Dear Lubomir and Klaus,
Thanks for these good posts. I was about to respond on the issue of old and new ideas when Lubomir said much of what I would have said, though in a different way.
I do want to add a couple of thoughts.
Don was writing about the importance of staying up-to-date on new issues. In fields such as psychophysics, psychology, neuroscience, or cognitive science, human beings have learned or discovered much that we did not know even a few years back. Some of these finding render old ideas obsolete or incorrect. Other findings amplify old findings to extend them in new directions.
In fields such as philosophy or theology, old ideas — very old ideas — can still help us to create important new ideas.
Most fields lie somewhere between. Gödel made it impossible for mathematicians to hope for the completion of the Hilbert program, and he rendered impossible Whitehead and Russell’s attempt to derive all mathematics from statements within a single system. Even though there may be a great deal to gain from classical texts in mathematics and logic, it is impossible to treat mathematics before Gödel in the way we treat mathematics today.
While much of Einstein’s work remains fundamental to physics, new findings have changed the field dramatically since 1905 and 1915.
In contrast, there is enormous value still to be derived from Dewey, Mead, and Peirce, not only in philosophy, but in education, social psychology, and logic.
Don pointed to an important issue that requires judgement. It’s not simply a case of the differences between young researchers and old scholars. There are differences between and among kinds of research. There are differences between and among different fields. And there are differences between and among conceptual, theoretical, or empirical articles.
As a philosopher, Keith often works in conceptual territory — my sense is that he makes greater use of Diogenes and Plato than he does of Goldman or Williamson. With the exception of better translations, there has been nothing new in the fragments of Diogenes or Plato’s dialogues for a few thousand years. Significant new ideas have been built on their work in the centuries since they lived. The conversation goes on today and Keith still does the Aeschylus boogie.
“You great good Furies, bless the land with kindly hearts,
you Awesome Spirits, come – exult in the blazing torch,
exultant in our fires, journey on.
Cry, cry in triumph, carry on the dancing on and on!”
— Aeschylus, The Eumenides, 458 BCE
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
—
Lubomir Popov wrote:
—snip—
Keith's post instigated a new reading of your previous post. At first, I took your text at face value and completely agreed with it. Citing something 30 years old? No way. Ten years max. However, Keith has a point. In philosophy, they go back a century and still cannot find anything better. We got too much influenced by the computer fields where six months might be a long time. And in architectural design, three years might be the limit for sifting through trade magazines.
The age of ideas is important. There are always newer developments, new findings, new kinds of discourses. All that accumulates and makes us richer. But does it? Does it accumulate? Many new development ignore previous achievements in order to boost bigger contributions. Everyone wants to be the first, to make something new, and to start a new line of thought.
In some cases, the old stuff is subpar; wrong, and even abusive. But in many cases, the new stuff is ridiculous; or just repackaging of the "old" staff. In many cases large groups of people suddenly change direction and rush into new thematic areas, embrace new discourses and paradigmatic developments, and engage in research that is the fad of the day. Many old thematic circles remain in their infancy, disregarded, and underdeveloped. And actually, those ideas might have much higher heuristic potential than the new ones. But the fad is taking the upper hand; people want to talk the new discourse, and the funding agencies fuel this as well.
It is really sad to see new ideas that are compromised, illogical, trivial, and political. It is sad because that is a step back or a step away. I fully support experimentation with new discourses and epistemologies; I am patiently waiting to see their development, to test their heuristic potential. In some cases I enjoy the new developments; in other cases I am frustrated by scholarly liberties that are tantamount to incompetence and scam.
Some research domains emerge with fanfares, grow for a decade, then stale, and finally remain undeveloped monuments of past enthusiasm. In my humble opinion, this is the situation with "Environment and Behavior Studies." The field started in the 1960s with great expectations. It was the fad of the day. Everyone hoped that this is the panacea for a better and user-friendly architecture. The field started developing its own theories and methods. There were interesting achievements in the 1970s. Then came a stalemate. No more theory. Just field research on various topics, data collection, and joggling with statistics. At the end of 1980s the community put together a handbook with theoretical developments that were just elaborations of the 1970s ideas. And after that things started subsiding, changing, going in many different directions. New paradigms and discourses were adopted. They brought new topics and thematic circles, pushing the initial ideas away. The new fads bring new information, but not the information needed to develop the theory of the field. The new scholars were influenced by developments in other fields that had a very different logic and way of thinking. In this situation, citing theoretical treatise from the 1970s is unavoidable. However, it is also sad because this is an indication for the failure of the field.
So, the new is not always the best, nor even the better. History of philosophy shows that very clearly. Not everything new in philosophy is better than the old. It is just like in architectural design. There are thousands of attempts to create new architecture, but only a handful actually make it and influence architectural designers around the world. And the old Modernism is still alive and kicking, long after the architectural demise of Postmodernism. This is a good example how one new development (Postmodernism) was celebrated as exceptional, only to go away after 15 years on the architectural stage.
So, I would not mind 40 years old references if they are advancing great ideas that were not developed at their time and that were forgotten for some reason. There is value in such ideas. There is value in resurrecting such ideas and comparing them to the competing ideas. Tell me in what way the rhizome is better than the system? Is it helping us understand complexity and change better than the system? Does it have a better developed conceptual apparatus? Does it have a better operationalization for application in practical matters (design and engineering of any kind)? Does it overcome the shortcomings of system thinking? Or we just compare one new idea with (assumed) great potential to the worst examples of an old idea (the system)?
Systems thinking can be very mechanical and linear, but it can also take the shape of a multilayered, multifaceted, multidirectional, self-learning and flexible conceptual structure. What is the advantage of the rhizome? That if promises more -- a more agile way of thinking, more flexibility, and better response to high dynamic situations. And have we seen the rhizomatic thinking in action? What will happen when it is concretized to the level of practice thinking? I am eagerly waiting to see that. I am not rejecting the rhizome concept, but also, I am not putting time to develop it. And, I am not sure how it is better than the system, at least at this time. Just claiming that everything is connected to everything is not enough. Besides, it is an old systems talk adapted for humanitarians. That is the truth. In some way, it is interesting to see how communities that cannot stand each other learn from each other and borrow from each other. But, in either cases, they would not acknowledge that and will vehemently critics the very ideas they have used to develop their new beliefs.
The rhizome idea comes from a completely different paradigm than the systems idea. The two paradigms produce very different discourses that do not interface, do not communicate with each other, and do not respect each other. People schooled in systems thinking would not like to read deconstructivist philosophy that makes the foundation for understanding the concept of rhizome. And the humanitarians hate to think about systems because this is far from the humanitarian rationality, way of conceptualization, and preferred lexicology.
I appreciate one initiative about five years ago, started by Erik Stolterman. He was looking at the history of system thinking. It is important to go back and trace the evolution of systems thinking from its mechanistic beginnings to its post-positivist evolution. I don't reject Deconstruction. I just want to make a case that during the time we work to concretize Deconstructivist ideas, we need something else to use in practice. This might be something old that was not developed to its full potential. Something old that might help us work in the transitional period. Or, like the story of modernism in architecture, neosystems thinking might resurrect and function as a respected parallel methodology. This time somewhat different, accounting for previous mistakes, adapted much better to the new changing world. We should not forget that systems thinking was created when the world become too complex to be handled with previous methods. Systems thinking was a response to change, complexity, and multidirectionality. However, some people simplified it to the point of mechanistic calculations. And the systems community didn't do enough to adapt it to an even more complex and dynamic world that emerged in the 1960s.
Just a few thoughts about the old and the new in science. Let's remember the adage that everything new is something old that was well forgotten and now resurrected in a new form. I do not support this adage, but very often, when I hear claims for new ways of thinking, I think about it. It is all about thinking and the phenomenon of thinking.
—snip—
—
Klaus Kruppendorff wrote:
—snip—
long post but worth reading. I fully agree with most of it.
a few minor points:
yes new ideas are often old ideas in new clothes which are not recognizable as such by those who do not know the past.
newness, fashionableness, being at the cutting edge of development is a trademark of designers but when it overwhelms everything else, it causes blindness.
newness should address the specific by asking whether it expand the horizon of design to address or create new phenomena and allows designers to improve the quality of life of their stakeholders.
system thinking is a cognitive preoccupation. it failed where it stayed on the level of rhetoric. without tangible results that thinking stays entirely in feel-good and self-serving conversations.
so is design thinking. it needs to demonstrate making a difference.
—snip—
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