Had a couple of interesting exchanges with Jean Boulton after my previous post tying-up a few loose-ends around my ongoing writing.
Preamble
Just one point I want to address here.
Part of the “problem with the problem” we’re dealing with – a meta-problem – is that we’re talking about “life, the universe and everything” and therefore “talking about everything all at once”. It takes effort and good-faith to avoid such dialogue seriously straining and breaking the limits of language, and it makes destructive-critique and disagreement much easier than creative-agreement – a topic in its own right for my writing project(s).
Also, talking about literally everything, we’re also talking about all types (classes, categories, forms) of everything at several levels of abstraction, every-meta-thing(s) as well as every-particular-thing(s).
And, once we’ve accepted science isn’t everything, then the ground we stand on, our chosen metaphysics, cannot simply be physical science. Metaphysics isn’t very fashionable in the 21st C, but these kinds of meta-talking about everything in the abstract are the bread-and-butter of philosophy.
Whatever ground we stand on and however explicitly we expose our metaphysics, we are creating our ontology, a meta-model of that everything, all those things and meta-things that may exist in the world and all their properties, processes and relations, and an epistemology of all that we can know about this “everything”, what everything means and thus every other branch of philosophy too. We’re talking about everything on many levels & dimensions.
(In my own metaphysics, my epistemology and my ontology are so closely tied that I’ve been calling it an epistemological-ontology … but I don’t want to talk here about that meta-model of everything – everything all at once.)
So, as I say I just want to mention one point here:
The Word “Systems”
In the previous post I already alluded to the fact that Seddon was limiting himself to the complication of particular systems. Named systems – human and technology – that were part of particular organisations and operations.
Boulton’s focus (like mine) is complexity – Embracing Complexity / The Dao of Complexity – and her interest (like mine) is well beyond the organisational management perspective of that previous dialogue. But she used the word “system” in this phrase: “when things don’t stabilise into so-called systems as when they do, and what makes them unravel”. She too is using system in the particular – so-called, things, they, them.
For me, as I’ve expressed many times but this is my first exchange with Boulton, systems is actually “Systems Thinking (and Doing)” as a response to real-world complexity. I’m using systems at the meta (as well as the particular) levels, simply viewing that “everything” in terms of their functional ontology. Seeing everything in the world in terms of their dynamic relations with other part & whole & eco-system things at any level on any dimension. A choice of how to view the (whole) world. Part of our metaphysical choice.
For me Systems is simply a response to Complexity, a useful way of viewing it all in all its complexity, not an alternate competing view.
In this systems view all such systems are always dynamic, patterns in flux on any & all levels & dimensions, evolving, and like everything else in the natural world, some such particular systems hang-around – emerge, stabilise, some by human choice, some by the active processes of life – reify-long-enough to be usefully given a name – speciation by any other name. But they’re all viewable as systems, even if they don’t.
Complexity camp or Systems camp, we can all use both words without pitting one against the other?
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