To everything there is a season,
A time for every purpose under heaven:
A time for building castles in the stratosphere,
A time to mind the anti-gravs that keep us here.
Re: Systems Science • Rob Young
Cf: Conceptual Barriers to Creating Integrative Universities
- RY:
- The aspiration to a form of knowledge ‘wisdom’ resonated with me, and, not withstanding the ‘university’ context (connotative?) the article was couched in, every time I read the word ‘university’, I mentally substituted it with ‘systems movement’ and the resonance was there.
Dear Rob,
Thanks for your comments and questions. They took me back to the decade before the turn of the millennium when there was a general trend of thought to embrace chaos and complexity, seeking the order and simplicity on the other side. (Oliver Wendell Holmes, but it appears in doubt whether Sr. or Jr.)
One thing I’ve learned in the mean time is just how poorly grounded and maintained are many of the abstract concepts and theories we need for grappling with the complexities of communication, computation, experimental information, and scientific inquiry. So I’ve been doing what I can to reinforce the concrete bases and stabilize the working platforms of what otherwise tend to become empty à priori haunts.
I’ll have to be getting back to that. For now I’ll just link to a few readings your remarks brought to mind. The “Conceptual Barriers” paper from 2001 is the journal upgrade of a conference presentation from 1999, “Organizations of Learning or Learning Organizations : The Challenge of Creating Integrative Universities for the Next Century”.
Your reflex of jumping from universities to systems in general is very much on the mark. Our work was motivated in large part by the movement toward Learning Organizations, that is, organizations able to apply organizational research to their own organizational development. To put a fine point on it, all we are saying is, “Shouldn’t a University, as an Organization of Learning, also be a Learning Organization?”
Well, I had a lot more to relate at this point, but our dishwasher just went on the fritz, so I’ll leave it for now with a few links to Susan’s earlier work along these lines and try to get back to it later …
- Scott, David K., and Awbrey, Susan M. (1993), “Transforming Scholarship”, Change : The Magazine of Higher Learning, 25(4), 38–43. Online (1) (2).
- Papers by Susan Awbrey and David Scott • University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Reference
- Awbrey, S.M., and Awbrey, J.L. (2001), “Conceptual Barriers to Creating Integrative Universities”, Organization : The Interdisciplinary Journal of Organization, Theory, and Society 8(2), Sage Publications, London, UK, pp. 269–284. Abstract. Online.
cc: Cybernetics • Ontolog Forum • Peirce List • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
The abstract consideration of how 
and 
use this set of signs leads to the contemplation of a pair of triadic relations, the sign relations 
and 
reflecting the differential use of these signs by 
respectively.
consists of eight triples of the form 
where the object 
belongs to the object domain 
the sign 
belongs to the sign domain 
the interpretant sign 
belongs to the interpretant domain 
and where it happens in this case that 
The union 
is often referred to as the syntactic domain, but in this case 
![\begin{array}{ccc} L_\mathrm{A}, L_\mathrm{B} & \subseteq & O \times S \times I \\[8pt] O & = & \{ \mathrm{A}, \mathrm{B} \} \\[8pt] S & = & \{ \, {}^{\backprime\backprime} \mathrm{A} {}^{\prime\prime}, \, {}^{\backprime\backprime} \mathrm{B} {}^{\prime\prime}, \, {}^{\backprime\backprime} \mathrm{i} {}^{\prime\prime}, \, {}^{\backprime\backprime} \mathrm{u} {}^{\prime\prime} \, \} \\[8pt] I & = & \{ \, {}^{\backprime\backprime} \mathrm{A} {}^{\prime\prime}, \, {}^{\backprime\backprime} \mathrm{B} {}^{\prime\prime}, \, {}^{\backprime\backprime} \mathrm{i} {}^{\prime\prime}, \, {}^{\backprime\backprime} \mathrm{u} {}^{\prime\prime} \, \} \end{array}](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cbegin%7Barray%7D%7Bccc%7D++L_%5Cmathrm%7BA%7D%2C+L_%5Cmathrm%7BB%7D+%26+%5Csubseteq+%26+O+%5Ctimes+S+%5Ctimes+I++%5C%5C%5B8pt%5D++O+%26+%3D+%26+%5C%7B+%5Cmathrm%7BA%7D%2C+%5Cmathrm%7BB%7D+%5C%7D++%5C%5C%5B8pt%5D++S+%26+%3D+%26+%5C%7B+%5C%2C+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cbackprime%5Cbackprime%7D+%5Cmathrm%7BA%7D+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cprime%5Cprime%7D%2C+%5C%2C+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cbackprime%5Cbackprime%7D+%5Cmathrm%7BB%7D+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cprime%5Cprime%7D%2C+%5C%2C+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cbackprime%5Cbackprime%7D+%5Cmathrm%7Bi%7D+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cprime%5Cprime%7D%2C+%5C%2C+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cbackprime%5Cbackprime%7D+%5Cmathrm%7Bu%7D+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cprime%5Cprime%7D+%5C%2C+%5C%7D++%5C%5C%5B8pt%5D++I+%26+%3D+%26+%5C%7B+%5C%2C+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cbackprime%5Cbackprime%7D+%5Cmathrm%7BA%7D+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cprime%5Cprime%7D%2C+%5C%2C+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cbackprime%5Cbackprime%7D+%5Cmathrm%7BB%7D+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cprime%5Cprime%7D%2C+%5C%2C+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cbackprime%5Cbackprime%7D+%5Cmathrm%7Bi%7D+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cprime%5Cprime%7D%2C+%5C%2C+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cbackprime%5Cbackprime%7D+%5Cmathrm%7Bu%7D+%7B%7D%5E%7B%5Cprime%5Cprime%7D+%5C%2C+%5C%7D++%5Cend%7Barray%7D&bg=ffffff&fg=000000&s=0&c=20201002)
in 
to mean the same thing 
to mean, namely, 
in 
to mean, namely, 
and 
each of which is a subset of the same cartesian product 
The structures of 
can be described in the following way.
is isomorphic to the 
so 
or the boolean cube 
is equivalent to addition modulo 2, where 
acts in the usual manner but 
In its logical interpretation, the plus sign can be used to indicate either the boolean operation of 
” (CP 2.318, unfortunately there is a hole in my PDF of CP right after and I [left] my paper edition at the library of my university, inaccessible at the moment).
Inquiry Into Inquiry 