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

species. Finally, theories, unlike species who always emerge from ancestries, can sometimesbe entirely original, unanticipated, without ancestors. This indicates that the growth ofknowledge is determined to a large extent by the social context. That leads to MichaelPolanyi and Thomas Kuhn.Within the OODA loop graphic, in Destruction and Creation and in The ConceptualSpiral, Boyd explicitly incorporated essential insights from both authors who, to a certainextent, disagreed with Popper. Polanyi had published his magnum opus Personal Knowledge:Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy in 1958. Preceding Thomas Kuhn’s famous book by fouryears, Polanyi’s book is part of the mid-century shift in philosophy of science towardsinterest in scientific practice. Several arguments were later refined in The Tacit Dimension. Thebook Boyd read, Knowing and Being, is a collection of short essays Polanyi wrote after PersonalKnowledge. It introduced Boyd to Kant Hegel, Piaget, Nagel and many other social theoristand philosophers. It includes themes from The Tacit Dimension and Personal Knowledge, whichpertain on the practice of science and the way scientific knowledge grows. It addresses thestructure of consciousness and even includes the role of DNA as a factor in shapingconsciousness, elements Boyd would include in his OODA loop sketch later on. Anoteworthy feature too is that the editor states in her lengthy introduction that ‘all knowingis orientation’ 29 .A first important idea Polanyi advances is that there are two levels of awareness andhuman beings employ both 30 . It is an idea that is closely related to Boyd’s insistence thatunderstanding requires analysis as well as synthesis, a central theme of Destruction and Creation.In fact, Boyd points to Polanyi as one of two sources for this idea 31 . Knowing is actionoriented and a process. Polanyi regards the process of knowing as fragmentary clues, sensomotoricor from memory, which are integrated under categories. We make sense of reality bycategorizing it. This is the lower level of awareness: it observes separate clues.However, this process of logical disintegration has reduced a comprehensive entityto its relatively meaningless fragments. The higher form of awareness recreates thecomprehensive entity of which the disparate clues are a part. As Polanyi asserts, a deliberateact of consciousness has […] not only an identifiable object as its focal point, but also a setof subsidiary roots which function as clues to its objects or as part of it. Indeed, heemphasizes that ‘the higher principles which characterize a comprehensive entity cannot bedefined in terms of the laws that apply to its parts in themselves’, a theme which willreappear later when systems thinking is discussed, to which Polanyi sometimes refers.This ‘integrating power of the mind’ is what Polanyi terms tacit knowing. And tacitknowing is implicit. It is the patterns of categories that contain theories, methods, feelings,values and skill that can be used in a fashion that the tradition judges valid. This integrationof knowledge is a personal skill in itself, it cannot be known by others. This tacit dimensionis essential. The knowledge that underlies the explicit knowledge is more fundamental. Allknowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. New experiences are alwaysassimilated through the concepts that the individual disposes and which the individual hasinherited from other users of the language. Those concepts are tacitly based, and importantlyfor understanding Boyd’s OODA loop, Polanyi asserts that the individual changes, “adapts”,the concepts in the light of experiences and reinterprets the language used. When new words29 Marjorie Green, ‘Introduction’, in Knowing and Being (1969), p.xi.30 See ‘The Structure of Consciousness’, in Knowing and Being (1969), pp.211-224.31 Boyd, Destruction and Creation, p.3.86