Replying to LO30900 --
Dear Organlearners,
Terje Tatonsberg" <tatonsberg@hotmail.com> wrote in reply
to Mark:
>> To say that 'Singapore is a place' is clearly false in the sense
>> that it is not universally true. Singapore happens to be a
>> nation-state. Thus, it is a government entity, and not a place
>> at all. This provides us with evidence that the universality of
>> your claim is clearly false.
>Is there a place called Singapore or not? Yes or no? If you
>landed at Singapore airport, and someone asked "are you in
>Singapore?" Would you say "not in universal terms"?
(snip)
>This is nothing but sophistry.
Greetings dear Terje,
I have followed the dialogue on this topic with great interest. Some
of it boils down to a saying in my mother tongue: "the splitting of
hairs". We may get so engorssed in seraching for the flea that we do
not notice the elephant in front of us. Perhaps my musings about the
elephant will have some value to your learning and that of others. I
cannot participate as I used to do because of illness. But I felt I
must reply to this particular topic.
True and truth. What is true and truth? This began to interest me in
1968, only after I had finished my academical training. I began to
study on my own literature on logic. I began to wade through
sentential logic, quantifier logic, relational logic, multivalue
logic, fuzzy logic, modal logic, imperative logic and interrogative
logic. How I wish I knew more of logic during my formal studies of
mathematics.
Meanwhile I also began to study all literature on creativity. The
further I proceeded in this, the more I became convinced that there is
a close relationship between creativity and logic. But what is this
relationship? Sometimes I had to laugh for myself:- trying to find out
the truth about the truth -- trying op create creatively -- what two
oxymorons!
To say that
1 + 1 = 2
is always true is actually false. We may have
1 + 1 = 1
in a modulo-1 group. The reason is that the axioms of such a group are
different to the axioms of the natural numbers. In other words, truth
is relative to the axioms by which one which works. Other examples
began to convince me that truth is determined by context of which
axioms are a formal representation of it. Only much later did I
discovered that this has very much to do with one of the 7Es (seven
essentialities of creativity). Truth has to preserve at least one of
them, namely sureness ("identity-context").
Already early in my teaching profession I discovered that students may
give true statements on minute facts. But as soon as I wanted them to
string these facts as information into one gigantic whole with their
knowledge, they began to produce the worsest tripe possible.
Eventually I knew why. Truth has also very much to do with wholeness
("unity-associativity"), another of the 7Es. A lot of facts combined
into one statement is useless when wholeness is not preserved.
Today I know that the 7Es and truth are deeply connected. It is
because I discovered the 7Es by seeking an adjunction (universal
correspondence) between toposlogic (abstract) and chemistry (material)
and then extending them to all other disciplines with phenomenological
thinking. I think that the greatest stumbling block is ignorance to
openness ("paradigm-transform"), another of the 7Es. We can make a
jump into the unknown and unexplained with creativity, but not with
meticulous logic. Goedel set a magnificant example to this.
One of the most intelligent persons ever was Goethe. He followed his
own path in discovering the truth. Few understood him and many wanted
to grind an ax with him. He never wanted to explain his concept of
truth, perhaps fearing that even less people will understand him. One
day he gave in, saying that there is in an interaction between his
"world-inside-him" and the "world-outside-him" and that this
interaction is the truth. It astounded me because at that stage I was
convinced that creativity has all to do about the interaction between
any system and the rest of the universe.
An enigmatic person in the universe was Jesus of Nazareth. He claimed
that he was the way, the truth and the life. Except for Goethe's
admission, this claim makes no sense, except telling of great
audacity. Yet it implies that when anyone who wants to discover the
truth, that person has to live like Jesus, connecting with the world
as a whole. Goethe was not a particularly religious person, but his
remark was greatly helpful to me in understanding Jesus better -- the
pivot between God and human relationships.
What is truth? For me it is the voyage of discovering the universe
with all its complexity. Logic is merely an afterthought on this
discovery, hindered by our lack of creativity and our desire for
simplicity. For example, formal logic tell about the truth of things
we already know. But it cannot tell about the truth of things we still
have to discover. For that we need creativity with imagination and
intuition as its outcomes as Faraday and Einstein have set example to
us.
To claim that the statement of a fact is always true is far too
simple. It is like saying that the human body as adope of the soul is
made up of atoms. It is a fact, but it tell us nothing about the
intricacies of the soul. Tell me how atoms enable us to learn as
individuals and in organisations and I will admit that finally facts
have caught up with reality.
The truth about truth is that we still have to learn by way of
experiences more about truth than what we already know. The truth
about truth is that we even know what we cannot tell -- the tacit
dimension according to Polanyi. This makes information (what we can
tell) inferior to the whole of our knowledge (what we have
experienced). It is a good thing when we are concerned about truth
because it reflects our commitment to learning. But when we begin to
argue what is truth, I think that we have lost our ability to learn.
A strange thing about truth in its exploration as logic is that little
has been said on the relationship with learning. Even more strange is
that nothing has been said on its relationship with organisational
learning. The truth about learning is still much in the cupboard. A
friend of mine, Andries Vorster, insists that education is still a
nebulous practice like those of the Dark Age. I am not such a
pessimist. We have advanced greatly the past 400 years. But we still
have a lot to cover.
One thing has become very clear to me -- that we will have to
understand the difference between knowledge and information as well as
how they are related to each other. To think of knowledge and
information as synonymous is in my opinion a great blunder.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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