Greetings, At
I appreciate always the spirit of your messages, and have learned much
from watching you, and reading you.
As you have guessed, I think David Bohm, and his notion of the endless
dialog, and Senge's adoption of the Bohmian approach, a mixed blessing.
For me, learning is a contact sport: it needs the clash ands collision of
minds rubbing against minds, ideas encountering challenge.
I now try to teach graduate students a 3-stage approach to intellectual
conversation. I call the stages "dialog," "discussion," and "debate."
We "dialog" long enough to be reasonably sure we have heard what the other
is saying, and trying to say. We move to "discussion," with its
"percussion," in an attempt to isolate and clarify the points of
difference; and if we cannot find agreement at the discussion stage, we
move to "debate."
I have wanted to move to "discussion" and "debate" with you, but have not
yet learned how to do so in the framework of LO.
******
You know the old joke: Eve turns to Adam as they leave the Garden, and says,
"Adam, we're living in an age of transition."
I would change the joke if I told it now. Eve would say, "Adam, we're living
in an age of paradigm shift."
(But what is the paradigm that is ending; and what is the new one to which
we are shifting? Postindustrial? Postcapitalist? Poststructuralist?
PostChristian? Postmodern?)
****************
You have created a "discourse," At. A lens of language through which you
see the world. In your world "entropy" is "real," and its effects
penetrate human organizations and account for much, and can be measured.
In the world you have created the "essentialities" are not linguistic
constructions, but "truths."
Yours is what others have called a "grand theory," a total view of the
world and how it is organized, and how it changes.
I, on the other hand, can not hear and appreciate "grand theories." I
believe that notions of "local knowledge" are more helpful: smaller
discourses that help clarify, explain, change.
For example: understanding and perhaps helping to change a troubled
university department.
I do not think the languages of "entropy," or "form-content", or the
distinction of induction and deduction and other logical categories are
useful, are helpful in finding the sources of the trouble, and perhaps
fixing the troubles.
I think the "local knowledge" called "ethnography" more useful in working
with an organization. If we look at a "department" through the lens of the
"culture concept" and try to assemble "thick descriptions" of how this
"culture" operates--roles, relationships, power, issues, language, etc--we
may begin to get insight into the nature of department as a system.
The "culture" of the department may include "factions" or "subcultures."
And the department/culture lives within the larger culture of the
"faculty" and the "university."
So, this is the "discourse" I would tend to employ in dealing with a
college.
If you look at your message below, you move quickly to physics, and
"differential equations."
So far, At, we are separated by walls of language.
Perhaps we can find a common language, and lower or remove those walls.
Be well.
Steve
At wrote:
>Steve Eskow <dreskow@corp.webb.net> writes:
>
>>It occurs to me that in order to diagnose and fix a troubled
>>automobile or a troubled university department one needs to
>>know in general how automobiles and universities operate,
>>but understanding a particular auto .or department can't be
>>managed in advance, can't be accomplished without an
>>encounter with a particular car or a particular department.
>
>It occurs to me that what you are saying here, is in form exactly how all
>those laws of phsyics work which can be represented by "differential
>equations".
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