Dear Norm,

I agree with your observation that intelligent design is one of the key 
issues for the future of design thinking.  Certainly, preliminary work that 
begins to bring into our conversations ideas growing out of indigenous 
understanding of nature will be valuable.

As a further provocation--following on my note in response to Lobomir's 
note on this theme--most discussions of general systems theory are clearly 
based on a materialist view of reality.  Though the "entities" that writers 
such as Bertalanffy discuss range widely across "all" systems, they are all 
entities at heart.  This is why I suggest that considerable sophistication 
will be needed to distinguish entitative systems from noumenal systems.  It 
is a mistake to believe that the two are equivalent.  Nature as material 
and nature as noumenal is an interesting topic to explore.

The general laws of systems--if such laws exist in anything more than 
literary analogy (note William Scott's excellent discussion of this 
matter)--may have some spiritual associations, but they offer only thin 
connections that pale in the face of thorough going discussions of the 
noumenal.  I am thinking, for example, of the dialectical interplay of 
freedom and necessity that one finds in Plato's Republic and Timaeus.  The 
Timaeus could be read as a lively account supporting general systems 
theory, except that its meaning must be seen in relation to the Republic if 
one is to have the full account.

[Keith will also like the following note, since he is always interested in 
the Poetics of Design:  Early in the Phaedrus, Socrates makes a seemingly 
casual comment on the value of scientific explanations before moving on to 
what is a noumenal account of rhetoric (read: 'design').  This 
juxtapositioning is much like the balancing of the Timaeus and the 
Republic.]

Sorry for the length of this note--not my usual style, I think.  But I find 
your (Norm) suggestion very valuable in opening up the issue of intelligent 
design.

BTW, The William Scott reference is:  "Organization Theory:  An Overview 
and an Appraisal" in Classics of Organization Theory, 5th ed.  Ed by 
Shafritz and Ott.

Regards,

Dick


Richard Buchanan
Carnegie Mellon University

--On Wednesday, February 23, 2005 10:43 AM +1000 Norm Sheehan 
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi Luis
>
> The design model of creation and the Idea of Intelligent design is
> central to Indigenous understanding of Natural Systems ... i am
> completing a paper that presents this theory as a design origin for the
> universe ... it is in elemental stages at present but will make it
> available on the list as soon as it is in draft form ... the big G word
> was only appended to some explanations of this theory in the 1920s &
> 1930s as a response to contact with missionaries. The many aspects of
> this theory were and still are presented in visual design form ... some
> of the traditional works of this kind have been explained to
> anthropologists as 'books' on philosophy by their painters.
>
> Intelligent Design is a key issue for the future...particularly due to
> the irreducibility of many features of Natural Systems. This brings into
> to my mind the question ... What are we doing when we design?
>
> Some comments on this would be interesting.
>
> yamin ya
>
> Norm
>
>
>
> At 11:44 AM 22/02/2005 -0800, =?UNKNOWN?Q?Lu=EDs_In=E1cio?= wrote:
>
>
> Hi all<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns =
> "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
>
>
>
> There has been much controversial over the past century because of a new
> arisen “science” called Intelligent Design (ID), which is considered an
> alternative to Evolutionism. And, as it tells Jim Holt on is article in
> the New York Times,
> (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/magazine/20WWLN.html?pagewanted=all&po
> sition= ),  it is beginning to be included in some schools of
> north-america, using the argument of encouraging the students to explore
> a different explanations of life, in this case ID.
>
> I must say that I agree on most of the Holt article, where he utilizes a
> good argument of verifying the work of a designer, not by the designer,
> but through the design. And by this way he concludes that the designer of
> ID, is not a very good designer. That is, by the presumption that someone
> designed the existence as we know it (creationism), he did not do a very
> good job. And Holt shows us some systems that demonstrate that this
> mighty designer is not very perfect.
>
> I know that some tries to escape, especially in ID theory, in using the
> “G-word, because, as they claim, theirs is not a religiously based
> theory”. but then, the question becomes “if they defend an intelligent
> design, who have designed the design? Who is the designer? Who is the
> intelligent designer?”.
>
> In the article the only thing that fails is the lack of a
> counter-argument to Behe’s Irreducible Complex (IC).
>
> This serves as a awakening call for the designers. I think that we,
> designers, must include ourselves in this discussion. It is not possible,
> people defending, or attacking ID, without knowing the theory of Design,
> as well as the Evolution theory.
>
> We must understand this fact, as a mean to discover the ontological
> aspects of Deign, beginning with a big question: “Is there a Metaphysical
> Design?”
>
>
>
> best
>
> Luís Inácio
>
>
>
> Luís Inácio
>
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