Introduction

To Human Systems

Human systems as a body of knowledge concerns several layers of human reality and multiple facets, dimensions or perspectival frameworks that are central to human systems in human reality. Analytical and synthetic understanding and formal knowledge therefore follows along these lines of stratification, differentiation and relationship in terms of theory, methodologies for investigating these realities, and in terms of alternative applications as possible solutions to problems of human systems--the problem of adaptation, of survival, of development, of harmony.

Beware the four idols of the human understanding

I have undertaken natural systems theory and metasystems science as an alternative method of framing and developing scientific knowledge. The central criticism of such an approach as it has yet been developed is that it lacks a strong and clear-cut empirical foundation but only stands upon the shoulders of scientific methodology. This is a legitimate if somewhat stilted critique of natural systems science. Natural systems science, like all science, is preoccupied with the unknown and the uncertain. If it is theoretically top-heavy in its early stages, it is so because it has a dual focus that should show a degree of parallactic convergence. Its first focus is the excoriation of reality in all its manifestations, to derive what can be considered its latent structures and order. Its second focus is to understand the constraints and dynamics of human knowledge systems that are used to represent these realities. Unlike conventional science, therefore, natural systems theory attempts to step beyond the boundaries of the scientific knowledge systems themselves, both in terms of the central object of interest (in a vague sense definable as the unknown) and in terms of the knowledge associated with that interest.

Hypothetical models are put forward in the initial stages of theoretical development of this perspective, not as the truth, but as heuristic devices that allow us to explore the ramifications and implications of our own knowledge about reality. Not every construction put forward in the course of natural systems theory development is necessarily interesting or even correct. These are promulgated not with the intention of imposing yet another human construction on the patterning of reality, be this whatever it may, but as a way of moving critically beyond the horizons of our own received constructions in the sciences. There are teleological implications to the received theories in the sciences that put to test, or at least should put to test, our collective imagination. It can be said that good science is in equal measure theory building and fact finding. Facts support the theories we build, and the theories allow us to find the facts.

There are also philosophical implications of our received view of reality that should be at some level approached and dealt with by science. All scientific theory demands some kind of explicated metaphysical framework, or at least exists in such a framework whether it has been fully explained or not. It becomes therefore a central aspect of meta-systems science to develop a natural metaphysic of science, which should include both an ontological view about reality, and an epistemological statement about our view of reality.

It has been a central contention of natural systems theory, arising out of the anthropology of knowledge, that science as it is articulated today largely lacks a clear-cut scientific worldview, or a comprehensive system of knowledge that can be said to be universal and natural and to take into full account the role and influence of a diverse range of human attitudes that are brought to such knowledge. Included in this scientific worldview would be not only humankind's relationship to nature, but also people's interrelationships to one another, especially in terms of our shared knowledge. It has been therefore a central objective of natural systems theory to construct and develop such a comprehensive perspective of the world in as scientific a manner as possible. Such a worldview must embrace an explicit metaphysic, as well as natural theory of systems in reality.

Implied in the name of natural systems theory is the starting premise that there exists an inherent order to reality that is latent to the manifest patterns of its phenomena as this has been found to occur at various levels. This natural a priori order cannot be discovered but by means of our language and knowledge capacity, which is inherently limited and constraining. 

The premise of a priori natural order goes even further to state that, in spite of all the variation of pattern found in reality, there are at its base a set of rules (or constraints) governing relationships and interactions, and in their fundamental form and function these rules can be said to be universal. The limits brought to this understanding by our knowledge entails that we will never fully or perfectly explicate these rules of order, but that our structural models and theories will be only rough approximations to the truth. Furthermore, if the second premise about reality made by natural systems theory holds true, that the structure of reality is infinite and open, we can see clearly that our knowledge of the known will always be faced by the shadowy paradox of the unknown that will circumscribe our knowledge at every point. Therefore, whatever models we develop based upon what we know, will always become in time relativized by all that we do not know. Therefore there should be no theoretical or empirical limit to the structure and order found by our knowledge, or of its knowledge itself, at least not as long as there are humans there to preserve it.

Francis Bacon probably would have criticized natural systems severely for its acute failure to develop a strong empirical orientation, and this would be a well deserved critique to make. On the other hand, natural systems science has its own operational foundation that leads directly to both empirical inquiry and practical application. But this empiricism can be said to be strongly theory-driven in meta-systems operation. This theoretical framework would be for the most part as explicit as possible.

There is nothing inherently wrong in freely entertaining ideas, or in using the human imagination, tempered by a close accounting with known facts, to solve problems that the intellect cannot otherwise solve by purely analytical and rational means, but this cannot be done at the expense ultimately of an empirical accounting of reality. If natural systems science is theory driven, it can also be said to be fact constrained to the nth-degree, as goodness of fit to the empirical evidence is the ultimate criteria for its success in the world. Erroneous theories at least let us know what we would otherwise not know and would remain unknown if we did not seek to empirically validate them.

This brings up a point in the natural sciences especially, and this is that data-bound and empirically driven systems of knowledge frequently tend to do a poor job of conceptual construction, often by failing to take into account the larger framework and implications of conceptual knowledge in the first place, especially in terms of its own constructive constraints. An empirically driving science that is well grounded to the facts of the matter, may be strong in one sense but less powerful conceptually than it might otherwise be. Reality that is strictly tied to what is known must be seen as being always overshadowed by the unknown as well as by what is hidden in our knowledge of reality but not unknown.

Coming out of the anthropology of knowledge, the development of natural systems theory is perhaps fortuitous in the sense that nothing known is so taken for granted that it cannot be questioned and critically evaluated. Nothing known is so non-arbitrary that it cannot be somehow alternatively framed or variably manipulated in order to arrive at some fresh perspective of possible reality. To a great extent, it can be said that natural systems theory is as concerned with the possible realities hidden in the unknown, as it is concerned with the limited realities contained in what we know. The aim of natural systems theory is to develop alternative constructs for purposes of the heuristic investigation of unknown realities. It can be held in the hypostatization of alternative plausible realities that can then be compared and tested against our knowledge. Often, such constructs may reveal hidden fallacies and contradictory implications in our own knowledge systems of which we may be unaware.

As Francis Bacon so clearly remarked so long ago, it is the nature of the human understanding to seize upon false idols regardless of their agreement with known realities. Even science itself, at this modern time, so advanced and sophisticated in its technical prowess, remains as yet not so far removed in some symbolic respects from Bacon's own time that was just dawning from the long sleep of the Dark Ages. At the edge of the unknown, even our advanced sciences fall back upon idols that are disguised as knowledge and understanding but which reveal a false sense of commitment to untested beliefs. The aim of a natural systems theoretic approach therefore is the testing of such belief structures by making explicit what would remain otherwise implicit, and by creating frameworks of comparison and contradiction where no such frameworks are otherwise found to exist. It can be called hypothetical and counterfactual in construction.

*****

The nature of the hypothetical models that have been proposed and revised represent what can be considered to be attempts at both comprehensive theories that are tied to general levels of the organization of natural phenomena, and at a unified metaphysical perspective, or what might be called a universal worldview, within which these models are articulated. Behind this approach stands what I believe to be an important form of natural human heuristic, which deals primarily with what can be called conceptual or symbolic problem solving.

For the first purpose, fairly specific models have been developed addressing the problems of integration and function at the physical, biological and human levels of natural patterning. In addition, other levels of patterning have also been addressed, alternative and applied systems, artificial or autonomous systems, abstract systems. In each area, specific general theoretical models obtain or have been proposed that embrace a number of covering law theories. There is no effort made to apply theories pertinent to one level to another level. Of course, no theory on the physical level can fail to take into account the phenomena of fundamental uncertainty, general relativity of space-time, or the cosmological principle. 

These theories only have metaphorical significance if they are applied to biological or human frames of reference. On the biological level, a systems model has been proposed that combines evolutionary theory with a dynamic ecosystems approach. The paradox is that on an analytical level, all biological systems may be reduced to their physical subcomponents and the processes obtaining between them. But it is clear that as biological entities coalesce into organisms, populations and communities, there are emergent properties at multiple levels of synthesis that cannot e strictly accounted for in reductionist terms alone. On the anthropological or human level, such modeling must take into account material, symbolic, constructive, psychological, social, environmental as well as biological dimensions and the theories pertinent in each of these areas. While frequent efforts are made to apply directly biological models to human cultural systems and processes, the tenuousness of these connections remain always suspect and uncertain. It is even more far-fetched to assume that indirectly all human processes are reducible to a purely physical level of description and explanation, which is possible, but remains partial and insufficient such that it can tell neither the whole story in terms of emergent properties indisputably attached to such systems, and that it cannot explain exactly how and why such systems developed or their state-path trajectory as complex and heterogeneous systems.

In other words, in systems theory, we do not mix our metaphors by using models developed at one level of analysis and synthesis to explain behavior at another level of complex organization. Of course, all natural systems are inherently stratified and thus are reducible to lower levels of analysis. Reductionist analysis to the simplest, most basic terms is possible with any natural system we want to describe. We must remember that the entities at each level are comprised of forms determined by emergent properties from the elements composing it at the next lowest level of analysis, and this process forms an infinite regress to possibly a fundamental sense of "nothingness."

Metasystems methodology, as either an operational set of procedures aiming at analysis and synthesis, or as theory, provides what can be considered to be a metaphysical frame of reference about naturally occurring processes and patterns that can be called structural and scientific. 

The central thesis of metasystems theory is that underlying all processes and patterns in the natural world, at whatever level of analysis we may adopt, there are certain inherent structural design features which apply and which can be systematically described, and that, furthermore, provide us with a method for both analysis and synthesis in a systematic way. Such an underlying structural patterning should not be confused as the basis for theoretical modeling at different levels of stratification of natural order in reality. 

There are multiple levels of natural ordering, at each of which unique properties and pattern-producing processes apply. Principles regulate patterning in different ways at different levels, and the general principles that can be said to be the most pertinent to anthropological systems are not those most relevant to physical systems. We cannot explain one order of natural patterning primarily or exclusively in the terms and principles derived at another level. The models we develop at any one level of natural ordering, are pertinent only for that specific level, and may have at best only a metaphorical significance at any other level.

It follows that the kind of problem solving that is most applicable to the development of models in natural systems, or natural systems theories, is a form of problem solving that deals primarily with the ordering of relationships between things or complex sets of things, and which ordering can be said to be at best conceptually defined. This is to be compared to an alternative form of problem solving that is also important to the articulation of research in natural systems, and this has to do with analytical problem solving, or the kind of problem solving that is most associated with mathematics and experimental science. Conceptual problem solving can be said to be a form of dilemma resolution, whereas analytical problem solving can be said to be a kind of puzzle solution. A puzzle can be said to be a kind of dilemma with a finite or specific solution. A dilemma can be said to be a kind of puzzle without a finite or with a non-specific, or general solution. With a dilemma more than one kind of solution is possible, as solution of the problem in a complete sense is not sought, rather only resolution of the uncertainty that is associated with the problem. Hence, solutions to conceptual problems are more or less efficient and parsimonious, and some solutions are probably better than other solutions. 

Empiricism and inductive inference are fundamentally conceptual kinds of problems, in spite of the rhetoric of scientists and their conventional methods. We apply strategies of successive approximations to reach the best possible solution under the circumstances, without really knowing in any certain or exact sense whether or not some better solution may exist or be discovered. Precisely the opposite obtains in puzzle-type problems. Puzzle problems are abstract-deductive problems that use a strict form of two value logic to achieve results that are exact and completely unequivocal. Conceptual problem solving is based upon the achievement of "understanding" of a problem in a deep sense, and in a scientific sense such understanding takes the form of rational explanation and alternative hypothesis formulation. Conceptual problems are fundamentally linguistic problems, and concern the meaning, and possibly the structural order, of natural patterning. 

It is an error to think that puzzle-problems are the only interesting or sort of problems appropriate to any field of science, and that only the social sciences need be concerned or tied up with conceptual problems upon a conceptual and empirical level of complexity that precludes puzzle-type abstraction. It is clear that puzzle solving abstraction in this restrictive sense is far less useful at the level of the social sciences than it is in the natural sciences, but it is not without its purposes in the empirical and heuristic modeling of conceptually-based systems, especially when it comes to statistical sampling, analysis and knowledge representation. At the same time, it is equally clear conceptual problem solving is as important at the physical level of natural patterning as it is at the humanological or anthropological level, and it takes in many respects the same forms and functions at whatever level it is systematically applied.

Natural systems theory is mainly concerned with the explication, exemplification and experimentation of conceptual problem solving in terms of theoretical models and experimental/methodological constructs that have general applicability to the natural world. Efforts are made as well to systematically apply puzzle-type problems and methods to metasystems and natural systems models and theories, but this is not the main thrust of this work or the larger approach that it represents. To a great extent, the academically defined sciences and disciplines have achieved remarkable progress with puzzle-type problem solving, and tend to lag behind with the former kind of conceptual problem solving. The result has been the promulgation of scientific models in many different fields of active inquiry that are fundamentally weak and deficient in a conceptual problem frame of reference, largely because a more complete systems approach was not undertaken, and also because the fullest potential of conceptual problem solving in a systematic manner is seldom realized when hyper-specialization of focus is required for professional advancement and activity.

Conceptual problem solving demands the development of coherent "worldviews" that aim at comprehensiveness of perspective as well as at achieving the greatest depth possible in such systems. It requires therefore a kind of backward chaining process of calling into explicit focus one's own background presuppositions and their implications. Superimposition of a systems approach, even if this can be variably defined by various people, entails what can be called setting a metaphysical and comprehensive frame of reference for defining scientific worldviews in a number of different areas of knowledge. This permits as well not only people to work in their own areas of knowledge with a greater sense of relevance to a larger natural reality, but it permits the interchange of information between different domains and between different levels that is useful heuristically for conceptual development of models. 

A systems approach, I would say, is the only appropriate approach for all the natural and human sciences, though such an approach may be variously defined and applied in different ways. Thus, when we claim a special status for natural systems theory in the philosophy and practice of science, we are claiming in fact status for natural systems theories in a plural sense that multiple models are always competing with one another at different levels of stratification/integration within a larger metaphysical framework. The models that result are analytic/synthetic in construction, and achieve success because they prove to be of the best overall fit and get the greatest mileage.

Conceptual problem solving and development appears to depend therefore upon the capacity to entertain competing alternative solutions at the same time, and to have the capacity to understand in some systematic manner the implications and presuppositions pertinent to any particular model that is proposed within a larger framework of understanding. It entails as well the capacity to create new solutions and to combine alternative solutions into a hybrid kind of model. It entails, in other words, a kind of conceptual and mental flexibility and agility of thought that mathematical puzzle-solving problems find inimical. The capacity to solve puzzle problems requires a single-track focus upon a narrow problem set, and systematic reduction through deduction to derive an answer.

*****

I believe that it is simply incredible and stultifying the extent to which all the scientific disciplines tend to lapse into dogmatic idolatry in their received knowledge at the edge of the unknown. This is almost an expected trait of all human knowledge systems, especially when there is a great deal of uncertainty involved. Even many of the methodological interests and focus becomes considerably compulsive and inflexibly employed when dealing with large sets of unknown variables. Uncertainty can be seen to be an almost chronic condition in some fields like the human sciences where there are few general laws or rules to anchor our frames of reference with, but the same thing can be said for any field of systematic study of natural systems. It is amazing that even in the physical sciences cosmological theories and physical constructs are typically received as is without almost any effort put into their critical evaluation and alternative reconstruction upon any level.

Natural systems theory can be said therefore to have a deliberate aim to call into question the received viewpoints of scientific systems, and to attempt at least to offer viable alternative candidates for the general description of reality at its various levels and areas. Beyond this intention, natural systems theory in terms of meta-systems science attempts deliberately as well to bring comprehensive unity to the various disciplinary orientations and to provide a framework for such unification of different and often disparate knowledge systems. Finally, it is the aim of meta-sciences to offer deliberate and clear-cut methodologies and methodological techniques for the heuristic modeling, empirical analysis, rational synthesis and experimental elucidation of natural and artificial systems. These then become the primary aims of this work and other related works.

First inferences are lasting ones

My primary interest in science is in the study of basic theory of knowledge applied to natural and artificial systems in an objective sense, and to an objective understanding of the structure and limits of knowledge itself. It is an attempt to develop viable alternative models of what I call "meta-systems" that represents the world realistically and scientifically upon a number of basic levels of analysis and synthesis. I've come over the past year to revise the models to a point that a considerable degree of stability and continuity of structure can be said to exist for the framework as a whole. At the same time, I've come to extend the basic model as this was elaborated in the previous works in a number of different dimensions and directions of development, creating a larger framework for natural systems theory and meta-system's science as a whole.

Yet to get at these systems objectively I find it almost unavoidable to have to seek to get around the notion of "objectivity" from an paradoxically "objective" standpoint. In other words, I find it important to seek to understand knowledge itself as a system that is at least in theory separate from the world or worlds that it is used to represent. And in doing this, we must again resort to the meaning systems of knowledge.

To a great extent, achieving alternative perspectives in the sciences requires some measure of marginalization and what can be called a studied distantiation as well as a kind of self-alienation from the main or central forums in which such knowledge is articulated and played out. This has been done, in my own life, as much deliberately as it has been an inevitable consequence of my relationship to a larger world. Perhaps I have allowed it to happen, but in another way perhaps, considering the kind of person that I am, always questioning things in reality, it became unavoidable.

I've come to pay increasing attention to the socio-political aspects of the use of knowledge, especially for instance, in Academic settings, but everywhere else as well. To a great extent, most legal trials are political forums of conflicting interests, mediated by lawyers to decide the legitimate or "correct" interpretation to place upon a case. Cases must seem credible and "beyond any reasonable doubt." I do so because I think that even in science, there are paradigmatic aspects of the articulation of knowledge that are serve primarily socio-political interests, either those of professors who seek to monopolize research topics or resources relating to such topics, or of the state in the promulgation of certain administrative policies or even private-based interests.

The harm caused by what can be considered undue or disproportionate interest in the socio-political functions and aspects of knowledge systems, especially in scientific praxis, is that, I believe, of the negative sanctioning of nonconformist views, and in the unnecessary frustration and stifling of people's abilities, interests, motivations and directions in developing new lines of inquiry. The outcome is invariably a received paradigm and a field unnecessarily narrowed and restricted. This is reflected, for instance, in the narrowing of the scope of published materials in a discipline, and in the virtual censorship or derogation of "marginal" voices that enunciate alternative points of view. It is a potential loss of productive involvement that would be impossible to measure in the best of circumstances.

In the long run, such social praxis serves as resistance to the progress of a science, serving to put brakes and blinders on the entire program of research and scholarship aimed at increasing and improving our knowledge systems. It seems that scientific progress is often as not achieved in spite of these kinds of issues, rather than as a result of them, and thus, I believe, the reason for the title of Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. When a paradigm shift finally does occur, it may be so sweeping in scope that it leads to a total collapse of the previously predominant point of view, along with all those who had a vested commitment to sustaining such a view perpetually.

My concern over these issues in particular has gradually arisen over the years in relation to anthropology as this is articulated in different forums and programs, and has come to take increasing attention because of the constructive and consequential nature of this discourse. It becomes a matter of whose point of view predominates or gets put forward, with a marked decreasing range of tolerance for alternative perspectives. Within such forums, there is much manipulation, negotiation, subterfuge and even, I would say, status control that occurs with the express intention of promoting some points of view while demoting other, antithetical ones. I have come to experience similar processes lately in programs other than anthropology departments, in the natural sciences especially where one would expect some degree of neutral objectivity and openness to alternative frameworks of interpretation.

I remark upon these issues because I believe firmly, or at least have come to a sense of conclusion, that these kinds of issues firmly impede us and stand in our way in the process of constructing new and better models of reality. A vast majority of Academics are caught up playing the Academic game, not so much to advance the knowledge of the field, but to advance their own somewhat restricted career interests in some department or university setting, or in some larger professional forum. The result I believe is a vast, bureaucratically administered army of highly trained brains marching to much the same tunes, and involved for the most part in the reproduction of "normal" science. The result I see is a narrowing of the scope of any and every field below what could be potentially achieved by the limited resources that are available.

I see the entire knowledge game as having come full circle, both in my own life, and in the larger history of knowledge in general. What started off a century ago as a critique of Western capitalism and imperial hegemony in the world by mainly European nations, and the rationalist viewpoints and sciences which largely supported these larger political economic formations, and what became in the 1960's a critique of the social construction of reality and the social relativity of knowledge, even scientific knowledge, and became in the late 1980's and the decade of the 1990's a call for a new form of political correctness and post-structural critique that appeared mainly self-deconstructive, seems to me to have reached a natural turning point, or should I say a "point of returning" to fill the void created in its own wake. Post-modern humanists, I should say, have created a negative debit in their own credibility, and they run the clear risk of not having anybody pay any attention to themselves, unless they can offer, in the wake of all their critique, a basis for new kinds of constructions and a new foundation for objectivity that is more or less free of the kinds of fallacies that they charged to the articulation of conventional knowledge in the world.

This work is about science, and not humanism per se, and humanists cannot be expected to successfully conduct scientific experiments on their own terms. The problem is not just bridging the gulf between the two Academic cultures and the worldviews and diametrically opposed ideological camps that they frequently represent. It is rather about seeing the larger sense of complementariness and unity of perspective between the subjective and the objective, and about developing a conceptual framework that puts this larger sense of integration of knowledge before the various and often competing and conflicting interests of different knowledge systems.

From an anthropological perspective, I offer a cultural basis for understanding knowledge and its articulation in the world as a potential meta-system, thereby substituting something that appears to be constructed and constructive for what has proven to be largely only destructive and critical about cultural and culturally derived theory. I define culture in a larger sociological and anthropological sense as something that is potentially emergent and reflective of the increased sharing and unification of people in the world. I offer furthermore the concept of culture as a basic meta-system for all knowledge systems and for their integration in the world, as a vehicle for achieving a new kind of world order that does not suffer as much from the kinds of contradictions our current world confronts. Many of the problems that we deal with in the world today can be analyzed in terms that are ultimately cultural in origin--much that stands in the way of achieving development and some sense of progress is due to cultural parameters that are narrow or stilted, usually to some coalitions advantage at the expense of many other people.

Knowledge systems, in other words, are invariably human based systems. We do the thinking, the learning, the knowing, the understanding and the communicating. We conduct the discourse for which our frameworks are constructed. All the mountains of stuff printed and published have no consequence or significance in the world unless they are read and used actively by people at least in thought if not in action. Scientific formulas mean nothing in themselves unless they are made significant by the human knower who can not only understand their significance but apply the formula to the world in some effective way. This is the basis for what I call the anthropological relativity of knowledge, and even purely scientific systems of knowledge are still constrained by the same kinds of factors in their human articulation and social praxis.

For myself, I have come full circle over the years in the sense that I have come to a reconciliation of my own frames of mind about my own professional identity and ambivalence as a professional vis-à-vis a larger community. I began my quest in this regard more than 24 years ago, in an attempt to overcome through understanding and alternative intellectual construction the desperate military circumstances that I had found myself thrust into. And so it has gone in every different context since that time. Its pursuit has led me to different foreign places, and to many different settings across the United States. The status aspects of knowledge, its politics, were never at the center of my being so much as they have come to occupy the center of my critical focus. I and my family have paid dearly for this sense of failure to participate in the political function and social articulation of knowledge, but on a basic level it is not this that I regret about my life. What I regret most in my life is not having carried such inquiry further than I have managed to do.

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All knowledge systems can have ideological functions in society. These functions are those of legitimization, creation of received authority and the capacity to determine social judgments of truth and falsehood. Ideologies have a universal claim and tend in this sense to be absolutizing over other knowledge systems. Absolutization of knowledge in terms of ideological belief structures has a fundamental function of masking the relativities inherent in knowledge. Furthermore, ideologies suffer the fallacies of naturalization, of reification and misplaced concretization. Social aspects of scientific knowledge, in particular what can be called paradigmatic, are essentially ideological in function. As ideology, sciences achieves its power institutionally by the repression of its own constructive functions, by disguising the history of their knowledge construction. As ideology, science becomes a form of self-contradiction that defeats its own purpose and function in reality.

Knowledge systems in ideological function have the aim at persuasion of people, and the cultivation of symbolic mythologies and the legitimization of structures of social action and belief that would otherwise lack symbolic realism and social motivation.

If all knowledge is socially constructed and potentially ideological, then it follows that its claims to realism must always be relativized by the acknowledgement, or at least awareness of its own social relativity that is a function of this construction. When science is taught as "objective truth" of the really real, it a approaches a kind of ideological dogmatism that takes its own social situation and origin for granted.

This claim is not the same as saying that there is not external reality that is the object of science to investigate, nor is it to assert that science cannot use objective method to arrive at a realistic understanding of this reality. It is to assert that this very function of science demands its own self-effacing as ideology, and a reflexive awareness of its own relativistic construction. This constitutes the anthropological relativity of scientific knowledge that is its own primary constraint in its articulation. The function of science as ideology is harmful to scientific praxis. The trouble with this fundamentally relativist stand, situated in the sociology and anthropology of knowledge, is that its own claim to objectivity must also come under critical self-reflexive investigation. We end up with a groundless ground upon which to base our meanings.

But if the claim of objective reality is a valid one, which I believe it to be, then the possibility and claim for a kind of objective knowledge of reality should also be warranted. Science largely attempts and achieves this, in varying ways and forms in different fields of its application and articulation. The fact of the social construction of reality, itself a reality taken for granted, is rooted in the basic and universal sociality of humankind, and in the communicative and symbolic function of its knowledge in the organization and functioning of this social reality. This social reality is as objective as any atom or animal that composes it, or as any space that contains it. It is the knowledge itself that is relative, because this knowledge is the intermediate form that occurs between our own awareness and sense of order in the world, and the experience of the world itself. All human experience is mediated by one form of knowledge or another, and usually by more than one, and all these forms of knowledge can be said to be symbolic in content, form, function and structure.

I have undertaken this work in natural systems theory coming from an advanced and hopefully sophisticated perspective that is by training and dent of experience grounded in the anthropology, sociology and psychology of knowledge. Issues of knowledge relativity and relativism are central in this understanding, as well as is the self-determination to escape the consequences of the ideological function of knowledge, its paradigmatic embrace, and to understand its consequences for our systems. Even further, it is to outline an approach that sees such reflexive understanding not as antithetical to a more objective approach to the representation and relation to reality, as this is especially embodied by scientific praxis, but to demonstrate that such an approach is a necessary precursor to a more objective worldview and means for achieving greater objectivity of our knowledge than is otherwise the case when such a perspective is either ignored or prejudiced against.

Only when formal knowledge systems, embodied in terms of their practitioners and the texts and forums they create, are understood from the standpoint of their own reflexive praxis and functions in society, as a kind of post-structural critique, is it then possible for science to step deliberately beyond the invisible boundaries of ideological paradigms that they create for themselves by their own cultural transparency. This is as true in the hard sciences as it is in the social sciences, even more true in some instances, albeit in different ways in different areas of knowledge and discourse.

*****

There has been at least for myself a disturbing trend throughout the sciences and within Academia in general. Perhaps it is only alarming for myself because I am an anthropologist who is supposed at least to be paying attention to such things. In academia, a rage for correctness and for diversity has led on one hand to a kind of intellectual inquisition and an emphasis upon conformist academic authoritarianism, and on the other, to the rise and prevalence at all levels of double standards and hypocrisy. Within the sciences, there is a general acceptance, or should I say unquestioning credibility, given to received views about how the world works, especially upon a general level of understanding. I would claim that academic programs and forums today are unprecedented, not for the open and free exchange of ideas in a common marketplace, but for fierce competition for status and resources, and for the dominance of received points of view over a humble and naïve attitude toward the unknown and the uncertain.

This is true, I believe, in the natural sciences, where received theoretical paradigms are no longer seriously questioned in spite of mounting counterevidence, and even more in the social sciences, where even good work of old is being discarded and devalued, not for its intrinsic merit, but for its failure to fit within the current paradigms that are promulgated. These approaches are no often no longer being taught as classics except perhaps in a dismissive and summary manner. 

Only in the biological sciences do we find the carry over of the older system of ideas, and its hybridization with new methods and information. But Biology enjoyed immense success within a Victorian framework, and has subsequently entered a plateau period of normal puzzle-solving that will not witness any "new synthesis" any time soon. And the paradigms that are being promulgated are being done so upon an unprecedented administrative and bureaucratic level of control that involves the collusion of private interests and public officials over the manipulation of government and academic resources. If there is a conspiracy about all this, then it was a conspiracy of cronies and of a modern business culture that was developed more than thirty years ago and is now at least into its second generation of sycophants and MBA's.

In short, I believe, we have created in global Academia a Brave New World, and it is therefore a world in which science can be nothing but normal and over determined. The metaparadigm of "correctness" has become entrenched upon a level of implicit, indirect sanctioning. We all know what is correct on a basic level--we sense it, though we cannot ever clearly define what it is or how we should be. Essentially, it becomes whatever our leaders want it to be. It has become embedded in the cosmopolitan culture of global academia, and its values of competition and monopolizations reflect the values of the capitalist political economy upon which it rests and to which it is attached as an institution of secondary symbolic legitimization. It is known now more in its violation than in its social articulation in society.

The main trouble and disturbing concern I have over the state of the academic mind is one of a failure upon certain levels to develop either an independent, coherent worldview, and, more importantly, a consistent and equally independent style and pursuit of life that reflects such a worldview and that adds to it in basic ways. A genuine interest and involvement in the reality of the world, has largely become replaced by an insincere self-involvement and self-interest in one's own prestige and position within a rank-ordered structure.

Worldview in many ways stands as much manipulated, even more in some regards, in open societies like the United States and Great Britain, as has been in the 20th Century Totalitarian Societies, as in China and in other totalitarian states. This manipulation derives in the free world not from the restriction of the freedom of information itself, as it occurs in Big Brother societies, so much as it is intrinsic to the structure of the distribution of information, and to the interference in the access and availability of what can be considered to be critical or vital information. They are not being lied to and denied, so much as they are not being told the entire truth. People who maintain themselves as deliberately uninformed, because they have no access to the proper information channels, are not just docile and obedient as their counterparts are on the other side of the world, but they become something worse, I believe. They become willing participants in the control processes themselves, willing to edit the information to suit their narrow cultural rationalizations, etc. They become more highly manipulable and gullible by and to such misinformation because they see their main social interest in such a world. Chinese are led by the nose, the Americans by the tail.

A big part of this dilemma in the Western developed world is just the shear mass and complexity of all the information, and the challenges of its organization in a socially useful and timely manner. But this is not the crux of the problem, so much as it is the basis. The crux of the problem rests clearly with the control structures that operate largely behind closed doors rather than in open forums to manipulate the laws and implicit rules of social systems in the promotion of private self-interest. Academia in this context becomes a game to be played, often at any cost, in which knowledge and information is treated as a resource and a commodity to be bought and sold for profit, and people are merely pawns and cogs in a largely impersonal system.

In understanding where we have gotten to in the academic system, we must ask ourselves what might be wrong with what we are doing, and what may be missing from all that we have done or intend to do. Furthermore, it is rooted in our goals, values and our educational priorities as to what is important to transmit to the future and what is conveniently, if not safely, ignored.

One of the things that seems missing in the academic milieu, is a genuine sense of cooperative endeavor for the achievement of common and collective goals that extend beyond the life-world of the individual. Another thing that seems missing is a full inclusion of the individual as an individual, rather than merely as a member or a competitor in a larger marketplace. This implies as well that there is lacking a fundamental level of trust and solidarity in interpersonal academic relations, as well as a fundamental reciprocity of interest and attention that is not prestructured within some hierarchical framework.

Missing also, I believe, is a sense of the play of ideas, or a kind of ideodaedaly that allows the production of new and alternative insights. Connected to this seems to be the lack of forums for such open communications to be cultivated and take place within, as well possibly as the appropriate atmosphere of social relations that entail mutual interest, respect, tolerance and appreciation of alternative points of view.

This kind of critique comes as a paradox to the formal trend towards increase in diversity in the Academia upon all levels. This sense of paradox is only resolved when we realize that diversity is largely a front that is defined in rather spurious and pseudo-scientific terms of race, and it therefore becomes a mechanism for the inculcation of a narrow sense of conformity, rather than as a means for opening the channels of communication between different people and different kinds of people. By opening the competitive base at one end of the academic ladder and in some ways within the larger social system, they have managed to effectively close it on the other end and in other ways.

*****

There is an important sense that runs throughout an anthropological perspective, especially in terms of research, that involves the problem of attempting to relate the immediate, and concrete apprehension of events and relationships one experiences in the here and now of everyday reality, with the largest possible significations that one can bring to bear upon the framing and comprehension of such experience. Through experience, we learn to do it commonly in field research, and we find ourselves sometimes embarrassed when we are still doing it somewhat habitually in the course of the rest of our lives. These significations that we draw from and bring to our everyday, concrete experiences are not of any form or fashion, but are constrained by certain guidelines of selection and definition that are framed within an anthropological idiom and worldview.

I have undertaken this work and previous works (Natural Systems, Metasystems) as a result of a decade and more of involvement in an esoteric field known as the Anthropology of Knowledge, that is akin to the perspectives referred to generally as the sociology of knowledge, except that traditionally the problem of the anthropology of knowledge deals with the anthropological (including, but not exclusively, the social construction of reality) construction of reality. Many questions inform this kind of study, which can be considered the cognitive equivalent of cross-cultural research. We consider issues of natural and cultural classification, the influence of language and culture upon human thought, the general relativity of knowledge, the possibility of cognitive universals, early acquisition, socialization and secondary enculturation of personality, psychological abnormality, especially from a cross-cultural perspective, the problem of symbolism and symbolic behavior, the ethnosemantic and ethnoscientific organization and distribution of across a cultural landscape knowledge, the cultural and ideological constraints of knowledge systems, the worldview problem, the problem of attitudes, emotions and behaviors across cultural boundaries, the problem of common sense, the problem of logical inference, the problem of the influence of literacy and orality upon human noetic patterns, problems such as the rural-urban transition in affecting the way human beings think and respond to their world, as well as a host of other related questions.

In returning from fieldwork abroad, I have sought both a larger, more general definition of the kind of research and study I have done, and I have sought to extend its methodologies operationally to embrace a wider array of applications of knowledge. At the same time, I've sought to elevate the entire problem of the "construction of reality" to a level of theoretical and methodological stature and design that it probably deserves, beyond being the mere critique of western knowledge and its structural articulation in the world. I have sought to extend the theoretical insights and problem solving operations developed within an anthropological perspective, to embrace a wider plethora of the human experience as this is articulated in and by means of formal knowledge systems. This development has gone in several different but convergent directions at the same time. I have been interested in the elaboration of what I refer to as a metasystems approach, which can be said to be based upon something akin to a "metaparadigm" of knowledge.

This entails that we adopt not only a critical or "post-structural" view of knowledge systems as we find them in the world, but that we attempt to define what can be called a metastructure for knowledge systems, whether of our own construction or a claim to more objective status in the world. In other words, I have sought to offer yet another construction in place of all our constructions, but one that is better informed than either the constructions or the critique.

Especially in this regard I have come to focus mainly upon scientific knowledge, and what might be properly referred to as the anthropology of scientific knowledge. It embraces what I call the natural sciences, which includes the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, geology and related subdisciplines); all fields of the biological sciences; and all related fields of the social sciences, (including anthropology itself, which paradoxically is the framework in which this work is defined in the first place). It also has been enlarged to embrace fields of mathematics, philosophy, engineering, education, art and, last but not least, the so-called cognitive computer sciences.

The role of science in the world and scientific knowledge has become of increasing interest in this research for several interrelated reasons: 1. As a knowledge system it has achieved superlative success in the shaping of our world and the received view of our world, both positively and negatively, and nevertheless, it lacks a "total worldview" that can be called its own. 2. Issues of the status and importance of scientific knowledge in the world, its organization and dynamics, has remained as yet unresolved. 3. Science as a general knowledge system informs a great deal of what is done in many different and disparate knowledge systems, though these processes have not been fully described. The sciences as a plethora of varieties of expertise seem to share basic presuppositions in common, and yet exhibit many fundamental differences in approach and style as well. 4. Science offers the potential for achieving a theoretical perspective and system of organization of knowledge upon a level of integration that has not yet been realized. 5. Finally, science as what I consider to be a central problem in reality involves the question of reality in both the most basic and most ideal senses that we can come up with.

One form of anthropological relativity rests upon the interpretive parallax of human language systems, particularly as these are used in the general description and denotation of reality. In such cases, multiple solutions to basic problem sets can be generated, each essentially correct, depending upon how the problem sets were defined in the first place. Each view would be entirely logical and rational, though they may lead to entirely different, and even at times conflicting conclusions. The problems themselves are as often as not defined in terms that lack any sense of clear resolution or that fail to disambiguate the realities supposedly represented. In such situations, we can say that the lack of agreement does not begin in the conclusions, but in the definition of the terms and the presuppositions that we bring to these terms that we employ. This demonstrates at the level of the study of culture and human reality, a certain form of semantic uncertainty about our knowledge, and a kind of complementarity of alternative points of view, each equally or more or less correct, but each limited in the terms that it uses to define the problem and reach its solution. Furthermore, science imposes some kind of objective criteria or set of standards upon such viewpoints, such that it stipulates that for any given problem set in reality, there should ideally be only one correct set of answers or best solution that exists independently of our knowledge parallax that we bring to such "systems" regardless of whether we can clearly identify or define such structures. They are presumed to exist at least a priori to our ability to comprehend them or the fact of our apperception of them.

The complementariness of the structure of knowledge, at whatever level we are addressing, but especially in this case, upon social levels, is inherent to the knowledge and depends upon the primes that we adopt in our definitions and presuppositions about the world. 

The first inferences we make regarding some problem set about which there is some degree of uncertainty, due to lack of information, will determine the possible outcomes that we arrive at. If we realize that our first definition of the problem may be prestructured in terms of the kinds of inferences we make from it, prestructured by our habits of seeing and defining what we see, by our habits of perception and conception that frames what we see, by unstated feelings and semantic meanings that remain usually below the surface of our awareness, then we can see that the outcomes of our interpretation or investigation may well depend upon our initial states and statements we make. If more than one set of solutions might be forthcoming from this semantic parallax inherent to complex problem sets, then we cannot claim that one solution is better than any other or is to be preferred, except perhaps unless we impose some set of intersubjective standards upon our solution.

This complementarity of knowledge resists the notion of establishing singular or primary causality for event processes or occurrences in the world. There are always more than one cause for complex problem sets, and therefore more than one correct solution in the explanation of such problem sets.

In light of this fundamental consideration of the anthropological relativity of knowledge, I have sought to offer what I feel to be the underlying structural aspects of naturally occurring systems at all levels. We can make the following kinds of statements:

1. All natural systems consist of complex, composite event structures that occur through time and in space, usually in a repetitive and at least in an expectable pattern.

2. All natural systems exhibit event structures that are reducible to series or sequences of cycles defined by two or more discrete events that occur per cycle.

3. All natural systems are informationally describable--their patterns can be linguistically or mathematically defined in terms that permit conclusions to be drawn about similar phenomena, or outcomes of such phenomena, and can be explained and demonstrated in terms of the rules derived logically and statistically from the observation of the patterns.

4. All natural systems are based upon emergent properties that are explainable in terms of the synergistic relationships of component subsystems. Emergent properties characterize the behavior of the systems as a single whole or integrated unity.

5. All natural systems are mechanically ordered and function upon different levels. Such systems can be said to be mechanically articulated, and the patterns produced by their articulation can be described in terms of discrete cycles or steps.

6. All natural systems exhibit some form of equilibrium of energy between its component parts and as a system as a whole in relation to its surrounding environment.

7. All natural systems have some form of built-in control structures that regulate the articulation of the system.

8. All natural systems perform some kind of work, that can be described, in a larger sense of the term, as anti-entropic in function. In other words, they can be said to occur in patterns that are relatively: 1. nonrandom; 2. semi-deterministic.

9. All natural systems appear to articulate with other systems in regular ways, leading to the development, through emergent properties, of a higher order system of integration that leads to the development of new natural systems.

10. All natural systems integrate within the natural surroundings of their articulation, and are subject to the same sets of physical properties and laws that govern their physical surroundings.

We can add a few more caveats to our definition of natural systems. All natural systems are both finite and continuous, have start, middle and end states, and tend to be instantaneously unique from any other similar or different system, and yet are however remotely related to any and every other natural system.

A natural system, in other words, can be described in definable terms and can be explained in terms of the mechanisms and state-path patterns such systems exhibit. Furthermore, they are amenable to experimental control and replication in nature, and these facets render the elaboration of such systems to be a fundamental part of scientific method as this is conventionally understood. In other words, we do not have to invoke what can be called supernatural causes to explain the origin and function of natural systems upon any level.

Natural systems therefore are a set of things and/or processes that interact and cohere together to form a functionally integrated unit. The basis for their integration is the rise of what can be called "control" and this "control" forms the basis for the emergence of dependent patterning. Control can be considered to be any measure of feedback that results in resonance patterning, whether this is amplifying, dampening, stabilizing or destabilizing. Control can be simple, or it can constitute a rather complex subsystem of the one it is controlling. Control sets in motion active constraints in the relational interactions possible within a system, and hence serve to regulate and forestall the path toward random decay in order between the subcomponents of the system and the system as a whole.

Control enables the establishment of a dynamic equilibrium of a system in relation to its surroundings, and this equilibrium is tied to the reciprocity of relations within the system and its environment.

Thus, the maintenance of order against the gradient of universal entropy is the basis for understanding life forms. It confers to a system a distinctive identity in nature, a pattern of order in a sea of disorder, that is frequently demarcated by the maintenance of some boundary mechanism.

There appears to be a fundamental similarity of ordering of natural relationships in the world at any and every level that we may choose to analyze. I have sought to frame within scientific terms, terms that I furthermore seek to qualify from both relativistic and objectivist standpoints, what I have come to call a metaparadigm of natural systems that exhibit a similar structure of patterning upon many different levels.

I would call a "metaparadigm" a framework for understanding that seeks to be comprehensive and encompassing of knowledge of many different forms. The metaparadigm that I seek is a system of knowledge that successfully integrates scientific knowledge, as well as other forms of knowledge, in a comprehensive framework.

What I refer to as a system embodies the notion of the complementarity of knowledge, that we seek to know and understand that with which we are dealing from as many different angles and perspectives as possible. But a system is more than just knowledge--a scientific system attaches itself outside to a world of experience and sensibility and action. It is a system that has a material form of expression and that therefore always involves the energy dynamics that are associated with any material form of objective expression. We call such a system mechanical--it is composed of working parts that make certain events happen, events that always involve the exchange of energy at least.

Thus the system of knowledge in science is purportedly at least based upon the implicit systems of nature that underlie the patterns of things we observe in the material reality. The system of knowledge in science is also based upon another fundamental property that seems inherent and important to the patterning of nature at all levels. It is based upon information that is implicit to the patterning of nature. By information, we are not referring to knowledge, but to the building blocks of knowledge that are derived from the order and repetition and regularity of pattern that we find in nature, as well as upon the changes and differences and chaos found as well.

Natural information is always found embedded in reality in a manner that invites choice and alternatives, variation and fluctuation. We assign meaning to these patterns, as we project by means of our cognitive abilities a symbolic framework upon the world, and we take in these meanings as things of symbolic significance in our lives. In a strictly scientific sense, we delimit this meaning strictly by empirical, etic standards of observation and replication of results. In this sense, information is a part of a system, a property of a system, and makes no sense outside of the system's framework. In such a case, information can be considered an inherent part or property of the design of the system, or its structural order and function. Natural information can be seen to be directly associated to and dependent upon the problem of energy in the natural world, particularly the problem of the organization of energy to perform some kind of work. Work in general occurs against a natural gradient involving the entropic loss of energy and therefore the inherent randomization and loss of ordered pattern and relationship.

Information is therefore a kind of trick nature plays upon itself--an order of relationship in a world based upon the inevitability of disorder. We derive knowledge from information that is a part of the structure of patterning we observe, and yet the information itself is critically conditioned by the selective perception and or preconceived categories employed in description. This is another fundamental part of anthropological relativity, that it is ultimately impossible to see the world in a fully disengaged or distantiated or objectified way. All such information will be framed not only in terms of the event patterning in which it is manifest, but in the terms that we bring to the experience of reality in order to render such reality meaningful and useful in our lives. If this is not challenging enough by itself, we must also take into account the informational facticity of our own presence and material existence in the world. We are a natural part of the informational framework that we are attempting to describe and define, and this basic truth is often lost sight of in supposedly "objective" interpretations of reality. We are attempting to define and describe information in terms that are ultimately part of the informational system, and that are composed by the same constituent factors that are involved in the production of natural information.

A systems framework provides a means for the organization of scientific knowledge upon an integrated and comprehensive level of its articulation in the world. In other words, it forms the foundation for the development of a metaparadigmatic approach to scientific worldview in a universal and general sense, as well as to scientific praxis in any context in which it can be said to occur.

A common definition that I feel applicable to all scientific knowledge is that it is:

1. Problem solving, in such a manner that solutions to the problems it attempts to solve are empirically substantiable and replicable, lead to the solution of other problems (i.e. they are productive solutions), and lead as well to new information and knowledge about reality, or else to the progressive improvement and refinement of such knowledge compared to some received standard.

2. Empirically descriptive and classificatory of reality in terms that are objectively realistic and make sense of the events and relations found in reality in some rational order.

3. Theoretically explanatory of the events and relationships found in reality in a manner that works and that can be tested by means of repeat, controlled experimental application.

4. Results in the augmentation of reality by the invention and devising of new systems of information that are alternative and non-natural, but which are based upon the ordered manipulation of natural events and phenomena.

The last point may not be obvious and is developed further at a later point in the text. Suffice it to say in this introduction that

Though it appears that I have adopted a fairly standard and conventional approach to the definition of science, I would qualify such an approach by a number of statements. First, science is what science does, and it appears that sciences is being done differently by many different people. It may seem superficial and perhaps superfluous to impose and arbitrary set of standards or system of problem solving upon all sciences, regardless of their domains, their history and their models and methods of praxis.

Beyond a received view of science, we must address the notion of the culture of science that shares, among other things, a certain consensus or agreement of worldview and understanding, as well as a special set of problems as well as the instruments for the solution of such problems. The culture is not all about sharing and consensus--it is as much about the competition of ideas and conflict of viewpoint as well. Scientific culture is about language dialects that define realities in complex terms, and about the sharing of implicit values and standards that serve to demarcate the boundaries and codes of conduct for this or that kind of scientist. It is about the control and distribution of resources and funding that permits and legitimizes some forms of research, and undermines and destroys the basis for other kinds or directions of research involvement. It is about egos, people and small cliques that become established and vie for position and status within some social organizational framework. It is in other words an inherently plural reality from the standpoint of the distribution of its knowledge among a broad plethora of different domains.

These aspects of the anthropology of scientific knowledge are no less important than the previous approaches toward its objectivity, for they affect the shape and outcome of scientific knowledge, and its ability to serve as either a positive or negative force in the world. But more importantly, they help us to understand the realities of science as something that is lived, as social praxis and process that has its own dynamics and that influences how it articulates with and in the world.

The issue of the socio-cultural construction and praxis of scientific knowledge, a viewpoint which arose clearly in the humanities as a critique of science, has probably been ill-received if at all within the sciences proper. Nevertheless, it does warrant consideration, as it broaches a much deeper issue within the argument of anthropological relativity of all knowledge, and that is the inherent dichotomy between subjective and objective ways of knowing. At all times, knowledge is situated both in and outside of the individual, and knowledge acts as a bridge between the inner and outer world that allows coordination of a sense of self and place within a larger context. We can see in this argument at once a larger symbolic function of scientific knowledge in answer to the question of "why" science. It situates the subjective sense of self within a world that is more certain and more solid because of its sense of certainty. It helps us to make sense of the world, and via this means, to also maintain a sense of balance of the ourselves in the world.

The subject-object dichotomy is inherent to all knowledge, and is reflected as well in the social situation of such knowledge, as both a sense of objectivity and greater subjectivity is broadened out to embrace a wider range of people. For this wider compass, a scientific worldview and collective representations offer the possibility of a basic sense of unity and a shared foundation for consensus about reality, as well as the possibility of greater realism in action and as expressed in social relation. It has from the beginning been a goal of science that it should involve an improvement of relation between people and the world, and between different people as a part of this world. The basis of scientific standards of measurement and objectivity really rests upon a shared locus of the public availability of scientific knowledge, open to independent test and verification. At the same time, the legitimization of the subject aspects of scientific knowledge also exists essentially within a social locus--one person alone has neither a clear sense of objectivity or one's own subjectivity.

I believe that scientific realism and detail of knowledge would mean little by itself if it is just left in books or journals on library shelves. It is in the act of reading the literature and understanding in a subjective sense that such knowledge achieves its purpose and function in the world, and that serves as the principle motivation, beyond status mongering and ego-centrism. Again, scientific knowledge, without independent social verification, remains essentially solipsistic and useless. Its use and function therefore always has both simultaneously a social and subjective locus.

As the basis for a metasystems approach and to advanced systems science, I propose a general heuristic problem solving methodology that I believe has substantive applicability to a wide range of knowledge systems. The basis for this approach is to construe problem sets, whether natural or of human origin, within a complementary framework of theoretical and operational interpretation that permits what can be considered successive or progressive resolution of the problem set by means of some workable solution that can be said to be of optimal value in terms of some received set of standards. There is both a rational and consensual framework for the framing and operationalization of these problem sets, that are rooted in as much common sense and basic experience as they are in open mindedness and exploratory inquisitiveness. There is also an empirical framework for problem definition, description and reference by which the results and outcomes, as well as the terms and terminologies, and the underlying taxonomies of relationship and difference, are consistently applied. At the same time, there are what can be called lateral models and alternative points of view, as well as complementary forms of knowledge and perspective, that may play upon the definition and solution of problem sets.

We stand in the middle of these influences and constraints, and we engage ourselves and one another in a dialectic of inference and practice by which we seek to resolve the sense of complexity and the overwhelming overload of information by some elegant and simplifying formula or paradigm that brings these different directions of knowledge together in a common middle-ground.

It is recognized that in any theory construction there must occur a compromise based upon a whole series of trade-offs between competing points of view.

The heuristic methodology I have espoused herein is one derived from anthropological research and is one that has general applicability in a large number of areas. Part of the issue here is the problem of the linguistic entanglement of meanings and words in the definition and explanation of scientific reality--language remains the primary basis for the communication of scientific information and ideas. Math as the abstract language of science is valid in an abstract sense as implied in the Noumenal realities of Aristotle and Plato, but its application to the description of actual natural realities is usually limited to measurement upon some scale, be it that of distance, time, temperature, weight, pressure, or count, be it percentage, proportion, sampling or some other derivative statistical measure. Even intrinsically, the applied use of mathematics to the problems of scientific description and explanation remain for the most part abstractly oversimplifying and limited in application. Hence, such language is usually severely limited in the actual process of defining and explaining event structures and state-path trajectories in nature. We therefore invoke standard language to come to our rescue, but then we are confronted with its semantic constraints and its inherent imprecision to describe faithfully the details as well as the conceptual rules lying behind the details.

The general heuristic proposed herein has efficacy to the extent that language problems represent duality of patterning in relation to the problems that they attempt to solve. If problems are empirically definable with finite and correct solutions available, then the challenge becomes to both disambiguate the terms used in the logical definition of the problem, as well as to push the problem in the general direction of the solution by ever closer approximations. The problem we deal with here, even for applied mathematical descriptions and statistic, are the logical inference structures that we apply to the understanding of the implicit rule structures and relationships that we find in our data--this problem is by no means a trivial one, nor can it be simply and safely overlooked just because it remains largely an invisible issue. Furthermore, we are limited in the semantics of our language to a definitional view of reality, and to a referential semantics that implies also some sense of taxonomic hierarchy, often embedded in the language itself, that implies underlying theories about the things being thus described. We would like to invoke a simplifying sense of common sense, or at least to basic categories, but we are hard pressed to find a common sense in the world that is not underscored by ethnocentrism or ego-centricity of judgment, nor are we likely to find a patent definition for what are "basic" or "natural" sets in the world.

Anthropological Relativity and "Systems" 

All knowledge that is or possibly becomes available to us is human knowledge--if other animals know, we cannot know what or how they know. This knowledge remains fundamentally unavailable to us. There is no knowledge that is not first prescreened and filtered through the mechanisms of human perception, cognition, memory, linguistic interpretation and active social construction. Thus there are certain built in constraints to our knowledge systems, namely and first that they are by definition human knowledge systems. This is the most general form of anthropological relativity that conditions and limits ultimately what, and how, we may know about the larger reality.

We must understand therefore that there are constraints inherent to our knowledge, of how we come to see and understand that world, that are built into our very condition as human beings, and this pre-structures what we may know and see in significant, even unknown ways.

We have developed alternative systems that have allowed us to systematically expand our knowledge base. We have developed instruments of perception, microscopes and telescopes, that allow us to see on scales never ever imagined to exist previously, and these instruments have broadened and deepened our field of view of reality by many orders of magnitude over what it was when we only had the vision of our bare eyes. Other kinds of systems have been developed to increase our knowledge of unknown realities in many other ways as well. All of these systems have broadened reality for us, and broadened our understanding of reality manifold.

But however powerful and enlightening our alternative systems may be, we must face a realization that all knowledge must ultimately be filtered through a human screen of consciousness, and this filter is far from perfect or being infallible, no matter how logical or well trained or informed we may presume ourselves or one another to be. It is most likely that there are some forms of knowledge, some domains of reality, that are for the most part permanently beyond the horizon of our understanding and comprehension, however remotely or indirectly it may be ascertained. Even the possibility of the existence of such unknown realities, containing what we may refer to as unknown systems, is itself even something that may be fundamentally uncertain. I suspect that we will reach our observational and inferential limits in understanding the fundamental processes of physical reality, for instance, in any decisive or certain manner, and that we will also reach certain grander limitations of our view of the larger universe. In fact I think we have already probably encountered such limitations even though we are hesitant to see them as insuperable boundaries to our knowledge and our science.

Two main points arise from this consideration of the fundamental anthropological relativity of all our knowledge systems, or possible knowledge systems. First, what we know, however much this may ultimately be, is always finite and always bound by the horizon of what we do not know--or of the fathomless unknown. We face a fundamental dilemma of trying to comprehend what may be ultimately infinite in terms that are by definition finite. Secondly, what we know is conditioned by the constraints of our knowledge, by how we know, and the act of knowing, which is never "pristine" as the "thing in itself" but always preconditioned by previous experience, by our own assessments, models, and patterns of perceptual recognition. It is not just that our knowledge is pre-selected and constrained in unconscious ways, but that our act of knowing reality, at whatever level, in whatever way, leads to our interaction upon some level with that reality. We bring not only our pre-understandings to our knowledge, but we bring it to what is known or possibly known by us.

These two sets of constraining conditions to human knowledge, that define the basis of anthropological relativity of knowledge, are mutually implicit to one another, and create a condition of ultimately never being certain of our knowledge, of what we really do known, in any non-relative manner. The only kind of knowledge that appears to transcend this dilemma is that encompassed by the logical relations, operations and terminologies of mathematics, the language of the "pure sciences." Pure mathematics does so by fact of its representation of ideal (i.e., non-real) realities that, by themselves, have no direct instantiation in the real world, but which are represented by many phenomenological instances that can be said to be applied forms. Even pure mathematics itself may ultimately be subject to these kinds of relativistic constraints, though we may not ever know for certain. Certain types of mathematical problems remain intransigent to solution.

One cannot over-stress the importance of understanding the role that anthropological relativity must play in our comprehension of the world, in all fields of knowledge, especially in relation to the sciences because it is in these areas of knowledge that objective/empirical claims to reality are regularly made but often without default consideration of possible anthropological constraints to such knowledge. The success of science has bred a certain attitude of hubris about what it knows and is capable of achieving, and in turn perhaps a blind eye to its own intrinsic limitations. 

It is an important caveat to note as well that when we refer to anthropological relativity of knowledge, we are referring to a basic philosophical and cognitive condition intrinsic to our form of symbolic knowledge itself. We are not referring thereby, however implicitly, to more vulgar forms of humanistic relativism, the problems of cultural relativity or interpretive parallax, or the role of emotions and dispositions in our thinking, and so forth. We are referring to a fundamental condition, a basic statement about the limits, nature and structure of all human knowledge, however it may be expressed, interpreted or used in the world.

It is especially in the realm of systems theory and systems science that the question of the anthropological relativity of knowledge comes to greatest focus and therefore gains the greatest significance. This is because systems theory deals primarily with the complementarity of alternative frameworks of reference, especially dealing holistically with complex systems, as all natural systems really are, and this entails the adoption automatically of a relativistic approach to such understanding, consideration of the fundamental contextuality and conditions that constrain our knowledge of the world.

We have largely taken for granted the pan-human condition of the anthropological relativity of our knowledge because it remains normally invisible and transparent to us as a condition intrinsic to ourselves. We cannot see the outside of the room that we are looking out from in the first place. The idea that we can feasible step beyond the boundaries of our own knowledge worlds arises in a partial manner of inter-psychological or inter-cultural parallax when we do encounter and interact with people who have adopted fundamentally different frames of reference for their knowledge than our own. We gain a sense of relativization and objectification of the difference that we normally do not need to deal with when we deal only with collective precepts and assumptions that are considered to be globally shared and universally true. But we are not likely to be brought fully to the objective awarenesss of the limitations and structure of our own knowledge unless and until we encounter some form of alternative intelligence in the universe, that is capable of some form of intelligent knowledge and information transmission. It will only be then that we are fully awakened from the complacency of our own knowledge foundations, and provided a frame of reference that we have never experienced before. I will not presume to make any predictions at this time about the outcomes of such an encounter for our worldview and thus, for our world.

Human Systems

by Hugh M. Lewis