Issues of
rigour in qualitative research conference
Association for Qualitative Research
Melbourne, July 6–10, 1999
A ferret tail chase—the perpetual closed loop of open system reflecting-theorising
by Anthony D McKenzie
Educational Developer
Orange Agricultural College
The University of Sydney
PO Box 883
ORANGE NSW 2800
Phone 02 6360 5540
Fax 02 6360 5590
Email tmckenzi@oac.usyd.edu.au
Abstract
How do we deal with a logic of emergent coherence? In open system inquiry, rigour in methodology is not primarily a question of adhering to an established routine, but one of feeling one’s way, allowing methodology to unfold in response to the theory it is co-generating. We are asked to judge the results of such a venture by:
Furthermore, it is not possible to make a judgment about the persuasiveness of its argument from the outside. Open system inquiry can only be judged from within—by reflective practitioners willing to evaluate the theory in terms of their own deeply perceived experience.
Open system thinking is whole brain inquiry where, at its best, the disciplines of well-tested scientific research are complemented by an emergent, intuitive and holistic apprehension of the global properties of the thing. The thing itself insists on remaining emergent and fuzzy, because it derives from the realm of unknowing, where the searcher perceives, within the black hole, the bottomless cup of refreshing lifelong learning—growth in understanding. Collectively, we start to realise that open system, whole brain inquiry invites a synthesis of Science and Art.
In 1996 the author completed a Masters dissertation on Improving the Effectiveness of Distance Education for Farmers. In this paper he acknowledges the role of intuition in the process of meaning-making within a constructivist, post-modern world.
Introduction
I wish to raise some issues of rigour swarming around the phenomenon of human inquiry, but the journey we take to get there will be the important thing. I want to think of human inquiry in its everyday, flesh and blood sense—how I make sense of myself and the world, whether moment by moment or across wide timespans, whether preconsciously or consciously, reflectively or reflexively. To get to our destination, we are going to immerse ourselves in the thick porridge of open system learning theory.
Intentional and formal kinds of inquiry face their own issues of rigour, but for action researchers who are intentionally and self-consciously immersed within the subject of inquiry, sensing the patterns from within, and indeed for all reflexive, open system learners, the further we go in pursuit of our goal, the deeper and wider our questioning, the more deeply-textured we realise our subject to be. The track ahead peters out, and we must progress by feeling our way.
In open system inquiry, the traveller acquires the sense of engagement in a lifelong meta-inquiry, as it dawns on us that what we seek is growth in understanding . This paper will hold significance for action reseachers and lifelong learners who recognise one’s human life as the ultimate research project, within which all our multidudonous activities take shape and find definition. It is from such a meaning perspective that we shall approach the question of rigour in open system inquiry. One of the purposes of this paper will be to juxtapose open system, ever widening inquiry with analytical quests down ever-narrowing rabbit burrows.
Along the way, this paper will be concerned with two practices, habits, of human meaning making—reflection, and theorising—and where logic intersects these operations. Other themes will be developed too, from different starting points, yet each thread will, I hope, be seen in the final analysis to serve a single purpose. My other threads are:
Reflecting, theorising, and logic
The ferret metaphor in the title of this paper proposes both a connection and a contrast between reflection and theorising. Let's bring these two terms into focus for a moment in order to ponder on possible conjunctions of these two practices...
Clearly, reflection or theorising can, for short bursts at least, appear to be happening in isolation of the other. I can simply reflect, or reflect on ‘reflection’; I can simply theorise, or theorise on ‘theorising’. Or I can theorise about reflection in the abstract, or reflect on a specific or accumulated experience of theorising. A more organic view of meaning making however is offered in the ferret motif. Reflection and theorising can continuously flow into each other. Each becomes the catalyst for the other, generating a seamless and never-ending ferret tail chase of meaning making. But now let go of the tail. A similar conjunction or interaction between ideas (the world of theory) and experience (the world of reflection) is offered from soft systems theory (Checkland 1989 p.89). Checkland detects two distinct domains of inquiry in soft systems methodology—"the real world flux of events and ideas", and "systems thinking about the real world". Likewise, in open system inquiry, it is helpful to think of one’s methodology as an open ended journey pursued simultaneously on two planes...
While it may be helpful to think in terms of a two-tiered journey, the ferret-in-a-tail-spin reminds us that understanding is one.
If we concede that reflection and theorising feed into each other, where does logic belong? When the word logic crops up, we know it will be referring in some way to a constructed argument, because logic is concerned with the internal relationships of ideas within a series of ideas. As such, we can expect that logic tests will be needed in evaluating theories and other conceptual structures such as constructed arguments. Later in this paper we will be ready to consider how application of a logic test requires special handling in arguments where the quality of coherence is emergent.
I want to turn now to one of the characteristic features of contemporary life—the experience of uncertainty. On the one hand this little excursion will illustrate the way new knowledge becomes a catalyst for the reflection–theorising tail chase, and on the other, lays important groundwork for my unfolding argument.
A road less certain
Kafatos & Nadeau (1990, p.4) convey a sense that we have moved out of the comfort zone offered by the Vienna circle in the 1930s. As the champions of logical positivism, members of this school had argued that all of science could be unified by relying on mathematical (symbolic) language; in this way philosophical and epistemological difficulties could be eliminated. However, scientists, critical theorists and others have reinstated epistemological concerns in the quest for knowledge. It is no longer only the action researcher, immersed in the flux of the real world under inquiry, whose manner of observing is integral to the thing observed.
There is a fundamental epistemological problem at the heart of all knowledge creation. Kafatos & Nadeau (ibid.) recall Kurt Gödel’s ‘proof’ that no mathematical system can in itself be complete—no mathematical algorithm can prove its own validity. To find such a proof, "a larger and more embracing algorithm is required which, in turn, cannot prove its own validity, and so on" (ibid.). While they defend the notion of objectivity of scientific knowledge (p.8), they are pointing here to the inherent limits to a final understanding of reality. For example, research at the quantum level leads Kafatos and Nadeau to regard non-locality as "a fundamental property of the entire universe" (p.9); it is "a fact of nature" (p.1). Research by Alain Aspect into the behaviour of quanta of light in different locations convinced them that...
the reality whose existence is inferred between the two points in the Aspect experiments should properly be viewed... as a reality that underlies and informs all physical events in the universe...all quanta can be assumed to have interacted at some point in the history of the cosmos in the manner that quanta interact at the source of origins in the Aspect experiments (p.9).
In other words, "non-locality infers the existence of an undivided wholeness on the primary level in physical reality". Why only ‘infers’? Non-locality cannot be viewed as an observed phenomenon; it is inferred from the correlations observed in quanta of light in different space-like regions in the Aspect research. What lies beyond direct observation is the reality that exists between the locations in the experiment.
And yet all that we can say about this reality is that it appears to be an indivisible whole whose existence is ‘inferred’ where there is an interaction with an observer, or with instruments of observation, and that it also appears to exist outside of or beyond space–time (p.9).
We have every reason to approach the world with rekindled awe and humility.
Understanding who we are
In counterpoint to our newfound humility in the face of a mysterious universe, we are also having second thoughts about the nature of personal identity. In the popular western mind, the sense of self is perhaps the most precious interior treasure we possess, lying low in the background of consciousness, out of harm’s way. Psychologically speaking this ego-self plays a pivotal role in human experience. As Darryl Reanney points out in The Death of Forever...
the ego-self is a symbolic point of internal reference, a nexus created in the mind by the mind to organise the input of experience so as to preserve the coherence of the subjective realm and allow the body/self to function in a purposeful way (Reanney 1991, p.159).
Even if we never reflect on it as an entity, we have no reason to doubt its existence. Of course ‘I’ exist, we retort! Yet for Harré (1983), for Gazzaniga, for Reanney, the sense of self has the status of a theory. If this has an unsettling effect on us—if my self is in doubt, what about my soul?—so will the idea that the development of self-consciousness in childhood is conditional on language development:
the infant becomes able to make sense and be accorded adult psychological status through entering into the same world of linguistic meanings as the community around him or her. From the point of view of consciousness there is much to be learned by considering not the development of language within the individual but the development of the individual within language (Pickering & Skinner 1990 p.241. See also Heelas & Locke 1981).
I have been attempting to draw attention to a feature of contemporary science in which theorists have been reassessing the hand-me-down assumptions that supported old, safe, comfortable views about the world, and offering us explanations instead that turn uncertainty into the mature disposition of choice. But I am not talking here about uncertainty as expressed in existential malaise or neurosis. Rather, I mean an existential and epistemological capacity to embrace the unknown, the realm of unknowing—a realisation that lack of clarity is the prior state of growth in understanding.
Why should changing one’s world view create a sense of uncertainty? David Bohm put it this way:
Though physics has changed radically in many ways, the Cartesian grid (with minor modifications…) has remained the one key feature that has not changed. Evidently, it is not easy to change this, because our notions of order are pervasive, for not only do they involve our thinking but also our senses, our feelings, our intuitions, our physical movement, our relationships with other people and with society as a whole and, indeed, every phase of our lives. It is thus difficult to 'step back' from our old notions of order to be able seriously to consider new notions of order (Bohm 1980 p.176).
Expanding our horizons—turning tourniquets into growth rings
We are presently trying to come to terms with, unravel the implications of, living in a quantum physical universe. While plenty of research goes on above the sub-atomic level of analysis (and thus beyond reach of the enigmas of quantum physics), it’s hard for some of us not to suspend a question mark over everything, now that the essential nature of physical reality has become problematic. It is my unique meaning perspective that shapes my sense of the unknown and the scope and incisiveness of my questioning:
As one pursues [the] Big Questions, the verities of childhood, the regularity of time, the certainties of earlier stages of reflective judgment start receding. Just as we can only form new meanings for ourselves from our previous experience of meaning, so, I will speculate, the range of our epistemological doubts will be governed by our existing level of reflective judgment. The black hole is only as deep as I perceive it to be, from where I stand (McKenzie 1996 p.98).
According to reflective judgment theory (Kitchener & King 1990), there is an epistemological journey that is an integral part of human cognitive development. By 'epistemological journey' I mean the successive stages of epistemological maturity one may pass through in a lifetime, the successive sloughing off of one set of assumptions about reality for another, the sequence of breakthroughs that turn our mental tourniquets into growth rings. The world of a child is predictable: in chilhood there are truths which serve as dependable compass or anchor points along the way. The journey from childlike certainty passes through a number of stages to a state of epistemological maturity, from which vantage point, the long distance traveller arrives at a temperamental predisposition to—and intellectual acceptance of—the finiteness (or 'situatedness') of all our authority structures. Those who last the distance uncover a capacity and resolve to be one's own arbiter of validity when assessing the truth claims of rival world views or belief systems, whether in the abstact, or concretised in practical problems like whether to keep God within one’s personal pantheon. In open system learning theory, this is called the journey of growth in understanding (see footnote 2). It is fitting in this context to note that science itself has its own equivalent journey (Salner 1986).
In The Death of Forever, Darryl Reanney sees this journey as an inner battle between two modalities of human personality. On one hand, our genetic inheritance, with its fixation on survival, nurtures the ego-self which, for Reanney, "is the sum of the differences, trivial in the main, which separates each human person from others" (Reanney 1991 p.162):
…the ego-self is largely a collection of accidents which separate our minds from those of our fellows. It is a kind of existential 'noise' which owes its being in large part to the chiefly random character of the events that create it. As such, the ego-self—the identity tag which our survival loops guard so carefully—has absolutely no value as a window to the world (ibid.).
On the other hand, struggling always to break free of the blinker of the ego-self, is one's consciousness—something that arises (emerges, unfolds) for Reanney in successive stages. What makes a person unique "is not his ego-self but the quality of his consciousness":
Confusion arises because people do not distinguish
No, the development of the human individual is not as simple as we once thought. Western (read ‘global’) culture and global capitalism have consorted most effectively to create ideal conditions for individualism, the hegemony of the ego-self, so it is not surprising that new scientific and critical thinking is questioning the assumptions on which the western world (global capitalism) is built.
A more complete cameo of the human being is achieved if Reanney’s position is overlayed with that of Rom Harré—a perspective that picks up Pickering and Skinner’s earlier point about the place of language in individual development:
...the fundamental human reality is a conversation, effectively without beginning or end, to which, from time to time, individuals may make contribution.
All that is personal in our mental and emotional lives is individually appropriated from the conversation going on around us. The structure of our thinking and feeling will reflect, in various ways, the form and content of that conversation.
A person is a being who orders his or her activities according to a theory of his or her own nature. Persons identify themelves by the character of their beliefs [my italics] (Harré 1983 p.20).
The essence of personhood consists in this view in the depth of one’s consciousness and the character of one’s beliefs.
Hologenesis and the emergence of understanding
My line of thought to this point has woven itself in and out of an implicit, ubiquitous belief that understanding is emergent in individual human experience. (It is so self-evident, yet does it really guide our curricula? Perhaps what we haven’t fully appreciated is the further claim of open system learning theory that the fulfilment we gain from growth in understanding is the defining feature of human kind, that our highest calling is to achieve our potential.) We will shortly be ready to confront the logic of emergent coherence. We shall get there via a track that will allow us to reflect on how we understand wholes.
The term 'hologenesis'—or the coming to be of wholes—popped up from nowhere some years back as I thought about a University of Western Sydney researcher's fuzzy yet noble dream wish for a 'catchment of green' in the valley where I was living. In the model of open system learning, acquisition of a body of knowledge involves
a double hologenesis—
[1] the cultivation, the anticipation of the whole in process of becoming; this is an intuitive bringing forth and continuous fine-tuning of the final desired form—a blueprint for action; and
[2] mental activity in the present moment designed to extend the present body of knowledge in the direction of the emerging blueprint—
like two balloons, one inside the other, being inflated together, two dynamic forms—the actual and the ideal—destined to become one in their final apotheosis-fusion (McKenzie 1996 p.63 & 57; see also appendix to this paper).
I suggested before that one's personal epistemological journey involves the successive sloughing off of one set of assumptions about reality for another. In fact what I replace is not just a set of assumptions but my 'reality' construct itself—the everything I hold dear. The sloughed-off snake skin image recalls my earlier description of turning tourniquets into growth rings. Both metaphors attempt to describe the hologenesis of mind within a human lifespan.
Or try this third metaphor—the ripples on the surface of a pond when something is dropped in. I'd like to offer a personal example of how one’s sense of everything (McKenzie 1996, pp.70–87), "everything I hold dear", can, like expanding ripples across the water, reach out to embrace an ever more comprehensive reality. The example comes from conjectural work on how educators might define and track student progress in management education. In one of the undergraduate management units presently being revised at my College, the development team was trying to find a way to embed the College’s generic graduate capabilities into the unit’s learning outcomes. I offered my own, highly personal matrix of developmental stages in six areas of capability—see table. (In the field of conceptual capability, I adopted Biggs’s SOLO Taxonomy, which identifies the growing complexity of the structural organisation of knowledge (Boulton-Lewis, G.M. 1995).)
Table: A personal, idealised schema of growth
Note: 1. Read from the bottom up.
2. Conation * is that portion of mental life having to do with striving, and covers both desire, and volition (the will to act).
| Conceptual capability | Reflexive capability | Affective capability | Valuing capability | Conative capability * | Communicative capability | |
| Level 5 | Extended abstract (knowledge is generalised into a new domain) | Lives by a value system that accepts the subjectivity of all knowing, and all that implies | Creates a more sensitive community | Creates a more appreciative community | Creates a climate that encourages achievement | Creates a more critical and mutually-respectful community |
| Level 4 | Relational (aspects of knowledge are integrated into a structure) | Critiques the assumptions underlying alternative interpretations | Integrates feelings, values, beliefs, thoughts and insights into a personal praxis of living | Defends institutions, people, property and/or ideas on moral or ethical grounds | Resolves any inner conflicts between the will to act, and the lack of it—managing one’s will-power | Fosters the habit of empathy, rapport and continuous critique in others |
| Level 3 | Multistructural (several relevant independent aspects are known) | Monitors on a metacognitive level his or her reflexive meaning making | Understands the importance and proper place of feelings in social and in intellectual pursuits, and moderates behaviour in ways appropriate to the situation | Through words and deeds, engenders in others a valuing of Truth, Goodness, Beauty and/or Bounty | Resolves any inner conflicts between a desire or commitment to strive, and a sense of his or her incapacity to achieve—managing one’s self-confidence | Practises continuous critique of the structures of knowledge and power |
| Level 2 | Unistructural (one relevant aspect is known) | Re-lives and re-interprets past interpretations of experience | Expresses a range of human feelings | Shows an appreciation of expressions of Truth, Goodness, Beauty and/or Bounty | Gauges the characteristics of a given context and acts, giving due expression to impulse and thought | Establishes empathy and rapport in communication with others |
| Level 1 | Prestructural (incompetence; nothing is known about the area) | Re-lives and interprets experience | Experiences a range of human feelings | Respects him or herself and others and their property | Acts on occasion in response to impulse | Effectively expresses what he or she experiences, thinks and feels through language and/or in other ways |
I haven’t mentioned the central place occupied by one’s personal value system in open system learning theory, but I’d like you to take that as read; the table setting out my idealised schema of human growth exudes the values that lie beneath all my meaning making and professional praxis. What my schema suggests (to me) is that we are all (at least potentially?) engaged in a personal hologenesis, as we attempt over the course of a lifetime to gain an ever richer, more comprehensive, more coherent sense of self in the world.
Parts, and the Whole beyond measure—jumping to conclusions
Earlier in this paper I referred to the changing landscape of theory about the nature of the quantum universe. We briefly saw that non-locality in space can now be thought of as a ‘fact of nature’. To return there for a moment, Kafatos and Nadeau in fact identify three non-localities. Alongside spatial non-locality they place temporal non-locality. (They suggest that Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment illustrates that "our observations of past events seem to be influenced by choices that we make in the present"—Kafatos & Nadeau 1990 p.163.) Then, as if hidden behind Type I and II non-localities, they propose a Type III non-locality, inferred from Types I and II, that "represents the entire physical situation" (p.165). Why ‘inferred’?
Although Types I and II taken together as complementary constructs describe the entire physical situation, neither can individually disclose this situation in any given instance. The reality represented by Type III non-locality is, in our view, the unified whole of space-time revealed in its complementary aspects of the unity of space (Type I non-locality) and the unity of time (Type II non-locality). Thus we can confirm with experiment the existence of Types I and II which taken together ‘imply’ the existence of Type III, which is not itself subject to experimental confirmation.
Type III non-locality infers the existence, in short, of an undivided wholeness in the cosmos. Spatial and temporal non-localities taken together mark the event horizon where we confront in the context of our knowledge of the physical situation the existence of the whole. Although spatial and temporal non-localities are present in acts of observation in astronomy, neither can be the subject of physial theory for the same reason that the results of the Aspect experiments proving Bell’s inequality do not lead to additional theory. What each reveals is an aspect of reality as a whole rather than the parts which science coordinates with physical theory (p.165).
What Kafatos and Nadeau are doing here in the context of discussing physical theory is, I believe, explaining the logical necessity of drawing inferences in the process of making coherent what we ‘know’ from experience. If they are right, proponents of the ecological world view for example will naturally be drawn to inferences of this kind. For open system learners, taking on an holistic outlook means accepting the need, as we go about challenging our present, constricted sense of self in the world, to jump, when the need arises, to an ‘extra-logical’ conclusion. First we intuit or ‘see’ the whole; in the model of open system inquiry (see appendix) this is called landmark-spotting. Having seen, we infer—give intellectual assent to or agree to entertain the hypothesis of—the existence of the whole, or the whole in process of becoming, whether material or conceptual in nature.
To recap on some of these threads...
I am about to tie off the latter thread here, but I must return once more to Kafatos and Nadeau. While Reanney, as we noted, would describe the quest for personal hologenesis as a battle between the ego-self and emergent consciousness, Kafatos and Nadeau focus on the roles of the conscious and unconscious mind in the quest for apprehending the ‘single significant whole’—what they finally name as Being (ibid. p.180). They point to a distinction...
between the content of consciousness, in which we construct in both ordinary and mathematical language systems conceptions of reality, and the background of consciousness, in which we apprehend our existence prior to any conscious constructions (p.179).
Their analysis is far too complex to be covered adequately here. Essentially, they argue that while science will enable us to understand more about the non-localities of space and time, bringing us to...
the horizon of knowledge where we confront the existence of the undivided whole, we cannot cross that horizon in terms of the content of consciousness... Science qua science cannot fully disclose or describe the whole (ibid).
If we suspend disbelief in these matters what does it all mean for lifelong learners who seek to understand their quest for growth in understanding, and the fulfilment they experience from discovering each new growth ring?
As a lifelong, open system action learner, I must in the final analysis pursue these weighty concerns in the context of my own experience. I would therefore like to draw some of the threads together by adding a postscript to my idealised schema of human growth:
From one angle, a creative surge of mental activity seems to be my most natural of reactions to a situation-in-flux... From whatever depths, for whatever reason, I find myself engaged in searching for a solution, the missing factor capable of integrating the fragments, the missing note bonding noises into harmony. This most immediate, most involuntary action I take—again and again—is perhaps the primary characteristic of my social existence. Any assessment of my relationship with the world, of my ‘meaning’, must recognise within my deep identity a making whole behaviour reminiscent of the healing processes in biological and ecological systems (cited in McKenzie 1996, p.167—extract from a paper presented to a seminar of the Centre for Human Aspects of Sciece & Technology, University of Sydney, 1989)
An idealised schema of growth like the one presented earlier, however practical or impractical it might be in terms of curriculum development, outlines a process of individual human transformation that is finally realised in the transformation of the human family. (See especially Level 5 in all but the first two capabilities.) While it may sound unduly idealistic, the schema expresses human qualities we see in workers committed to healing, emancipation and transformation all over the world, and in that sense is deeply connected to the world of observation. It is uplifting to hope that the cosmos might not only be unfolding consciousness, but also compassion.
For the owner-occupier of this world of thought, the metaconjecture—possessing a making whole behaviour reminiscent of the healing processes in biological and ecological systems—is illustrated in his attempt at creating an educational tool for undergraduate curriculum development. As the metaconjecture predated the forging of the tool by nine years, this story might cast further light on the hypothesis about the hologenesis of consciousness–compassion in individual experience. It certainly demonstrates the persistence of goal-responsive thought .
I do not document these reflections because I’m on a soapbox or because I’m a dream flasher. (Open system learning implies sharing of one’s experience with fellow travellers. It is in this spirit that my personal world of thought is aired here.) I wanted to shed light on the nexus between ideals and values, and between theorising–schematising and reflection, and to find a way into thinking about the limits of knowledge and the role of intuition in meaning making. I will be happy if some of you take some of this away for further unteasing.
The realm of unknowing
We have already noted Kafatos and Nadeau’s suggestion that our apprehension of the Single Significant Whole occurs prior to any conscious constructions of it—it is pre-conscious thought, intuition. It is a sense that lies beyond the "horizon of knowledge". They argue that "any direct experience we have of this whole is necessarily in the background of consciousness, and must be devoid of conscious content" (Kafatos & Nadeau 1990 p.180). As I reflected and theorised about open system learning, the mental landscape I found myself in needed something like ‘the background of consciousness’ (even though this was long before I had come across their term). The need itself prompted my imagination to dredge up the notion of realm of unknowing. The realm of unknowing is that primal domain of personhood forever beyond conscious reach, where thought, feeling and intent are one—or more accurately, where such distinctions are unthinkable. We are ineluctably drawn here as we spin around the perpetual closed loop of reflection–theorising. As I write this, imagination quickly reconfigures the closed loop tailspin into a corkscrew or spiral spanning a lifetime. The following reverie uses a spiralling conch shell as metaphor for a human life, or rather, the history of an intellect:
This is my life, this Conch that envelops me, and I am the centre of gravity. I look behind, and see the past receding into some mysterious still point, beyond memory. I look ahead, down the future. That's not life's end, that still point: it's the culmination of my quest for understanding. This Conch, this cognitive spiral, is my intellectual life... as it appears to me in the present. The still point of the future is the unknown potential to which I aspire. A spire.
I breathe out.
I breathe in. Speck of dust I was, and shall be. I view the bottom of the black hole always and only from where I am. The phial of unknowing is forever. It is enough. (McKenzie 1996 p.107)
Of course, these thoughts are highly subjective. We may ask ourselves, in the larger scheme of things, against the canvas of the human history of meaning making, what we stand to gain by owning, existentially, the unknowable, as an integral part of one’s human being. Why coin a picture language term like ‘realm of unknowing’?
is not as clearcut as it sounds: subject–object distinctions hide the deeper unity within things. We come to see the world without and the world within as two hemispheres as inseparable as breathing (McKenzie 1996, p.104).
Whole brain inquiry
This is not the place to further expand these themes, except to say this. The apprehension of the Single Significant Whole, or of any conceptual ideal, would seem to be an intuitive realisation that cannot be substantiated by rational processes. If we accept this we are admitting that holistic thinking requires both logical and extra-logical ‘thought’ (in David Bohm’s sense of the word—see footnote 1). It is my belief that for this to become our natural way of thinking, we must learn to wait upon the awakening of our intuitive self—he/she who sees the whole beyond all conscious formulations. The model of open system inquiry (see appendix) is one way of representing this awakening. Perhaps this will stand for now as an explication of what whole brain inquiry is. (Readers interested in the reconciliation of Science and Art or Science and Religion might also have food for thought here.)
Logic of emergent coherence and the question of rigour
As the end draws nigh, we may wonder what is meant by a logic of emergent coherence, and how application of a logic test requires special handling in arguments where the quality of coherence is emergent.
‘Logic of emergent coherence’ doesn’t substitute for the Habermasian ‘logic of growing insight’. What is it then? In the case of a constructed argument, it is "is the rationale lying behind a writer's sequence of thought when the sequence of thought embodies within itself an emergent or unfolding meaning" (McKenzie 1996 p.51). This paper is an example, if, that is, the reader finds the global argument or the various strands of thought finally, to some extent, cohering.
"...the global argument or the various strands of thought". Why did I just I offer alternative constructs as the possible agents of coherence? Coherence tends to be something that gains credence over time. For each of us, the weight of evidence tips the scales at a certain point, and we are persuaded. I want to speculate here that the weight of evidence may be drawn from our conscious machinations, in which case it is the accumulation of various strands that finally knit together and 'hold water' for us; or maybe coherence can be a property of one's intuited, unfolding apprehension of the global properties of the thing.
How do researchers of messy human situations deal with research projects that depend on a logic of emergent coherence, when for most of the time an impartial observer would only see chaos? Open system learners are temperamentally suited to being patient, to remaining unfocussed for as long as it takes. But what about researchers who are committed to more rational measures of rigour?
I don't have an answer to that question at the moment. Instead, I will close this paper by proposing three criteria that may help reassure the open system researcher while ever the global coherence of the subject - methodology - reflection - theorising gestalt remains less than persuasive:
I look forward to the further refinement of these ideas as the ferret tail chase continues and their usefulness is put to the test.
Bibliography
Bohm, D. 1980, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Ark, London
Bohm, D., Factor, D. & Garrett, P. 1991, Dialogue—A Proposal. © Dialogue. Hawthorn Cottage, Broad Marston Lane, Mickleton Glos GL55 6SF England
Boulton-Lewis, G. .M. 1995, ‘The SOLO Taxonomy as a means of shaping and assessing learning in higher education’, in Higher Education Research and Development, vol. 14, no. 2, pp.143–154
Checkland, P. 1989, ‘Soft systems methodology’, in Rosenhead, (ed.) 1989, Rational Analysis for a Problematic World, John Wiley & Sons, New York
Edelman, G. M. 1992, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire—On the Matter of the Mind, Penguin, Harmondsworth
Harré, R. 1983, Personal Being—A Theory for Individual Psychology, Basil Blackwell, Oxford
Heelas, P. & Lock, A. (eds) 1981, Indigenous Psychologies—The Anthropology of the Self, Academic Press London
Kafatos, M. & Nadeau, R. 1990, The Conscious Universe—Part and Whole in Modern Physical Theory, Springer-Verlag, New York
Kitchener, K.S. & King, P.M. 1990, ‘The reflective judgment model: transfroming assumptions about knowing’, in Mezirow, J, & Associates (1990), Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood: A Guide to Transformative and Emancipatory Learning, Jossey-Bass: San Fransisco, pp.159–176
McKenzie, A. D. 1996, Improving the Effectiveness of Distance Education for Farmers, unpublished M.Sc. (Hons) thesis, University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury, Richmond NSW
Margolis, H. 1987, Patterns, Thinking and Cognition—A Theory of Judgment, University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Pickering, J. & Skinner, M. 1990, From Sentience to Symbols—Readings on Consciousness, University of Toronto Press, Toronto
Salner, M. 1986, ‘Adult cognitive and epistemological development in systems education’, in Systems Research, vol. 3, no. 4, pp.225–232
Teilhard de Chardin, P. 1955, Le Phénomène Humain, Editions du Seuil, Paris
Von Bertalanffy, L. 1981, A Systems View of Man, Boulder, Colorado
Welton, M.R. 1995, ‘The critical turn in adult education theory’, in Welton, M.R. (ed.), In Defense of the Lifeworld—Critical Perspectives on Adult Learning, State University of New York Press, Albany
Appendix: a model of open system inquiry
Phase 1: Open system thinking
Openness— I need a predisposing orientation of openness if I’m to get anywhere. Openness suggests a sense of continuity with the world of observation, of the interrelated-ness of entities and experiences; and patience, and acceptance.
Depth-of field sensitivity—having the capacity to accommodate multiple frames of reference, contexts, layers of significance. Several overlayed contexts triggered by a single landmark can be held more or less in consciousness together.
Depth-sensitive perception—landmark-spotting begins, but the open-system learner always keeps in mind the background against which an entity takes form. The context of a landmark is a world of thought in the making, only the blink of an eye away. Depth-sensitive perception implies that metacognitive awareness of these processes is emergent
Depth-sensitive thinking—thoughts multiply within their respective worlds of thought, either by rational thinking or spontaneous imagery creation. The one landmark can send us off onto this train of thought or that one, and we can switch between them at will.
Phase 2: Open
system learning
[The learner continues to demonstrate
phase 1 behaviours, plus two more.]
Body of knowledge forming—the learner resolves to develop knowledge and understanding of the subject. This process involves a double hologenesis—progressively anticipating and cultivating a blueprint of the desired understanding, and mental activity in the present designed to extend one’s current knowledge towards the final desired form.
Circumnavigation—the exploration stage; it involves continuous switching between the subject matter and its multiple contexts. The P-cognitive spiral, Margolis (1987), neatly conveys the idea of circumnavigation.
Preconscious thought lies outside conscious experience, but it may be helpful to think of it as proto-thought—the process of giving a thought birth. I adopt a wide definition of thought, such as the fine inventory offered by Bohm et. al., 1991: "We are using the word ‘thought’ here to signify not only the products of our conscious intellect but also our feelings, emotions, intentions and desires. It also includes such subtle, conditioned manifestations of learning as those that allow us to make sense of a succession of separate scenes within a cinema film or to translate the abstract symbols on road signs along with the tacit, non-verbal processes used in developing basic, mechanical skills such as riding a bicycle. In essence thought, in this sense of the word, is the active response of memory in every phase of life and virtually all of our knowledge is produced, displayed, communicated, transformed and applied in thought" (p.2).
Open system learning theory proposes that the defining feature of human kind is the fulfilment it gains from growth in understanding (McKenzie 1996 p.102). Growth in understanding, a metaconcept that subsumes cognitive and epistemological development as well as experiential wisdom, deserves a central place in our educatonal praxis.
Open system inquiry is a broad spectrum category of human meaning making, encompassing open system thinking and open system learning. Open system learning theory is the name I have given to my own synthesis of various theoretical perspectives, a postmodern and constructivist educational theory for teaching and learning aimed at progressive personal transformation through growth in understanding. The theory and model of open system learning are described in McKenzie 1996.
Research by Alain Aspect (published 1981–82) offered convincing support for the view that quantum physics is a self-consistent theory, and that "the character of physical reality as predicted by quantum physics was non-local, meaning that correlations between results would hold in spite of the fact that the regions in space in which they would be observed would be too distant from one another to allow signals travelling at the speed of light to travel between the two points in the time allowed" Kafatos & Nadeau (1990, p.1).
(a) ‘...catchments of green’—Helen Russ and her co-researchers from UWS Hawkesbury were exploring with landcare members and landholders their attitudes to what our catchment bioregion could become. (b) '...popped up from nowhere' is misleading. Years before I had come across Teilhard de Chardin's term 'Cosmogenesis', and during my Masters degree research, had encountered David Bohm's 'holomovement'. Hologenesis would appear to be a fitting hybrid of both progenitors. Human creativity draws on all manner of raw materials for inspiration in crystallising thought in words.
In my Masters thesis I describe a collaborative learning process in which my co-learners and I each composed three pieces of writing, the doing, reflection and sharing on which gave us a fuzzy yet deeply felt sense of having grown in this sense (McKenzie 1996, pp.70–102).
For Fritjof Capra the ecological world view requires that the properties of the parts be understood as dynamics of the whole (Kafatos & Nadeau 1990 p.183).
Open system learning theory distinguishes between conditioned-responsive and goal-responsive thought. "In the former, an individual lives the life that circumstances have prescribed; in the latter, an individual uses the undetermined future as a stimulus for creative action" (McKenzie 1996, p.99).
These images recall the P-cognitive spiral of Margolis 1987, discussed in McKenzie 1996 p.61–62).
Critical theorist, Jurgen Habermas, in the context of critiquing the Marxist analysis of learning processes in society, argues that learning occurs beyond the dimension of productive forces. Welton 1995 writes that for Habermas, "a ‘logic of growing insight’ operates within social interactions..." "[T]he learning process of the human species takes place through the accumulation of both technical and moral-practical knowledge. Both forms obey a ‘logic of growing insight’ whose successive steps consist in rules of possible problem solutions..." (p.27).