham.)
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The Content – Small and Simple?
My topic is for the moment, as I say, this linguistic technicality. In my last post on this, I reduced the whole of the preceding dialogue to 4 simple statements the last of which was:
… this simple question is the point of the workshop & posts:
“IS WISDOM MORE THAN SCIENCE OR ISN’T IT?“
(And if it is, shouldn’t we be more careful in how we use those two words, Science and Wisdom?)
The objection – to the question – is that I called it simple, but in reality it’s not. The definitions and understandings of science and wisdom, and how well these can be captured in symbolic language anyway, are massively complex questions. The relations & similarities, dependencies & differences between Science and Wisdom are therefore another order more complex still. Sure, tell me about it 🙂 #ItsComplicated
My point, again, is that despite that undoubted complexity and uncertainty on so many levels, it is still a simple question with a simple – even a given – answer.
My answer is clearly “Yes” (Wisdom IS #MoreThanScience). And in fact the more complex those other aspects, the clearer and simpler the question and answer are.
I embarked on an ontological / taxonomic exercise, in symbolic (logical and graphical) language – in some draft visual / dynamic slides, hierarchical, heterarchical, holarchical systems network or set-theory diagramming based on some I’d prepared and used in earlier lives – remember this used to be my day job before I saw the error of our ways 😉 But, do we really want to go there just now? Let’s just stick to the natural language of human interactions for a while longer.
The Question Again
Let’s rephrase my question negatively and see if the point is clearer:
Is there any conceivable world – a whole world over all evolved times and domains – in which we can (ever, usefully or truthfully) say:
Wisdom <is identical with> Science ?
Surely not, “No”? Whatever their complexities of definitions & understandings, overlaps & relations in good & bad examples of linguistic & physical process embodiments, can the answer ever be “Yes”?
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And again:
Obviously it’s not simple to agree a comprehensively definitive definition of “science”. Ditto “wisdom”. Both are complex on many dimensions.
But the simple logical question remains simple.
Each IS more than / different from the other on at least one dimension?
It’s about broad and narrow, identity and definitions. (The image above.)
Identity is about all defining features that make a thing unique. (In a human political context we can choose – as a matter of social agreement on policy priorities – which aspect(s) / feature(s) to base our chosen identity on.)
Definition is about any number of – one or more – distinguishing features that make a thing distinct from another adjacent thing. Every such feature is part of an exhaustive – pedantic – ontology, but in natural language it’s simply those features we use to distinguish use of one word from another.
Here the words we’re choosing between are “Science” and “AnotherWord”. (NotScience, OtherThanScience, MoreThanScience, Wisdom, intuition, inspiration, … whatever, in the context of knowledge on which we plan to base our decision-making.)
Despite the logically symmetry in the relationship between science and wisdom above – each is more than the other on at least one dimension – I nevertheless prefer #MoreThanScience because it would be unwise not to treat a piece of good science as good knowledge for decision-making purposes, (though we may for rhetorical purposes).
For me “wisdom” is just a word for that which is useful epistemically – as decision-making knowledge – but which is in addition to the available scientific knowledge or “science”.
Do not pass go.
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