The Unbounded Mind by Ian I. Mitroff & Harold A. Linstone

Author:Ian I. Mitroff & Harold A. Linstone
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780199879540
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1993-01-21T07:00:00+00:00

The Systems Approach: General Background and Overview

In 1896, the great American philosopher William James of Harvard University wrote a letter to Provost Harrison of the University of Pennsylvania recommending Edgar Arthur Singer for a position in philosophy at his institution. James wrote that in his thirty years of teaching philosophy, Singer was the “best all around student” that he had had “in the philosophic business.” There was no aspect of philosophy that Singer could not do well.

Singer went on to a long and distinguished career in American philosophy. Among his many outstanding students was C. West Churchman from whom Mitroff studied philosophy of science at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s.

The point of this all too brief bit of history is not just that the first author can trace his intellectual lineage back to one of the world’s most distinguished philosophers, and one whom both authors admire greatly, but that Singer was one of the most important participants in the founding of the modern systems approach. Churchman in turn extended Singer’s ideas significantly and their ideas form the philosophical basis for the modern systems approach.

It would take us too far afield to discuss Singer’s and Churchman’s philosophy in detail,6 but we can give a good sense of it by means of a seemingly simple example.

Before he became a philosopher, Singer was a civil engineer. (And no one is more practical than civil engineers, as the first author knows all too well since he too was one early in his career.) In Singer’s day (the 1890s to the 1950s) most scientists and philosophers thought that the act of measuring the distance between two points on the surface of the earth, say A and B, was among the simplest of all the operations in science. Presumably, all one did was to stretch out a ruler or tape measure on the ground and merely read the correct result. Given the immense complexity of modern physics and engineering in the twentieth century, surely this simple act of measurement paled in comparison to the great feats of modern science.

First, the measurements had to be read by a human observer. And, if anything is characteristic of humans, it is that they make mistakes. This means that the “ ‘simple’ act of reading a tape” is not as simple as it first appears. We have to know or “sweep in” psychological knowledge about how and why humans perceive the ways that they do and what kinds of errors they typically make so that we may correct for them. Otherwise, we will repeat what the great astronomer Bessel did in the nineteenth century.

Bessel had several research assistants who worked for him. Their task was to time the passage of certain stars, or the movement of the heavens, between two hairlines in a telescope. When the position of certain stars crossed the first hairline, an assistant started a clock and then stopped it when it crossed the second. Naturally, the times differed significantly from one research assistant to another, and Bessel wanted to fire the slowest and the fastest.

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