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

The presence and production of mismatches are what sustain and nourish the enterprise ofscience, engineering, and technology, hence keep it alive and ongoing – otherwise therewould be no basis for it to continue.Boyd then sets out to explain how this enterprise of science, engineering, and technologyaffects us personally as individuals, as groups, or as societies 94 . The previous discussion hadshown that ‘the practice of science/engineering and the pursuit of technology not onlychange the physical world we interact with – via new systems, new processes, new etc. – butthey also change the mental/physical ways by which we think about and act upon that world.In this sense the practice of science/engineering and the pursuit of technology permit us tocontinually rematch our mental/physical orientation with that changing world so that we cancontinue to thrive and grow in it. Put simply:The enterprise of science, engineering, and technology affects us personally as individuals, asgroups, or as societies by changing our orientation to match with a changing world that we infact help shape.To Boyd the discussion up to this point has revealed that ‘without the intuitive interplay ofanalysis and synthesis we have no basic process for generating novelty, no basic process foraddressing mismatches between our mental images/impressions and the reality it is supposedto represent; and no basic process for reshaping our orientation toward that reality as itundergoes change. Put simply:Without the interplay of analysis and synthesis we have no basis for the practice ofscience/engineering and the pursuit of technology – since novelty, mismatches, andreorientation as the life blood ingredients that naturally arise out of such practice and pursuitcan longer do so 95 .These findings mandate a modification of the definitions of science and engineering offeredearlier, showing how Boyd himself had applied the spiral model for getting closer to thetruth. The earlier definition of science regarded it as a ‘self-correcting process of observation,hypothesis, and test’. The amended definition Boyd now suggests, regards science as a ‘selfcorrectingprocess of observations, analysis/synthesis, hypothesis and test’. Note that Boyd haschanged observation into observations to indicate the fact that it is a continuous process, andnot merely a one-time event. The same holds true for engineering, which had been definedearlier as ‘a self-correcting process of observation, design and test’. This now must bechanged to read ‘a self-correcting process of observations, analysis/synthesis, design, and test’.The reason for this change of view is that ‘without the interplay of analysis and synthesis onecan evolve neither the hypothesis or design and follow-on test nor the original ‘simplemindedmessage’ nor this presentation itself 96 .Final step: why novelty mattersStill, Boyd acknowledges, it is not obvious what bearing all this have on winning and losing 97 .The next slide illuminates this issue, without fully providing the answer yet. It suggests that94 Ibid, p.24.95 Ibid, p.25.96 Ibid, p.26, italics are mine.97 Ibid, p.27.265