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Joined: 31 Dec 2003
Posts: 2
Location: Waterloo, Canada
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The text is long, translated, but still worth reading
 Happy New Year, folks!
Abstracts from
‘Methodological Meaning of Difference Between Naturalistic and Systemic-Activity Approaches’
by G.P. Tschedrovitsky, 1991
The major issue which currently separates us in our work is no more difference in scientific views on the object, but methodological differences with approaches that are being accepted while organizing our work, differences in ontological views and worldviews, differences in means and methods of our reasoning work; the latter often takes the form of differences in our logics…
Taking all the above as a grounding work, which is the most exact reflection of the changes in our reasoning during the last 50 years, we shall consider differences between naturalistic [translator note: ‘naturalist’ might be translated as ‘empiricist’] and systemic-activity [SA] approaches within research and cognition in application to natural sciences; these differences are the most important and even decisive for the socio-cultural situation in science.
… Any researcher who takes the naturalistic approach [NA] (it does not really matter what science he is with) assumes that he is given the object to research, that he applies a certain set of research procedures and actions that yield him [the researcher] some knowledges about the object. These knowledges are kind of a stencil, groove, or schema that we fit onto the object; in this way we get its image and at the same time the appearances and the form of that very object.
A naturalist researcher never asks where the object comes from and how it comes to life; this is because Nature consists of objects from the very start for this type of a researcher however sophisticated method-wise he might be; we may also call these objects ‘objects of contemplation’ (K. Marx), which later on become objects of a specific scientific research.
a
construed
immediately
given
b
subject object
C
Cognitive subject Nature object
cognition
research
Fig. 1
While engaged in this type of reasoning a naturalist works (or we may say he IS) within
1a - epistomologo-organizational model created in Ancient Greece,
1b - gnoseologo-organizational model developed by the beginning of the 15th century; nowadays this model is usually presented as a cognitive relation ‘subject- object’
1c – naturalistically concrete subject-object model per se. This model was developed in the 16-17th centuries thanks to the ‘Nature’ notion (credited to the works of F. Bacon).
In order to link this topic to the discussion of SA approach I’ll present subject-object relations in SA models, terms, and symbols (see fig. #2); in this model – in order to make things simple – I’ll glue the subject’s ‘cognition’ and ‘research’ relation to Nature’ into one symbol to mimic the way it is usually done in naturalist methodology.
Consciousness tableau RA standards
Fig. #2
In order to avoid any inadequate interpretation of this article I want to stress it out specifically that so far I am not criticizing the naturalistic point of view, but only sketch it out in contrasting wording to bring about its basic specific ontological, organizational and reasoning assumptions. In my view, the naturalistic view is as much legitimate and logically grounded as ANY other approach. More than that: it has been beautifully developed during the last 400 years as opposed to all the other approaches, and science owes it all the credits for its major successes. This makes it difficult to criticize naturalist approach, especially when it comes to natural sciences.
By now I just want to stress it out that NA is by no means the only possible one; there are some other approaches, and very important ones at that – as far as their general concept is concerned.
… While contrasting and analyzing different approaches to scientific R&D I employ another one – called the activity, or, to be more exact, SA approach, which does not root its major reasoning structure in opposing subject to object or more specifically a researcher to a researched object, but which is grounded in the activity reasoning systems themselves, in the ways and methods, technique and technology, procedures and actions, ontological models and views constituting the structure of RA (research RA included) and guiding its basic organizational forms.
Consciousness research standards and models
tableau
ontological view of the object
research means
speech-thought
texts a1, a2, a3,… an
Fig. # 3
In order to match an expanded view on NA I have to expand the model shown on fig. #2. So, in fig. #3 the researcher has:
1. a set of reasoning and activity means to handle the object
2. a set of actions (procedures and operations) to perform on the object
3. the so called researcher’s ‘consciousness tableau’ to present images of his research experience
4. texts of the researcher’s speech/thoughts to present the development and results of the R&D and to communicate them to other people (for future reference: these texts contain the knowledge of the object)
5. special standards and models to organize the research RA; specifically categories which the researcher employs for his reasoning and activity while taking that very cognitive/research stand towards the object as presented in fig. #3; these categories might happen to be those famous gnoseological-organizational models, which he kind of ‘puts on’ acting as a ‘cognitive’ or ‘research’ subject and at the same time ‘telling’ what his operations and procedures are directed at and what he is able to see as his ‘Nature object’ and ‘cognition/research object’ at the same time with the help of ontological models and views (you can find more details re: ways/models to organize activity and reasoning in a number of works by G. Tschedrovitsky 1964a, 1966a, 1969b, 1974a, 1981a, 1982a, 1975a, 1975c, etc.)
It needs to be underlined one more time, and it is, basically, one of the greatest miracles on our mind’s works, that in spite of obvious complexity of our RA (the research RA included), in spite of the great number of elements/parts it consists of, the mind of a naturalist while in the theoretical objective mode detects only the research object, focuses only on it, sees and notices only it, which constitutes, perhaps, the greatest simplicity and power of the NA, its undisputable practical advantage. It’s obvious that a mind organized a la NA does not notice complicated structures of reasoning and activity and fails to notice the fact that the object of a RA is included into that very RA, it’s its functional and morphological part/element; instead of most complex RA structures it [NA oriented mind] sees only two morphological foci of the said structures: subject and object; distinguishes only two of them, separates them, pulls all the RA-ish onto them only and claims a relation of a special kind between them: that of cognitive/research one.
… This type of presenting structures and mechanisms of a research RA developed as a result of the 17-18th century philosophical reflection upon scientific research. This reflection was mostly projective and speculative rather than retrospective and of a research type, which later on was borrowed by numerous natural scientists and stayed as a custom.
It was due specifically to that reflexive speculation that the object turned to be ‘taken out’ of the system of RA and knowledge and was opposed to the ‘subject’ an independent real entity existing in Nature. Though this view was obviously an oversimplification of the real state of affairs, it allowed Naturalist’s mind to focus on the object and start analyzing it with the help of special procedures targeting the Nature material, sorting out attributes and qualities, presenting them in knowledges and notions, transferring into ‘visions’ and observations, discussing all this as immediately-phenomenological or mediate-reflexively given etc, etc. All the above, including focusing on the object, was made possible only due to the fact that during the historical development of RA and specifically its scientific and philosophical forms, epistemologo-organizational model was developed first and later on the gnoseologo-organizational model to ground and justify the first one; the latter became the major form to organize our reflection and knowledge. By the end of the 18th century this model started to direct our Understanding and Meaning within scientific research process (as understanding of the 3d party texts and understanding circumstances), as well as ways to create texts and present knowledge within those texts.
After this form/way of understanding and knowing was presented to us, we could see under any circumstances, a priori, as I. Kant has demonstrated, that which we knew. Within this specific type of RA this means that we could see the object with all its attributes found through our RA, and all these attributes we derived not from the RA and credited not to the RA, but credited to the object per se.
In other words, we kind of glued our knowledge onto the Nature material and in this way we gave birth to objects under consideration. Before this ‘gluing’ happened there were simply no objects. No objects given, there cannot be any naturalistic approach to study them. Basically we might conclude that research NA is the only possible one if we already know, at least in general, the structure of the object under consideration, its boundaries and what methods to use researching it. Natural sciences developed based on NA became possible only after Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, et al with the great methodological and philosophical work of their predecessors at their back, such as mathematicians, logicians, and meta-physicists, construed general views on Nature and possible ways of the Nature objects to exist; their followers in the 17-19th centuries construed a number of more detailed views on various Nature object types to match various naturalistic scientific categories, such as substance, process, interaction, thing, field, totality of particles, etc. All this time through, for about 400 years, we have been using these basic views and construed, based on these views, various sciences one after another. Theoretically, if we consider science alone, isolated from engineering, technology, gadget producing, this work can go on infinitely and we can produce more and more new naturalistically organized scientific disciplines. But the matter is that during all this time the nature of human social praxis itself has changed, its circumstances have changed, the nature of the societally related RA has changed; due to these facts the objects construed within NA oriented science do not match the issues and problems created by the societal praxis.
In short, we can state, that there has recently evolved a manifold complex praxis which gave birth to such a RA content, that cannot be expressed by means of views on traditional Nature objects; this means that we are trapped into a socio-cultural situation reminding of the one in which the 17th century philosophers, methodologists, mathematicians, and physicists started their work; in the same way as they construed new ontological views about Nature and thus founded the base for the whole Natural Sciences system, so we have to construe completely new ontological views about the activity and reasoning world and thus we have to lay the base for the RA Sciences system. This, in turn, implies, on the one hand, addressing absolutely new categorical models, on the other hand, it implies employing an absolutely different, not naturalistic but that of an activity, or, better say, systemic activity approach.
A transition from the naturalistic approach to a SA one implies a number of structural changes in the forms of our reasoning and RA organization; the good news is that this transition has been being prepared historically for awhile, and the most explicit and noticeable changes happened during the last 300 years. |
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it's the time to get connected and start thinking on mutual objectives |
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