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I was recently having a discussion with a friend about whether or not systems theory is anti-realist per se. It seems to me that almost every systems theorist I've encountered has been explicitly anti-realist, but I don't believe that this is necessarily strictly true.
For a working definition of realism, I'll take Francisco Varela's definition from The Embodied Mind:
"The world out there has pregiven properties. These exist prior to the image that is cast on the cognitive system, whose task is to recover them appropriately (whether through symbols or global subsymbolic states."
Thoughts?
For a working definition of realism, I'll take Francisco Varela's definition from The Embodied Mind:
"The world out there has pregiven properties. These exist prior to the image that is cast on the cognitive system, whose task is to recover them appropriately (whether through symbols or global subsymbolic states."
Thoughts?
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Re: systems theory as anti-realist
Wed, June 30, 2004 - 8:09 AMIsn't systems theory a means of recovering appropriately "pregiven properties"? -
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Re: systems theory as anti-realist
Wed, June 30, 2004 - 8:58 AMIt would seem to me that systems theory / complexity is, quite the contrary, explicitly realist. In Maturana and Varela's discussions of autopoeisis, for example, even though they view the autopoetic organization as a self-determining system, they acknowledge that this system is living in recursive interaction with the environment and that is the basis for the structural change it determines within itself over time. This implies an environment with pregiven properties to which a cognitive system continually self-adapts.
At best, you might say that complexity is "realism with a twist", in the sense that *knowledge* of properties is not pregiven and only emerges in recursive interactions between subject and object. This is not to say that knowledge is to be equated with objective properties, it is simply the process through which we adapt to such properties. -
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Re: systems theory as anti-realist
Wed, June 30, 2004 - 10:01 AMI can see your point, although Maturana and Varela make several statements that strike me as pointedly anti-realist. For instance, in the introduction to Autopoeisis and Cognition, Maturana relates how his work with color vision in frogs drove him reluctantly to the position that a visual field can only be understood as a mutual construction between the nervous system of the frog and the givens of the environment.
Perhaps I'm being too dualistic in suggesting that systems theory is strictly anti-realist - I don't mean to suggest that there are no givens in the world. That would be absurd. I do mean to suggest that there is no possible unmediated description or perception. My position is that perception and description have a fundamental role in constructing or determining their objects - even on the level of Locke's 'primary qualities'. -
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Re: systems theory as anti-realist
Mon, August 23, 2004 - 10:55 PMIMHO, Barnaby, everything you, Maturana and Varela have said in this posting is consistent with realism, as held by nearly all contemporary Anglo-American philosophers in the realism / antirealism debate, except for the most extreme of "naive realists" and a few anti-realists. Nearly everyone else agrees with the "interactionist" view. To my mind, the only true metaphysical anti-realists are those who accept what you called *absurd* ("there are no givens in the world...").
If you reject that position, then it is merely a matter of what kind of realist you are, what kind of relationship you think obtains between "the given" and the cognitive system trying to ascertain or adapt to their properties. Interestingly, I have heard many more scientists than philosophers (who are presumably the experts in this kind of debate) take a hardcore anti-realist position.
But I would like to make one modification to your statement, "My position is that perception and description have a fundamental role in constructing or determining their objects." Many or most realists might rephrase this as, "My position is that perception and description have a fundamental role in constructing or determining (OUR CONCEPTS OF) their objects, AND ARE OUR ONLY ROUTE OF ACCESS TO THOSE OBJECTS."
Another variety of anti-realists, the "epistemological anti-realists," merely deny that we ever could be justified in believing that our views and theories actually correspond (or otherwise adequately describe) the true properties of the objects and processes they claim to describe. One interesting version holds that the world has Givens, and that organisms like us have things we call "beliefs about the world," but that our "beliefs" in no way represent or even describe the properties of objects and processes in the world. E.g., a computer's descriptions about the world, embodied as ones and zeroes in the computer's memory, do not in any way describe or represent the properties of the world— these properties being a radically different kind of thing than the ones and zeroes (they would claim). -
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Re: systems theory as anti-realist
Tue, August 24, 2004 - 10:06 AM>>>Many or most realists might rephrase this as, "My position is that perception and description have a fundamental role in constructing or determining (OUR CONCEPTS OF) their objects, AND ARE OUR ONLY ROUTE OF ACCESS TO THOSE OBJECTS."
Well, now that's just my point. I would not reword it thusly, and the question I pose is precisely whether such a formulation is tenable. At least since Kant the question has been asked whether it makes sense to refer even in the most hands-off way to a noumenal object. And Maturana writes in the introduction to Autopoesis and Cognition that he came to the conclusion in his research that one could not speak of a visual object that was not a mutual construct of world and perceiver. If I may dare in this forum to borrow Derrida's appropos locution, the object is 'always already' constituted by a subject.
To me the question of whether or not a pre-experienced world can be coherently referred to carries a lot of force, and I think there's a lot Systems Theory can add to this reflection. For example, J. A. Scott Kelso's work on perception and behavior strongly suggests that there is a deep homology between the dynamic pattern-recognition processes of our brains and the dynamic semi-stable pattern-formation laws that constrain sensible objects to remain more or less the same over the span of time. I am very sympathetic to such a perspective myself, and I think it goes a long way toward explaining why some objects appear to us to have identity and some do not (tree vs. forest).
In other words, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. -
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Re: systems theory as anti-realist
Tue, August 24, 2004 - 10:18 PMblah, blah, blah....Okay, I'll reword my rewording, "My position is that perception and description have a fundamental role in constructing or determining their objects, AND ARE OUR ONLY ROUTE OF ACCESS TO THE WORLD."
By this modest phrasing, I mean to merely acknowledge the mind-independent world, and to refer to the world/universe as a whole, without seeming to claim anything about particular "noumenal" objects in it. Even Kant, I think, would allow us to allude to the existence of the world in itself as long as we don't predicate anything about it. After all, Kant himself referred to this world itself when he named it "the noumena." This is sufficient to make one a metaphysical realist (since the existence of the world is not denied), though one might also be an epistemological anti-realist (if one denies the ability to be confident in saying anything about the noumena, though we might be justified in describing the features of the phenomenal world)... blah, blah, blah.. -
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Re: systems theory as anti-realist
Thu, August 26, 2004 - 10:37 PMI was sorry to hear that you were recently stolen, ScreamBrian.
Kant did indeed refer to the pure given world, for which he rightly has gottn his ass kicked for the last few centuries.
"There's this world that exists that is the basis for all of our claims, only we can't refer to it. I'm not referring to it! (wink wink) It is the basis for my epistemology and ontology, but ... I'm not referring to it!"
Nope. Sorry. Too late.
World is saturated with construction. How could it be otherwise? Besides, the queerer implications of quantum mechanics firmly establish that it is futile to attempt to refer to the world as it is absent of measurement and perception. It seems to me that if this is true, than that's the death knoll for the whole enterprise of realism.
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Re: systems theory as anti-realist
Mon, August 9, 2004 - 9:17 AMIf we're talking about the same "systems theory" (I'm always wary of confusion there) my experience with it is that it comes in two flavors.
In the first flavor, no a priori properties are projected onto the reality we are trying to capture. This turns out to be almost impossible to deal with, mathematically, so some convenient assumptions are made (linearity and Gaussianity being the two consensus hallucinations most often employed). This is not inherently anti-realist, it's just lazy.
The other flavor of systems theory employs its paradigms much as, say econometricians see the world: we already "know" most of the basic features of the reality we are trying to describe, all we're doing in systems theory is coming up with a convenient parametriziation of the missing bits.
I'd agree with you that that is a more anti-realist approach.
And hi.
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Re: systems theory as anti-realist
Wed, September 22, 2004 - 3:31 PMI think that systems theory, as well as all the rest of science, can get along just fine without metaphysical postulates of any kind. (This is a pragmatist position like van Fraassen's.)
So I don't think systems theory is inherently either realist *or* anti-realist, any more than molecular biology or magnetohydrodynamics is. It tells us how to make and use certain kinds of models, but it doesn't tell us what "real" means -- much less what's "real" and what's not.
Of course, individuals are free to pursue any kind of science while maintaining belief in additional (but unnecessary) postulates about God, Truth, Reality, or Space Rays.
