Rediscovery is a very old phenomenon, and seems to be especially relevant
these days when it comes to organizational change, consulting,
reengineering, etc., for what it teaches us about deficiencies in higher
education, and the nature of our present-day sources of information.
Why am I writing about this? I have a feeling that we are swept up these
days in some serious personal and knowledge calibration issues; that we
are victims of beliefs that are seriously deficient, and the consequences
of this are bad for all of us. An urge to discover and invent is
certainly commendable, but what if we are constantly reinventing things
that we could have learned at much less cost? And what if we are
constantly passing on our personal miscalibration to others, so that we
create a torrent of misunderstanding?
Example #1. Reinvention in Philosophy. My first example is out of the LO
context in a sense, but is put here because it shows how reinvention is an
old phenomenon, and allows me to work in a reference to one of the most
scholarly books I have ever read, and from which I think anyone who is
interested in reasoning would do well to get and read. It is the book:
I. M. Bochenski, A HISTORY OF FORMAL LOGIC. A small percentage of this
book is taken up by Bochenski's editorial remarks, but the bulk of it
consists of direct quotations from many generations of philosophers;
allowing us to see how thought about thought has evolved through over two
millenia: something that might be interesting to people who are
interested in the subject of learning. The reinvention theme is one of
the minor themes of the book, but is interesting for the perspective we
can get on this subject. We can also learn some rather amazing things
such as: "scientific history of formal logic, free from the prejudices we
have mentioned and based on a thorough study of texts, first developed in
the 20th century" (page 9). What does this tell you about interest in
learning how to present logical arguments?
On pages 6-8, we see a discussion of prejudices in scholarly work that is
seldom matched in today's critical discussion, and remarks on how ideas
were uncritically accepted for a long time in a field that is dedicated to
logic.
On pages 14-15 we see how certain themes have regularly recurred in
different developmental periods: the problem of implication, semantic
paradoxes, modal logic, analysis of quantifiers, and the "scholastic
syllogism" with the central question of "necessary connection" that
evolved independently in western logic and Indian logic. On page 17 we
see specific instances of rediscovery that span centuries. And we see how
scholars consistently misattributed results thought to be new that had
been discovered long ago; so that the readership of the scholars kep
receiving incorrect information from them. Just to take one example:
"The discovery of truth-matrices was ascribed to Peirce [1839-1914], or
even Wittgenstein [1889- 1951]; Peirce himself found it in the Megarians"
(page 17) [the Megarians being active in the period from the second half
of the 4th to the end of the 3rd century, B. C.; page 27].
Is it any wonder that Bochenski titles a section "The Problem of Progress"
[pages 15-18]?
As the book proceeds, specific instances of rediscovery are regularly
cited.
On the LO list, I note the following contributions:
o In LO 03143, from Fred Nickols, commentary from Peter Drucker about the
"rediscovery" of the Gantt chart in a much less comprehensive form, while
retaining the name; this under the discussion of "backcasting", which is
said to originate with Gantt, though earlier LO contributions apparently
though it was a new concept originating from the LO milieu
o In LO 03164, from Richard Karash, Richard describes the finding of
Polanyi that as we get skilled with a tool we begin to forget how to
describe or explain it, since it gets internalized.
In his famous papers titled "The Fixation of Belief" [1877], and "How to
Make Our Ideas Clear" [1878], Peirce walks us through the components of
belief fixation and tells us how habitual behavior is internalized. In
one summary statement: "The essence of belief is the establishment of a
habit, and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of
action to which they give rise." As he describes our own self-deceptions:
we "mistake the sensation produced by our own unclearness of thought for a
character of the object we are thinking. Instead of perceiving that the
obscurity is purely subjective, we fancy that we contemplate a quality of
the object which is essentially mysterious; and if our conception be
afterward presented to us in a clear form we do not recognize it as the
same, owing to the absence of the feeling of unintelligibility. So long
as this deception lasts, it obviously puts an impassable barrier in the
way of perspicuous thinking; so that it interests the opponents of
rational thought to perpetuate it, and its adherents to guard against it."
Concerning people's willingness to share, the most superficial explanation
is that knowledge is power and people want to hang onto it; but there are
other explanations. In all of our work on complexity, involving
Interactive Management, we have never found any unwillingness to share.
On the contrary, we have found total willingness to share. So it must be
that there is something having to do with process credibility, that
affects willingness of people to share.
Among these reasons are: (a) doubt in the integrity of the system in
which they are working, (b) a long history of learning that sharing causes
more systemic problems than it solves because people don't take the time
to learn what was shared, but rather misinterpret it and pass it on; (c) a
history of seeing that the misallocation of time assures that the shared
information will be misused and that the sharer might even then be blamed
for the systemic misuse.
That is why ad hoc processes, promoted as personal ventures, ultimately
die a slow death, only to be reincarnated in a new disguise, whereupon the
cycle repeats.
-- John Warfield Johnwfield@aol.com