Contextual dyadic thinking is proposed by Keekok Lee in her 2017 The Philosophical Foundations of Classical Chinese Medicine. This is a way of appreciating Chinese implicit logic, as an alternative to dualistic thinking that has developed over centuries in Western philosophy.
Chapter 9: Modes of Thinking
Chinese philosophy did/does not appear to have a branch designated “Logic” in the way that such a subject exists in Western philosophy as formal logic. [1]
[1] This could be regarded as controversial, but for a reason which will soon become obvious, this author chooses to follow Kurtz, 2011 which gives a detailed discussion of the search among Chinese scholars during the last hundred years or so for fragments of texts which could be used to support the claim that Chinese philosophy or must have developed logic in the European understanding of that term as formal logic. The operative phrase is…
In which systems would you like to see changes occur?
Systems Changes is a collaborative open research program, initiated from Toronto, Canada. A call for participation was launched in January 2019 at the monthly Systems Thinking Ontario meeting. The web site was will evolve as contributions and knowledge are added.
The plurals in the program name are significant.
There are multiple systems simultaneously at play, not just a single system.
Changes include those within a field that individual and groups can influence, and those in an extended environment that are beyond our abilities.
The program is initially facilitated by David Ing. Collective learning is encouraged with the cooperation of Systems Changes program members.
In 1965 Sir Geoffrey Vickers issued a challenge to the community interested in the exploration of human systems. That challenge was one of embracing the moral importance of responsibility; more to the point, the urgent need to develop an ethic of Systems Thought. Since that time Systems Thought has cautiously engaged the ethical question. It has done so through questioning the methodological purity of any particular inquiry; it has done so through critically engaging the boundary of any particular system and it has done so in the epistemological sense. That being said it has not confronted in a heroic sense the fundamental ground of the ethical question: ‘what is to be done’.
This paper demonstrates that Neo-pragmatism is the most appropriate approach to a decision making process within the context of Systems Thinking expressly because both Systems Thinking and Neo-pragmatism recognize the contingent nature of the phenomenal world and the modeling nature of both Systems Thought and Neo-pragmatism. Finally the implications of social transformation of Neo-pragmatism as the appropriate decision making process for Systems Thinking is discussed.
John Vodonick received his Juris Doctor degree (cum laude) from the Pepperdine University School of Law, as M.T.S. from the Pacific School of Religion and his Ph.D. from Saybrook University, School of Organizational Systems. Doctor Vodonick lives in Northern California and teaches, writes and consults on matters of organizational ethics, structure and change management.
This paper primarily argues that Epidemiology is Ecosystem Science. It will not only explore this notion in detail but will also relate it to the argument that Classical Chinese Medicine was/is Ecosystem Science. Ecosystem Science (as instantiated by Epidemiology) and Ecosystem Science (as instantiated by Classical Chinese Medicine) share these characteristics: (a) they do not subscribe to the monogenic conception of disease; (b) they involve multi variables; (c) the model of causality presupposed is multi-factorial as well as non-linear.
Keywords
Ecosystem science Epidemiology Classical chinese medicine Multifactorial causation Non-linear causality
1 Introduction
This contribution explores the thesis that Epidemiology should be considered as Ecosystem Science; it does this through an examination of the following sub-themes.
1.
Biomedicine exhibits two paradigms of explaining disease. The monogenic conception of disease, which is the dominant paradigm, embodies the standards and criteria of scientificity for Biomedicine. In contrast, Epidemiology is considered to be the Cinderella as its paradigm of explanation and scientificity is different and hence, held, at arm’s length, if not with outright suspicion.1
2.
The two paradigms differ ontologically and methodologically. The monogenic conception of disease upholds the thesis: one causal agent, one disease entity. It rests on thing-ontology. Its implied model of causality is Humean, monofactorial and linear (the causal arrow is unidirectional, from cause to effect only). On the other hand, Epidemiology understands disease not so much as a disease entity but more as a pattern of interrelated events which may lead to a pattern of ill-health in the population. It rests on process-ontology. Its model of causality is non-Humean, multi-factorial and non-linear (the relationships are synergistic, reciprocal, with feedback loops).2
3.
While the monogenic conception of disease is rooted in the Gold Standard of the Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) and of late its related Gold Standard of Evidence-based Medicine (EBM), Epidemiology proceeds more in the manner of Ecology as a field science. Ecology explicitly studies ecosystems: the biotic and abiotic components which make up a particular ecosystem, the relationships between these with the ecosystem as a Whole, not to mention with other ecosystems. This kind of science is necessarily non-Reductionist as the Whole in terms of its causal inter- as well as intra-relationships are reciprocal in character; this complicated network of causal relations means that properties emerge from the Whole which cannot be predicted by simply adding up the contribution of each of the component parts of the Whole. Epidemiology is, hence, Ecosystem Science.3 It will also be shown that Ecosystem Science/Thinking itself may be considered as a variant of Systems Thinking.
4.
If one cares to do some comparative history of science, the model of Ecosystem Science/Thinking and Systems Theory/Thinking can be said to be found in Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM for short, whose origin may be traced back to more than two and a half thousand or more years): CCM is a science which is Wholist4 in orientation, resting on process-ontology (rather than thing-ontology) and whose causal model is multi-factorial, non-linear and reciprocal, and with feedback loops.5
5.
In a very brief extension of the theme at 4, this contribution looks at how CCM perceived/perceives epidemics and whether it had/has any grasp of what today we call Epidemiology. The conclusion is positive, although to mark the differences in spite of the similarities between CCM and modern Epidemiological thinking, the CCM discipline will occur in italicised form, namely, Epidemiology.
The thick broken lines of the circle and their arrows stand for the mutually engendering cycle while the thinner unbroken lines and their arrows inside the circle stand for the mutually constraining cycle
6 Chinese Epidemiological thinking is necessarily ecosystem thinking
John Thackara’s phrase, the metabolic rift, is growing with me. We don’t have any feeling for the ecosystem that supports us. We are no longer part of it in important ways. We do lots of things that result in damage that we may not even see until it is too late. In that Maturana sense of any organism being in contact with its environment — we are not — we are increasingly separated by a metabolic rift.
Metabolic because this is about the most basic and fundamental level of life processes. About breathing, about nourishment, about a zillion symbiotic creatures that we depend on in ways more complex than we will ever understand.
And rift, well, because riven — cracked, split, broken. The metabolic rift is at least economic, cultural, educational, medical, social, legal, colonial, practical, emotional, and mental.[1]
Any life-form, from the simplest virus to complex interconnected forests to social insects to intelligent mammals, has behaviour that is adaptive. Partly, it stabilises its environment the way it needs to be and partly, it adapts to changing circumstances that cannot be stabilised. This is a many-to-many symmathesy[2] as described by Nora Bateson. It cannot be otherwise. Creatures can and do fail to stay in contact with their environment and whole species and families of species go out of existence. Sometimes there are waves of rapid change (“extinction events”) like the one we are part of now.[3]
The metabolic rift says we have lost this ability. We do not know how to use our supposedly superior intelligence to stay in touch with our environment. In fact, there is a widespread cultural belief that we can manage our environment for our own narrow benefit. We can’t: that is it doesn’t work at all when we try to.[4]
History and economics
David Graeber says that the nature of neoliberalism is this: when faced with a choice between the political and the economic, it always chooses the political. It is far more important (to neoliberalism) to give the impression that it is successful, even triumphant, than it is to make the economy actually work better.
If we take a tolerably intelligent farming system like a managed rapid rotation of different sorts of animals and other stock, it is about eight to ten times more productive than the surrounding conventional agriculture. But we are told that only mechanised agriculture and monocultures are economically viable. Here is the metabolic rift at the economic level. The neoliberalism of Monsanto and government agriculture departments insists on huge scale mechanisation and depopulation of the land which produces highly inferior foodstuffs.
The immediate history of the interaction of culture, social systems, and food production centres around labour-intensive modes of food production. Instead of assuming that labour-intensive is a problem, we can ask the other question. In Miraculous Abundance by Perrine and Charles Herve-Gruyer, there are details of a properly controlled experiment to see how many people 1000 square metres of land in Normandy can support. If the health and material needs of a family of four can be met from a tiny patch of land, what is the problem actually? And if the food produced is so good that chefs come from Paris and pay premium prices, why would anyone grow monocultures and use a combine harvester? Why?
In England, prior to George III and his Enclosure Act of 1773, most land was common land, where local people had rights to various sorts of access.[5]This system encouraged crop rotation and grazing by many species of animals and birds. In practice, it maintained the soil and the fertility of the soil. The so called British Agricultural Revolution, much celebrated by the landed gentry, raised the productivity of farms but in a way that has proved not to be sustainable. I can remember from my school days that we were supposed to be impressed by Jethro Tull and his Horse-hoeing Husbandry, but of course tilling was one of the things that eventually destroyed the soil.
The mucous membrane of the land
We have spoken before about the membrane that lines our human insides and of the mucous film that works with it. By analogy, Didi Pershouse speaks of the mucous membrane of the land, a surface layer of organic glue that holds the soil together and allows it to develop its healthy sponge-like structure. The glue comes from many soil organisms but perhaps especially from the exudates of fungi. Most of these organisms are not visible to the naked eye, but they depend on a complex cycle where plants make sugars and supply them to mycorrhizal fungi and surface plant litter supports saprophytic fungi.
Human life literally depends on this mucous membrane of the land that we cannot see and which we usually ignore and destroy. And we don’t want to know. It is the ploughing and fertilising and use of a range of biocides (weedkiller, insecticide, fungicide, etc.) that wrecks this invisible life support system. Our modern world of droughts and floods and wildfires is literally and directly a result of this wanton destruction — it is not just that we wreck our food.
We used to have a human culture that grew up protecting the source of human life over the centuries because it was focused on stewardship and maintaining an intensive local food supply in all its diversity. The labour intensive nature of this system is not accidental nor incidental. Much land at the time was not in cultivation at all: there was a necessary density of production that maintained the land in good order.
The diversity is the key. As soon as you move to a single species of animals grazing, sheep for instance, they get parasites and the pasture needs more intervention. As soon as you move to a monoculture of plants in a given field, there will be insect problems and fungal problems that need intervention in order to protect the crop. But if you maintain the diversity, these problems occur less or not at all. Multiple species of animals and birds grazing perennial plants maintains the health of soil, plants, and animals.
I think this is a neoliberal agricultural system: move to monocultures because they are mechanisable and look clean and sterile. This seems to be the technocratic future: GPS controlled mega-machinery putting exactly the right amount of fertiliser on each part of the field, etc.[6] But it is a neoliberal lie: the way to intensive production that supports human health is in the opposite direction. It would be nice to think that agricultural production was about human health but it hasn’t been so for a long time. Even organic production is typically not sustainable.[7]
This exactly matches Graeber’s statement about economics: the political act of seemingly intensive agricultural production that throws people off the land is much more important than genuinely intensive production that provides employment and health. And this is not an anti-industrial rant or crusade, it is proper agricultural economics on a properly social basis.
Social history
The societies that organised themselves around common land and mutual systems of using and stewarding the land were themselves sustainable. In such societies there may have been hunger and hardship but no-one starved. The workhouse for the indolent, work-shy poor was an invention of enclosure and the destruction of the commons.
James Scott in his Seeing Like a State describes how a village in Tsarist Russia threw people into starvation simply by mapping the land. The mapping required that all land had an owner, and this threw into disarray the existing customs where people had rights to different uses of the land at different seasons. This is the clearest possible pursuit of political objectives ahead of systems of human and ecosystem health.
In general, there were complex systems of craft skills that supported a local economic system for a wide range of trades. This is not simply about agriculture in the narrow sense, but about the supply chain of related services and trades. The classic text is H.J.Massingham, Men of Earth, (1943!) that celebrates a world now largely lost to a different sort of economics, that as a side effect wrecks the soil and the ecosystem.
I am hypothesising that the ecosystemic nature of the local economy is required to match the ecosystemic nature of soil regeneration if they are to thrive. We cannot have a neoliberal political system regenerating soil ecosystems and we cannot have impoverished soil ecosystems supporting a vibrant local economy. If this is true, it would be a pivotal insight into the current climate crisis. Only both ecosystems thriving together is viable and sustainable.
Two more recent vignettes. There is a first people’s tribe somewhere in the mid-west (USA) that live on and manage a small forest reservation. They maintain the forest while extracting enough timber to support the whole tribe. There are people queuing up of course to tell them how to do it properly and make more money, but increasingly there are a different sort of people queuing up to study something that they have realised they don’t know how to do for themselves.
And I am reading, because I need to learn the basics, about perennial vegetables. I am an allotment gardener and I grow the vegetables we need. There are of course things like rhubarb and asparagus that can only be grown as lusty perennial plants. But our vegetable culture revolves around digging the soil and growing annuals in the brief summer months. There are ways to have a riotous mixture of plants improving each other’s environments and soil and supplying vegetables, without that annual cycle of thinking we know better!
Financial ecosystems
The Victorians in the UK, especially in the dynamic northern towns which were so enterprising in spirit, developing mutual self-help financial cultures and mechanisms that also mirror what we speak of here. The original Building Societies were just that: groups of people who came together in mutual organisations so that they had enough capital to build houses for each other. The original societies might have perhaps thirty members and disbanded again when everyone had built a house.
As with capital so with risk. There were, and actually still are, mutual insurance societies where the members jointly meet the losses of individual members. The major current example is the Strike Club which insures shipping containers and their contents as they are transported round the world. The interesting feature of such an enterprise is that it is seriously in the interest of each member, each shipping line, to limit the losses suffered by other members.[8] Because of that, they actively share information about risks, threats, and mitigation techniques.
Throughout Africa there are mutual savings clubs.[9] I worked with some Somalis and some Zimbabweans in London to see how these cultural institutions could be applied to their problems such as excessive credit card debt. In these clubs people contribute a weekly or monthly small amount and then the fund is applied, perhaps by a lottery or perhaps according to urgent need, to give the members access to sums of money they can otherwise never gather.
The metabolic rift
There is no future for mankind without bridging, healing, overcoming the metabolic rift. We need to live in a way that plays our role in the ecosystems of life that ARE the world, even though we have forgotten it. There are lots of places where we can see the damage caused by our forgetting, and the soil is perhaps the key one. We can see it locally in our hands when we use them and we can see it globally in terms of the billions of tons of soil that are lost each year. Remember that more weight of soil is lost than weight of crops that are grown.
It is perhaps another application of Conway’s Law that as we farm, so we reap! Our social organisations and our mental organisation are broken and blind and so we harvest a broken ecosystem in our soils and what we grow in them.
We wrote before about Robin Wall Kimmerer, herself from a first peoples tribe, teaching ecology in college in New York. All her students were keenly aware of the damage humans do to various ecosystems and to the whole planet. But when she asked them what the positive role that humans need to play in those ecosystems was, they were struck dumb. We really need to do better than dumb, in all its senses.
— —
[1] You’ll recognise some of these as dimensions of what Nora Bateson calls “warm data”
[2] For the uninitiated, symmathesy is a learning together, “an ongoing process of calibration within contexts of aggregate interrelational variables.”
[3] See point 4 of Scott Alexander’s essay, which posits that we may be playing brinkmanship with a tipping point of extinction, despite the countable extinctions.
[4] If you immediately thought of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, bravo! We’ll get back to that in a moment.
[5] Still in force today, though 223 years later, they passed the Countryside and Rights of Way Act
[6] Admittedly, I suspect that animals raised in computer-controlled environments have it better than the ones who are just jammed in on top of one another. I saw a Dutch documentary in which individual chickens were dosed when they seemed poorly, rather than whole-flock applications, and where cows walked themselves to the milking stations unaided, etc. But doing ‘better’ than conventional factory farms is a pretty low bar. Fun fact: tiny Netherlands is the #2 exporter of food to the world, after the USA.
[7] How could it be sustainable when the capitalist system demands that any product that attracts a premium price have its premium nature beaten out of it in the interests of scale and profit?
[8] Yes of course, it’s the Prisoner’s Dilemma all over again. But the players are in an iterated game, not fly-by-night one-shot operators.
[9] Excellent book on the variety and purposes of such clubs: Portfolios of the Poor
Your SysCoI co-host David Ing has a habit of coming out of left-field with well-researched and integrative blog items like this which are really just accessible, properly-research academy articles. Recommended!
Doing, not-doing; errors of commission, errors of omission
Should we do, or not-do? Russell Ackoff, over many years, wrote about (negative) potential consequences:
There are two possible types of decision-making mistakes, which are not equally easy to identify.
(1) Errors of commission: doing something that should not have been done.
(2) Errors of omission: not doing something that should have been done.
For example, acquiring a company that reduces a corporation’s overall performance is an error of commission, as is coming out with a product that fails to break even. Failure to acquire a company that could have been acquired and that would have increased the value of the corporation or failure to introduce a product that would have been very profitable is an error of omission [Ackoff 1994, pp. 3-4].
Ackoff has always been great with turns of phrases such as these. Some deeper reading evokes three ideas that may be worth further exploration:
1. Doing or not-doing may or may not invoke learning.
2. Doing or not-doing invokes implicit orientations on time.
3. Doing or not-doing raises question of (i) changes via systems of willful action, and/or (ii) changes via systems of non-intrusive action.
These three ideas, explored in sections below, lead us from the management of human affairs, beyond questions of science, and into question of philosophy.
For those interested in the history of philosophy and science, the three ideas above are followed by an extra section:
Appendix. Doing or not-doing in management can be placed philosophically in American pragmatism.
The question of doing or not-doing has been deep in the intellectual traditions of American management thinking in the latter 20th century. The attitude of Bias for Actionespoused by Tom Peters first published in 1982 exhorts managers to do. Peters describes the shifts of 1962 “Bias of planning”, to 1982 “Bias for action” in a report card from 2001, and observes in a 2018 interview that it’s become the first of eight commandments in Silicon Valley.
Rest of contents covers:
1. Doing or not-doing may or may not invoke learning
2. Doing or not-doing invokes implicit orientations on time
3. Doing or not-doing raises question of (i) changes via systems of willful action, and/or (ii) changes via systems of non-intrusive action
Appendix. Doing or not-doing in management can be placed philosophically in American pragmatism
Systems thinking is generally considered difficult, both to learn and to explain what it is about. Here is the latest of my efforts in this blog to make it simple. At the end is a concept map. It is self-explanatory, but only if you read the table above it very carefully. This post could be considered a follow-up to the previous one. It has been syndicated by The Systems Community of Inquiry to https://stream.syscoi.com, the global network of systems thinkers, scientists and practitioners.
The three steps …. are: (1) recognizing that some problems are socially and organizationally complex; (2) acquiring some basic knowledge of systems thinking, social systems thinking in particular; and (3) selecting one or more systems approaches to address the complex problem, at first arguably a generic systems method such as Churchman’s dialectical systems approach. The numbering is arbitrary: the three form what could be…
As demonstrated by a simple Google search, the MBSE acronym seems to be widely and consistently understood. Yet, the consensus about ‘M’ standing for models comes with different meanings for ‘S’ standing either for software or different kinds of systems.
Tools At Hand (Annette Messager)
In practice, the scope of model-based engineering has been mostly limited to design-to-code (‘S’ for software) and manufacturing (‘S’ for physical systems); leaving the engineering of symbolic systems like organizations largely overlooked.
Models, Software, & Systems
Models are symbolic representationsof actual (descriptive models) or contrived (prescriptive models) domains.Applied to systems engineering, models are meant to serve specific purposes: requirements analysis, simulation, software design, etc. With software as the end-product of system engineering, design models can be seen as a special case of models characterized by target (computer code) and language(executable instructions). Hence the letter ‘S’ in the MBSE acronym, which can…
Many of the big challenges and issues confronting humanity are only solvable using all available knowledge – across disciplines and paradigms of knowledge. Edward Wilson set out an agenda for better integration of all sciences in his book “Consilience” two decades ago.
More-over many of the most interesting developments in knowledge, of both practice and theory, are coming from inter- or trans-disciplinary domains.
There have been huge developments in the practical integration of knowledge across many disciplines often outside of academia – examples like rare species preservation, ecological management, space exploration, etc come to mind.
In addition the existence of multi-disciplinary social science ‘vocational’ University departments – like social work, business administration, public administration and public policy – have encouraged more cross-disciplinary working and created their own ‘spaces’ (conferences, journals, etc) where such fusions can occur (although that is not a given even in these schools – disciplinary boundaries can…
Per Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/atcx8l/researchers_watched_in_real_time_as_a/):
Researchers watched in real time as a single-celled algae evolved into a multicellular organism. The transition took place over the course of 50 weeks and was caused simply by the introduction of a predator to the environment. Time-lapse videos are available in the supplementary info.
Making Places Work for
Women: Gender and
Systems Change.
A Discussion Paper by The Point
People and Giselle Cory
October 2018
Contents
Introduction
Executive Summary
Our aims and approach
Chapter 1: The case for change
Chapter 2: What’s getting in the way?
A limited understanding of ‘systems change’ and what it
looks like in practice
Data is often gender blind and service focused
Commissioning doesn’t work with the grain of
women’s lives
Mental health services aren’t sufficiently engaged in
supporting women
The voluntary sector plays a key role but it is vulnerable
The need for gender-influenced ‘systems leadership’ is
not recognised
There are significant cultural factors that are getting in
the way of change
Chapter 3: Five principles for systems change: making
the difference for women experiencing multiple
disadvantage
1: Build a shared understanding of the population of
women experiencing multiple disadvantage
2: Outcomes are attached to the system and defined by
and with women, not for them
3: Services that work together, not just alongside
one another
4: Visible leadership at all levels of the system
5: Look below the surface to address
unconscious dynamics
Chapter 4: Where next for this work?
Recommendations for Trusts and Foundations
Recommendations for commissioners and
local authorities
Recommendations for central government
Conclusion
Many of the big challenges and issues confronting humanity are only solvable using all available knowledge – across disciplines and paradigms of knowledge. Edward Wilson set out an agenda for better integration of all sciences in his book “Consilience” two decades ago.
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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