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

The link between thermodynamics and Heisenberg/Gödel however may well havebeen provided through his reading of cybernetics and systems theory in which the conceptof open and closed systems is an essential theme. Indeed, the seed of this insight may havebeen sown when Boyd read Jean Piaget’s work Structuralism in preparation of Destruction andCreation, to which he frequently explicitly refers in this essay 100 . Structuralism is a remarkablebook, and Structuralism a highly influential movement. The book contains a broad overviewof disciplines that dealt with structures. Translated from French, it not only dealt with Gödel(although Gödel features very prominently indeed), but also includes explanations of thework of systems theoretician Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the linguist Noam Chomsky, thesociologists Talcott Parsons and Michel Foucault, anthropologist Claude Levy-Strauss,Charles Darwin, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Ernest Nagel, and a host of others. Accordingto Piaget, they all explain their subject in terms of systems or structures and in terms ofprocesses of transformations that sustain these structures or systems. Indeed, Piaget shows,structure is a system of transformations, indeed, a structure is a systematic whole of selfregulatingtransformations 101 . The quintessence is that there is no structure apart fromconstruction 102 . Alternatively, he may have been alerted by Polanyi, who, as noted before,pointed Boyd at the insight that ‘the higher principles which characterize a comprehensive entity cannotbe defined in terms of the laws that apply to its parts in themselves’ 103 . In any case, these books capturethe nexus between the epistemological issues discussed above and the next element of Boyd’s scientific Zeitgeist: the systems view of the world 104 .Wholes, not partsThe emerging systems view of the worldThe new complementary paradigm that emerged carries various labels. The contours aredescribed by various authors in various ways, depending in part on the moment ofpublication and their own discipline. Yet several similarities appear throughout. Capra notedin 1982 thatOut of the revolutionary changes in our concept of reality that were brought about bymodern physics, a consistent world view is now emerging. In contrast to the mechanisticCartesian view of the world, the world view emerging from modern physics can becharacterized by words like organic, holistic, and ecological. It might also be called a systemsview, in the sense of general systems theory. The universe is no longer seen as a machine, made upof a multitude of objects, but has to be pictured as one indivisible dynamic whole whoseparts are essentially interrelated 105 .Later he labeled it as the “holistic worldview”, and “deep ecology” 106 . The essence of newparadigm is alternatively captured in words such as the “Organismic Revolution” 107 , the100 Jean Piaget, Structuralism (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1971).101 Ibid, p.44.102 Ibid, p.140.103 Polanyi (1969), p.217. This comes from the same section in which he introduces Piaget.104 Another study on structuralism Boyd had read, Howard Gardner’s The Quest for Mind, Piaget, Levi-Strauss and the Structuralism Movement (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1972) actually regardsstructuralism as the ‘worldview’ that took hold during the sixties.105 Capra, (1982), pp.77-78.106 Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, A New Understanding of Living System (New York, 1996, p. 6).107 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory (2 nd edition, New York, 1968), p.186.100