Robert Andrew Este

A Background to Awareness

To this point we reviewed a range of variables in innovation based on leading edge science and engineering that met, or did not met, their original visions and goals. Through brief recounting of two examples, we considered aspects of their technical, political, and conceptual terrain. This has suggested that explicit philosophical thinking has generally not been a part of such innovation pursuits. In this way we can begin to consider whether philosophy appears to be regularly excluded from innovation.

The Absence of Philosophy

To continue our exploration of where we might find another example of evidence for a contemporary approach to a set of leading-edge tasks that could have the potential of reflecting the relative significance of philosophical work — that is, where we could logically expect to find thoughtful and reflective work embracing and addressing the rigor of understanding the challenges at hand, linked to questions about the meaning of both the work itself, all of this coupled recursively with the work that is necessary to determine the meaningfulness of the work itself — let us examine the contemporary emergence of leading-edge new science in the field of astrophysics.

Backdrop with Questions

This first chapter introduces two examples of relatively recent innovation achievements — or, at least, powerful forward steps that could have brought us to such visionary achievements if circumstances had not evolved in the way they did. In each example briefly provided in this first chapter, the following is illuminated: [i] a vision to achieve something is identified, agreed upon, and made reasonably clear; [ii] the technologies and processes required to achieve that vision are thought about, some are brought into alignment and new ones developed, and then they are applied; [iii] the organizational constraints that define how those technologies and processes are to be researched, developed and made real are specified; and [iv] in the complex network of practical, political and organizational decisions about how to achieve the vision through such steps, at some point the project itself (or the steps being taken to achieve it) is altered for any number of reasons, and the original vision is never realized.

Understanding Denial and Delusion

The preceding sections of this book have been structured and presented in the following way. Initially, a number of significant questions were raised having to with the relative overall importance and apparent relative functionality of philosophical thinking and pursuit in relation to those things we appear to consider as most important. Questions explored here have been along the lines of: what is the status of our collective philosophical thinking when we consider how we commonly tend to expend our thinking energy in the pursuit of our endeavours; in other words, to what extent is philosophical thinking and the work of philosophy important to how we carry out our lives? In the current era, why does philosophical thinking, and the work and outputs of such thinking, appear to have such a low status (to the extent of vanishing, for all intents and purposes) in relation to what seem to be our main concerns and interests? From consideration of this question, can we safely entertain the idea that we tend to deny philosophical thinking and philosophical work to various extents; and, if this is so, why might this me be the case? How can we most usefully think about what the costs might be of denying philosophical thinking and philosophical work? Are we even aware that this situation might exist and may be expanding in scope and impact? Entertaining and commencing the exploration of such questions in the first section opened the door to the possibility that, collectively, we are faced with a very serious challenge that might be best cast in terms of a potentially fatal philosophical problem — fatal not only to philosophy, but fatal to what we appear to have begun to construct as a prosperous world that we hope will be for all.

Conclusion (Philosophy Undenied

In this book I have explored what I have taken to be the denial of philosophy in the realms of science, in what we think of as innovation, and in the design and activation of how our organizations are shaped and run. I have also illuminated the denial of philosophy and for purposes of illustration have explored the denial of evidence and reason in the context of religious faith. I have pointed out that it appears for the most part that today the pursuit of philosophy is seen as being irrelevant to the vast majority of our concerns about and interests in the world today — whether we focus on realms of human endeavour and achievement where we hold critical thought by way of reason and evidence to be paramount, or if we embrace and focus on a realm of belief based on denial that is delusional.

Absence of Philosophy in Innovation and Organizational Policy

In the previous sections of this book we have explored a plausible relationship between the emergence of leading-edge science and the role of epistemic clarification in particular and of philosophical pursuit in general. We have explored an overview of major innovations, a new institute at the University of Calgary called the Institute or Biocomplexity and Informatics, and we have reviewed comments about discovery science in the realm of the Square Kilometer Array. We have briefly considered critical commentary about quantum mechanics and what have come to be called holonic systems. We have seen that falling into the trap of conceptual slippage in the face of challenging conceptual problems has the potential to seriously endanger philosophical thinking and even the future of philosophy. We have seen claims that philosophy is useless or dead put forward as plausible self-reinforcing evidence for this slippage which, it has been proposed, could be indicators for the eventual final denial of philosophy in general.

Quine and the Drawing of Inferences

Here we shall suspend consideration of what Whitehead might have meant by the term “modes”, but still move forward with the remainder of his claim. It is not difficult to find what he has to say somewhat worrying, especially in light of the purpose of this book. That is, how do we critically revise our “modes of abstraction” so as to avoid sterility (and its presumed consequences of non-existence)? And let us immediately focus on Willard Van Orman Quine (1969), who pithily observed that “(c)reatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind”.

The Necessity of Conceptual Skill Enhancement to Address Philosophical Challenges of New Science : Background and Implications

Sensory extension and increasingly powerful computation underpinning emerging new science provides us with daunting conceptual challenges. It is here argued that because they are primarily philosophical in nature, high-level conceptual challenges are unique and different from those that help us refine outputs and achievements based on solving our technical and political problems. This paper explores the practical implications of such unique conceptual challenges and discusses the need for enhancement of conceptual skills. Such conceptual enhancement may provide us with a good opportunity to best respond to and benefit from these challenges.

Some thoughts on unprecedented conceptual challenges presented by holonic multi-agent systems

The unprecedented complexity of challenges arising from our emerging technologies has outstripped the very conceptual skills we have used to invent them. This is illustrated with the emergence of autonomous holonic multi-agent systems. It is difficult to imagine that the societal, economic, scientific, environmental, and knowledge consequences of such complex emerging technologies could be other than profound. Standard technical and political responses to such unprecedented challenges are helpful but do not by themselves lead to solution. This paper therefore begins the task of exploring how conceptual skills might be enhanced to effectively deal with anticipated consequences that cannot be fully known. Hopefully this provides a plausible foundation for defining new opportunities arising from these circumstances, and perhaps provides us with improved pre-adaptive capacities to assist in dealing with technologies that emerges in years to come.