Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

under the same conditions will come out the same way, that results are repeatable andtherefore independently verifiable. Finally cause and effect are demonstrable. This canhappen in a number of ways: observed, inferred, extrapolated, etc. Therefore the nature oflinear systems is that if you know a little about their behavior, you know a lot. You canextrapolate, change scales and make projections with confidence. A consequence of theNewtonian paradigm is the view of systems as closed entities, isolated from theirenvironments. Outside events do not influence such a system; the only dynamics are thosearising from its internal workings. The analyst thus has an inward focus.This leads to the deterministic character of the Newtonian view. Newton’s equationsof motion are the basis of classical mechanics. They were considered to be fixed lawsaccording to which material points move, and were thus thought to account for all changesobserved in the physical world. The “cosmic machine”, once in motion, was seen as beingcompletely causal and determinate. All that happened had a definite cause and gave rise to adefinite effect, and the future of any part could - in principle - be predicted with absolutecertainty if its state at any time was known in detail. This view was not only applied to solidmatter but also to fluids and gases. The first law of thermodynamics, which sprang from theapplication of Newtonian mechanics to the study of thermal phenomena (treating liquids andgases as complicated mechanical systems), states that total energy in a process is alwaysconserved.Thus, it was also believed that the world could be described objectively, i.e. withoutever mentioning the human observer 72 . Laplace hypothesized that a sufficiently intelligentbeing (or “demon”) could grasp any future event from an adequate comprehension of thepresent. The perceiving subject is a neutral observer and the object a pure datum ofperception, each separated from the other by a chasm of non-participation. Defined as a“mirror of nature”, the mind was thought capable of representing the world throughobjective knowledge that was stable, certain, and accurate 73 .The Newtonian natural science proved itself in practice, with its theories producingimpressive results and its success had a dramatic impact on the social sciences emerging inthe 18 th and 19 th centuries. Social scientists and historians began searching for laws that thatcontrolled the social and psychological world in the same way that laws controlled thenatural world. Thus from the 17 th to the 20 th centuries, a new modern paradigm emerged,organized around the logic of determinism, and rooted in the objectifying, mechanistic,abstract, and atemporal mode of thought stemming from the natural sciences. Scientismbecame a modern faith, promoting the belief that the scientific method alone provided theroyal road to truth, that there was one legitimate logic and one reliable methodology, andthat eventually all sciences and fields of intellectual endeavor could be unified within thesame nomological and reductionist framework 74 .However, the assumptions of classical physics upon which we have confidentlyerected our entire way of organizing life turn out to be largely fallacious, Rifkin told Boyd 75 .There is not a crisis of the sort Kuhn described. The recent history of science ischaracterized by a series of problems that are the consequences of deliberate and lucidquestions asked by scientists who knew that the questions had both scientific and72 Capra, 1975, pp.56-57. I deliberately refer directly to this book as it is one read by Boyd in the earlystages of his research. The issue of determinism is also discussed at length in Prigogine and Coveney.73 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn (The Guilford Press, New York, 1997), p.203.74 Ibid, p.202.75 Rifkin (1980), p.224.95