Steps toward the evaluation of a humanistic computing science
by Kristo Ivanov
University of Umeå, Institute of Information Processing, S-901 87 UMEÅ (Sweden).
Phone +46 90 166030, Fax +46 90 166126, Email (Internet): kivanov@cs.umu.se
Revised 19 February 2004 in order to insert the following bibliographic data for the paper, including the author's present e-mail address: kivanov@informatik.umu.se:
Ivanov, K. (1991). Computer-supported human science or humanistic computing science? Steps toward the evaluation of a humanistic computing science (UMADP-WPIPCS-41.91:3). Umeå University, Inst. of Information Processing. Rev. ed. of paper presented at the Tenth International Human Science Research Association Conference, August 18-22, 1991, Gothenburg. (http://www.informatik.umu.se/~kivanov/page4.html.)
Keywords: humanism, computing, soft systems, development, participation, action research, constructivism, historicism, critical social theory, discourse, communicative action, linguistics, interpretive, structuralism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, postmodernism, theology, ethics, communication, interaction, hypersystems, dialectics, formal science, mathematics, logic, cooperative work.
The paragraph above is a quotation which, for the purpose of its surprise effect, I took the liberty of not identifying outright as a quotation. It belongs to the beginning of an article with the title What is "Social"? - What Does it Mean? written by F.A. Hayek (1967, pp. 237-247), and published originally in 1957. [1]
Be this as it may, the present essay takes its impetus from my concern about the use of the adjective "humanistic" as applied to computing science, since here this word often seems to have the same vague meaning as "social". Some conceptions have gone to great pains in trying to anchor their use of the the words social and human. Some state, for instance that "social action systems" - without any closer discussion of the system concept - are seen by "critical social theory" as those the behavior of which is strongly affected by socially determined forces and constraints such as behavior-channeling influences of authority, norms, customs, habits and precedence: "We say 'social' rather than 'human' action in order to emphasize that all human behaviour is influenced by socially determined constraints. Some of these are conscious, such as documented office policies, procedures or public laws; others are sub-conscious, such as customs, habits, learned precedents, beliefs, managerial ideology, charismatic authority, and so forth" (Lyytinen, Klein, & Hirschheim, 1991, pp. 41, 43). Others who work within the tradition of "activity theory", that has sometime has been regarded as an "umbrella" theory for all human and social sciences, see activities as taking into account "essentially human qualities"; among such qualities they count the idea "that humans can control their own behaviour - not 'from the inside', on the basis of biological urges, but 'from the outside', using and creating artifacts" (Kuutti, 1990, pp. 3, 16)[2]. Still others, in the phenomenological hermeneutic tradition, seem to relate humanism or, for instance, "the dignity of the human worker" not mainly to the idea of challenging, stimulating jobs but rather to the idea of a type of "human community" that is characterized by "the fundamental importance of interpersonal dialogue and the search for meaning through language in a human community" (Boland, 1987, p. 377). A recent initiative for launching a "humanistic" alternative information and computer science states shortly that it is "based on the assumption that computer models are constructed by humans, to fulfil desires made up by humans, serving needs for humans and for those who are protected by human interests" (Forsgren, 1991a).
Both words, "social" and "humanistic", seem to an ever increasing degree to have taken the place of the words "moral", "responsible", and "good". In fact, "ethics" and "ethical" are also often used as a kind of pledge, at least as often as "humanism" and "humanistic" are used this way. The fact that these word appear many times in this essay shows, I hope, the seriousness of the author's struggles to clarify their meaning. Therefore I will soon go over to the humanistic issue.
Before that, however, I wish to mention that the general direction I have been trying to impart to our research in information systems at the university of Umeå in the last fifteen years has certainly coincided with, if not contributed to, the rise in our country of the term social and, especially, humanistic in such contexts. About five years ago our particular research direction was explicitly noted in a national newspaper as representative of a humanistic tradition. Social research in the same area was made also at several other - but not too many - places, mainly in terms of action research in social settings and labour union participation. There were certain concerns, however, which could not appropriately fit into those social and socialistic efforts. At that time I did not care if the term "humanistic" was being used as a kind of "ragbag" for concerns without a home. I felt satisfied that they had a home, and that it was my home. The difficulties of academic squabbles about departmental labels and naming or frontiers of disciplines could be overcome, I hoped, in due time, with the proper effort. Today several difficulties persist, and now the time has come to return to the question of humanism in order to evaluate the theoretical and practical development trends in the research efforts. American philosophical pragmatism and empirical idealism had given rise to our dialectical social systems theory (Churchman, 1971). Today they have to contend with a several other directions and "isms" like phenomenology, language action theory, activity theory, hermeneutics, constructivism, etc. that sometimes claim to be consistent with our background, sometimes not. Eclecticism waits at the door; but it is, of course, only one more "ism".
I wish also to mention that in other papers (Ivanov, 1986; Ivanov, 1987; Ivanov, 1990b; Ivanov, 1991b), I have already addressed some problems of particular attempts - including "human scale information systems" "work-oriented design of computer artifacts" and "constructive computer applications" (Ehn, 1988; Forsgren, 1988b; Forsgren, & Ivanov, 1990; Nurminen, 1988) - that aim at developing a new social or human computing science. The "human" issue as related to computers and information has since long appeared in many guises, including democratic participation, creativity and privacy.
But, what does, then, this "sudden" interest for humanism mean? In this context of social or humanistic computing science the following thoughts come easily to mind, (Montgomery, 1991, p. 42):
This language of stereotype - borne upon an endless stream of supporting images, reports, interviews, articles, books, etc. - accumulates a power to weave a spell, to impose a paralysis of expectation. Such a spell becomes utterly ordinary, normalized. Terms like "discovery", "breakthrough", "revolutionary", "genius", "mystery", used over and over again at each new opportunity of expression, like the formula tints of a postcard sunset, act to inject a type of pseudo-spirituality into the scientific; the terms apply to it a certain quality of the sacred.
Yes, I also think that the appeal of words like "humanistic", "social" or "ethical", inject into our context of computing science a type of pseudo-spirituality and of the sacred. Therefore I will try to take into consideration more seriously both the spirit and the sacred in this essay. In doing so I understand that I will have to sail between Scylla and Charybdis, or to walk as if on a knife's edge, between dogmatism and relativism. Paradoxically enough, the seductive attractiveness or pseudo-spirituality of "kitsch-science" apparently draws its power from it being a sociopsychological reaction - an "enantiodromia" as Carl Jung calls it in the tradition of Heraclitus - to the absolutism and dogmatism of scientism and of naïve positivistic science (ibid., pp. 31ff).
In the last twenty years of computing and information science the adjectives "humanistic", like "human centered", "ethical", "cultural", "critical", and "social", have been mentioned with increasing frequency as a kind of prestige words for calling the attention upon things which are supposedly easily forgotten in the context of technology. Many scientists and technician have expressed their irritation at the insinuation that they are supposed not to think about human values and so on, while self-appointed humanists who use and appreciate - or even profit from - technology in their daily lives profess self-confidently their own respect and admiration for the human race and its vague highest values. In fact such an attitude is rather suspicious, like assuming that the limits of morality and ethics must follow the lines of demarcation between different professions or spheres of interest simply labeled by different words.
In order to direct the research efforts for evaluating and developing a better computing science the present essay will start surveying some of the connotations of humanism. The search will be guided in its broad outline by what is suggested in encyclopedic overviews (Enciclopedia di filosofia, 1981; Encyclopaedia of philosophy, 1967).
In this respect this paper will be similar to earlier efforts that have been made toward a conceptual clarification of the meaning of human science. Unfortunately, the latest of them reached me after the completion of the main body of my manuscript (Collen, 1990, and other contributions in the same journal issue; Dahlin, 1989). These efforts include attempts to understand the classification and divisions of sciences as related to philosophy, history, etc., and they even include pluralistic, transdisciplinary, integrative approaches. Such approaches aim especially at the divisions of human sciences as e.g. phenomenology, hermeneutics, interpretive social science, linguistics, humanistic psychology, field theory, social action research, etc. (ibid., p. 27).
In the context of development of computer support we are a group of researchers who have tried to accomplish a much less ambitious and more focused integration by developing a particular pragmatically inspired approach to dialectical social systems science (Churchman, 1971). The clarification of human science in this paper, then, is attempted in view of its application to particular contemporary human problems in the field of computing science, especially in the design and evaluation of practice of systems development. Since all problems by definition may be considered as human I must explain at the outset that I am thinking of particular core concepts that need a place in our theorizing. This includes the core concepts of empirical-analytical hard science, and others which are "softer" but must reach beyond perfunctory references to communication, participation, knowledge, ideals, negotiation, and the like. I am thinking particularly of what in the literature has been called power, justice, ethics, aesthetics, spirituality, intentionality or teleology, etc. but also - in a more detailed mode - freedom, responsibility, duty, obligation, understanding, relationship, integrity, authenticity, and even "further" toward love, hate, trust, despair, resignation, repentance, forgiveness, charity. At the edge of political morality and ethics I will also touch upon religion. While religion today may seem to be irrelevant to an elucidation of the meaning of a human science, I believe, like a few others (Allwood, 1990; Kvale, 1990), that this may be due to a pervasive modern tendency to replace religion with a belief in progress, or at least survival, through "humanistic" enlightenment, rationality, and science.
These values are today often pursued through participatory, client centered, or user driven systems development. By confusing values or ideals as such with values held by a social actor it is easily forgotten that "not only the Church, but the whole free world of pluralistic, tolerant democracy is built on the blood of martyrs and constructive dissidents" (Allwood, 1990, p. 44). Or, referring to a presumedly less religious formulation: "in contrast to the desanctified reality of the Enlightenment, human action is in a fundamental way moral action within a historically constituted human community" (Kvale, 1990, p. 10, referring to Stigliano, 1990).
By transcending purely profane social humanism, I hope to avoid the trap of easy, goody-goody attitudes, and also to avoid the temptation of handing over the responsibility for the issue to the social community, i.e. others. In other words, if anybody asks me what is the meaning of my self-professed humanistic attitude or of my humanistic initiatives, I want to avoid answering by stating that an answer will be provided ultimately by the behavior of those who join me in the endeavour, or by the initiative itself. This is like the traditional "operational" definition of intelligence as the result of applying an intelligence test, or the definition of justice as the judgement of a legal court. As well known, these definitions beg the ethical issue of responsibility, since they are neither helpful as a guide for the designer of the test nor for the member of the court.
If these things are well understood, then we might also in the long run be able to answer, for instance, the question of the difference between talking about humanistic computing science versus talking about computer supported humanism. We might also - before we found some new humanistic enterprise - be able to appreciate and build upon the merits of earlier humanistic attempts in the field of computing science. Such attempts have been made both in what concerns the creation of societies like "Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility"[3], particular interest groups in other societies[4], and in what concerns research or debate, beyond those which are covered in some detail in this paper: (Annerstedt, Forssberg, Henriksson, & Nilsson, 1970; Barrett, 1987; Bolter, 1984; Checkland, 1988; Dreyfus, 1979; Dreyfus, & Dreyfus, 1985; Ehn, 1988; Göranzon, & Josefson, 1988; Heim, 1987; Hirschheim, & Klein, 1989; Ivanov, 1986; Ivanov, 1989; Ivanov, 1990a; Ivanov, 1990c; Ivanov, 1991a; Nissen, 1989; Roszak, 1986; Tengström, 1987; Turkle, 1984; Ulrich, 1987; Weizenbaum, 1976). If the purposes of some of these attempts happen to be political we may hope that they are not mainly political and that they will profit from a better understanding of the meaning of politics and, in particular, of the policy of science (Boffey, 1975; Churchman, 1979; Hahn, 1971; Rouse, 1987).
Some "executive" readers - doers and men of action who like to "build" - may not want to take the risk of suffocating their creativity or entrepreneurial spirit by inquiring into the fundaments of their buildings, be they historical fundaments or others. Nevertheless they may still appreciate the following overview of some problems of humanism as related to computing science, which incidentally may cast some light on what is being done, and why. I ask the reader to keep in mind that the main purpose of my paper is to show the extreme complexity of humanism, the problems of the tendency to reduce it to social terms, and the need of turning the attention to the concrete expressions of the presuppositions that stand behind humanism proper. This is done in this paper in terms of "apperception", i.e. a fostering of the ability of a designer to design a system from many points of view, where the author and the reader are envisaged to be the designers of future humanistic systems or computer supported human systems; another way of formulating the approach of this paper is in terms of a "sweeping-in" process which consists in bringing concepts and variables from various different disciplines into an inquiry in order to both create and overcome inconsistencies (Churchman, 1971, pp. 75, 197).
In this edition of the paper I will take the liberty to refrain from attempting a systematization of detailed conclusions, and from relating to each other those conclusions which are scattered along the text. I feel that this paper has been for me the most difficult that I have ever written, and in an inordinately short time, while I was trying to cope with a volume of material which - because of some interesting reason - was ever growing. I am painfully aware of its shortcomings. (The use of several secondary sources, however, is not the most serious shortcoming since I find that it can be justified, if required.) All this together implies that the paper probably will also be extremely difficult to read. Even so I opt for making it public because I judge that the matter is urgently needed in order to help others - not the least graduate students - to orient their ongoing research.[5]
And one preliminary conclusion which attempts to grasp the essence of this research will correspond to what T.S. Eliot probably meant in "Little Gidding", the third of his Four Quartets.:
We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.
"Humanism" is identified in encyclopedic works as a term which apparently was used for the first time by nineteen century historians, and could be related to the term "humanist" already used in the fifteenth century as a name for the literate person who occupied himself with humanæ litteræ, that is, a study of classics[6]. The fundamental character of humanism is seen as being initially that of the Renaissance's break with the supposedly dark Middle Ages and a return to antiquity, to the cult of the classical world. The genuine meaning of the classical world would be rediscovered by means of a philological analysis that would open the way to a development of rhetorics, understood as the art of persuasion in the art of government and of moral sciences. This attitude implied an involvement with the political problems of the time, and a consideration of culture as a part of public life. This led, however, to intellectuals becoming public servants at the service of the powerful.
A reaction followed, in the person of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), a major representative of Renaissance platonism. Being completely withdrawn from public life, he would reinterprete the classical thought in terms of a religious syncretism that aimed at unifying Christianity and Platonism. It would be a religious wisdom or pious philosophy not available to the great masses of people, but rather reserved for the initiated who dedicate their lives to the study of these matters, and who can work as intermediaries and guides for other people.
The celebration of man, for the centrality of his position in the universe, would be found later in most expressions of humanism. And a controversial subsequent issue would be the danger of anthropocentrism and the relation between God and man with respect to claims to such centrality.
In relation to the history of philosophy there are still controversies between those who consider humanism essentially as an artistic and literary movement without further deeper implications, and those who consider it as a new conception of man, a break with particular, traditional ways of philosophizing. In the context of computer- and information science it is interesting to note the two ways in which humanism is usually understood in current philosophical speech. The first is, in a theoretical sense, defining all positions that emphasize the value of man in contrast to God or to nature, and the second is revindicating or countering the menaces against human personality - whatever should be meant by this term - that arise from the economic, social or technical organization. It is probably in this later sense that humanism is more or less consciously adduced in the context of computing science, not having, however any particular relation with the historical meaning of humanism except the theme of the "dignity of man".
In the context of modern thought, humanism is often mentioned in relation to an antitheological and antispeculative position represented by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). It is this brand of humanism which inspired Karl Marx (1818-1883) to develop his conception of communism where humanism departs further from the idea of a metaphysical metahistoric "essence" of man. In its place such new humanism proposes the idea that the nature of man is historic, determined essentially by the set of the economic and social relations through which he lives. In this perspective the new humanism seems to recall later currents of evolutionistic pragmatism or social behaviorism as represented by the interactionism of George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), and of pragmatist constructionism as represented by the interactivism of early cybernetically inspired systems theory (Ackoff, 1974, pp. 27ff). The motive of such humanistic interactionism and constructivism also seems to permeate much of later work on relations and interactions on a biological basis, for instance in the context of autopoietic constructive cybernetics (Maturana, & Varela, 1980).
In modern philosophy the question of humanism was revived by existentialism (Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger) and by its critics in the tradition of so called structuralism (Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault), touching upon the debates about historicism.
In order to understand modern humanistic philosophy in relation to social philosophy, however, it may be helpful to consider the relations of philosophy to metaphysics and religion. This is important in order to understand what is being attempted nowadays with the help of social, participative and communicative philosophies as implemented in constructive computer supported cooperative work. In this essay some of these relations are discussed in a later section on the political and religious dimension. The time is ripe now, however, to mention a potentially fruitful way of considering the history of philosophy (Spengler, 1981-1983/1918, vol. 1, pp. 364ff).
In every culture there is a metaphysical period in the development of thought. This is a life-creative period which is originally of a religious, and later of a rationalistic cast. It is followed by an ethical period in which the philosophical creative power still remaining is turned on the conduct and maintenance of life. In the one period life reveals itself; the other has life as its object. The one is theoretical or contemplative in the grand sense; the other is practical perforce.
With the decline of metaphysics, ethics has outgrown its status as a subordinate element in abstract theory. Henceforth it is philosophy, the other divisions being absorbed into it and practical living becoming the centre of consideration. The passion of pure thought sinks down. Metaphysics, mistress yesterday, is handmaid now; all it is required to do is to provide a foundation for practical views. And the foundation becomes more and more superfluous. It becomes the custom to despise and mock at the metaphysical, the unpractical, the philosophy of "stone for bread"....
Strict metaphysics has exhausted its possibilities. The world city has definitively overcome the land, and now its spirit fashions a theory proper to itself, directed of necessity outward, soulless. Henceforward, we might with some justice replace the word "soul" by the word "brain". And, since in the Western "brain" the will to power, the tyrannical set towards the future and purpose to organize everybody and everything, demands practical expression, ethics, as it loses touch more and more with its metaphysical past, steadily assumes a social-ethical and social-economic character. The philosophy of the present that starts from Hegel and Schopenhauer is, so far as it represents the spirit of the age (which, e.g. Lotze and Herbart do not), a critique of society (ibid., pp. 366f).
The text goes on to say that F. Nietzsche is in every respect a disciple of the materialistic decades. That which drew him with such passion to Schopenhauer is that element of Schopenhauer's doctrine by which he destroyed the great metaphysic of, and also parodied his master Kant. The world becomes a brain-phenomenon and human consciousness is conditioned by the intellect. This is a mere accident of our being, since it is a function of the brain. And the nervous system is only a product of the rest of the organism inasmuch as it serves a purpose of self-preservation by regulating one's relations with the outer world. This corresponds to the flattest materialism, the intellect as instrument of the will-to-life, as a weapon in the struggle for existence, and sexual love as unconscious selection according to biological interest. In contrast to the philosophies of Hegel and Fichte, this kind of philosophy was one whose metaphysical propositions could be absorbed with ease by intellectual mediocrities.
Without necessarily espousing the whole background for the analysis that was summarized above ("I feel urged to name once more those to whom I owe practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche", ibid., p. xiv) I feel that we have heard enough in order to recognize the flavour of many arguments in the context of so called artificial intelligence, and in the context of the social-biological basis for both socialistic and individualistic approaches to the study of computer support to human thinking, including autopoiesis (Maturana, et al., 1980). "Socialism is political economy converted into the ethical and, moreover, the imperative mood. So long as a metaphysics existed (that is, till Kant) political economy remained a science. But as soon as 'philosophy' became synonymous with practical ethics, it replaced mathematics as the basis of thought about the world - hence the importance of Cousin, Bentham, Comte, Mill and Spencer" (Spengler, 1981-1983/1918, vol. 1, p. 367). It may turn out that the words political economy and philosophy can be replaced by systems development in the sentences above. It could then also explain the intuitive reason for the goodwilled but misplaced efforts of those who feel that computer systems development should be turned into a pure formal mathematical or logical matter (including recursive "self-referencing" functions), and rescued from sterile philosophies and ideologies of the type that are easily absorbed by intellectual mediocrities. I wonder whether we are misreading Kant and - despite all protestations of "humanism" - abandoning metaphysics for a position of the "flattest materialism". For this purpose it may be fruitful - if not necessary - to consider in a later section which issues of politics and religion appear in the context of computer systems development.
I give the name Historicism to the belief that men can, by the use of their natural powers, discover an inner meaning in the historical process....What I mean by a Historicist is a man who asks me to accept his account of the inner meaning of history on the grounds of his learning and genius.... I say an inner meaning because I am not classifying as Historicists those who find a "meaning" in history in any sense whatever....The mark of the Historicist, on the other hand, is that he tries to get from historical premises conclusions which are more than historical; conclusions metaphysical or theological or (to coin a word) atheo-logical.[8]
In encyclopedias of philosophy historicism has been defined as a term that designates a current of thought that was born in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century based on some main ideas that are often attributed to Gian Battista Vico (1668-1744). In particular such ideas considered the concrete question of the world of human actions. It was opposed to the world that was not created by man but rather by God and that consequently could not be understood by man with the same depth and detail as the former world of actions that was created by himself.
All this is obviously related to the meaning of "artefact" and "artificial", as in the debate on "artificial intelligence". It is also a background for the meaning of human sciences, as a result of the classification of sciences in as either formal (like logic and mathematics), or empirical or real. The latter could be further subdivided into natural (like physics, chemistry and biology), and human (psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc.) which were ultimately differentiated into social and behavioral. There are several ways of telling the story of the genesis of these subdivisions (Collen, 1990). They could, by themselves, be made the object of interesting studies pointing to the need of the "system" concept. It should be noted that philosophical pragmatism questions the meaningfulness of differentiating between so many classes of science. Nevertheless it could barely reject the formulation of the historical methodological problem to be considered below, a problem which is inherent to the "historical" dimension of modern scientific areas like statistical information systems and data bases.
The eighteenth century also was interested in history, but mainly for the illuministic purpose of indicating the course of "progress" (e.g. Voltaire). The later historicism regarded history as an evolution and progressive realization of human essence according to a plan that could be interpreted as being basically divine (G.E. Lessing's intuitions).
In its more restricted and precise meaning, historicism designates a current of thought that is closely related to German historiography of the second half of the nineteenth century. This current of thought followed upon the criticism of the romantic view of history, and is often represented by such names as Dilthey, Windelband, Rickert, Simmel, Weber, Spengler, Troeltsch, Mannheim and Meinecke. A recurrent theme in the discussions was history seen as a theater of human actions where man stands at the center of the scene. The issue was often whether natural science with its stable laws of generalizable behavior and its closeness to mathematics and logic would overlap with the science of history, of man or of the human spirit - Geisteswissenschaften, with their "idiographic" method of the unique, as opposed to the "nomothetic" method of natural science. To the extent that there was no overlapping - an overlapping which would have been made possible e.g. by means of reference to an ultimate divine plan for both these worlds - there was the risk of an opening towards relativism. That was the relativism of the single historical event related to the single man in the context of a particular historical process or historical cycle of a country or of a culture and civilization. Some thinkers like Rickert, Troeltsch, and Meinecke reacted against the dangers of relativism by means of adducing the presence of God or a divine plan in history. By so doing they reconducted the issue paradoxically to its starting point in the tradition of romanticism. It was namely the negation of this romanticism which had provided the initial impetus of historicism (Dilthey).
Some of the claims of an overlapping between natural and historical science, or rather of an inclusion of the latter in the former, were advanced in the name of analytical philosophy and positivism. Even within this current of thought, however, there was a defense of the autonomy of the science of man, like in the work of W. Dray (Laws and Explanation in History, 1957) who, within the tradition of analytical philosophy, revived the position that was introduced earlier in England between the two world wars by the historian and philosopher R.G. Collingwood[9].
For one of the main exponents of structuralism, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the historical event as the essence of a humanistic view of the world is not something simply unique and non-repeatable. It is rather a series of contingent variations within a range of possibilities that is offered by structures that are constant or timeless. True invariances are not represented by apparent or generic similarities but they are rather hidden in the dynamics of the relations between variables. They represent the "structures of the human spirit" or "the unconscious". In this way structuralism recalls some of the features of analytical psychology and of the humanism of C.G. Jung (D'Aquili, 1975; Rauhala, 1973), but it also questions the "ethnocentric" ideal of social evolution and progress.
In contrast with views that at the present time are often accepted as "obvious", Lévi-Strauss claims, in polemics with phenomenology and existentialism, that the lived experience of the subject in his own culture is mainly an obstacle to the discovery of its own hidden structures. The archetypal human scientist in the person of the humanist should rather study men from outside, at a distance, with the help of language as "symbolic systems", and also include non-verbal aspects of culture. In this perspective social anthropology, which can be seen in our context as a "method for systems development", turns into a general science of signs or semiology (cf. Lévi-Strauss, Éloge de l'Antropologie, 1960).
The potential interest of structuralism for applications to the field of computing and information system in our context derives from its extension of the structuralist linguistics of R. Jakobson to symbolic systems. It is tempting to speculate that Lévi-Strauss' studies of the creative and productive reasons for certain prohibitions of marriages between blood relatives (stimulating interfamiliar relations) could possibly apply even to desirable prohibitions of the use of computer communications and electronic mail! This would be consistent with the view of societies as sets of individuals who are communicating with each other by means of various aspects of the culture which constitute as many forms of language. This is a far cry from the belief that certain main forms of verbal and visual communications implemented by computer networks would enable a revolutionary potential of development. It would be naive to believe that this could be achieved through increased communication and pooling of opinions between individuals without regard for the deeper aspects of culture as implicit in the different connotations of humanism.
An important criticism of humanism was also formulated in the work of Michel Foucault who questions the obviousness of the identity and continuity of the "subject". The centrality of the subject or, as one might say in the field of computing science, of the "user", starts to develop at the time of the Renaissance and culminates in the human sciences of our century. It assumes that the subject if conceived as an immediately positive datum, and that history follows a line of continuous development. Foucault proposes to show that the pretended positivity of the subject in the historical process is the outcome of the removal of psychological and physical deviance that is conceived as negative and pathological. This removal, furthermore, does not occur as a linear continuous process but rather as the result of sudden, contradictory fractures. These "epistemological fractures" are studied in Foucault's later works about Les Paroles et les Choses (1966) and L'Archéologie du Savoir (1969).[10]
An intuitive potential interest of these insights in the context of the development of information systems would be the realization that our dogmatic belief in the importance of "user participation" and "communication" is jeopardized by our inability to take care of the contributions of the deviants. Unfortunately, even the supposedly most participative and constructive systems development projects today may be limited to the participation of the few who happen to share a more or less some common view of the world or of the axioms for action. That may indeed be seen as an obvious precondition for being able to act at all within the constraint of limited resources. It is, however, exactly this kind of limitations that historically have made the identity of the "users", as well as their constructive cooperative participation, highly problematic and an object of "epistemological fractures", and other fractures[11].
Hegel is prized for having definitively ruptured the link between philosophy and theology or metaphysics, abandoning the search for a "human nature" or for the "deepest level of the self", and reducing the matter to a historical process of socialization. This is indeed notable and paradoxical in the context of the search for a meaning for "humanism", and it certainly is the background of the accusation for antihumanism that has been historically directed against Hegel's philosophy. The liberation from theology and metaphysics, and from the temptation to escape from time and chance is supposed to have helped us to substitute freedom for truth, freedom and autonomy becoming the goal of thinking and of progress.
Rorty, however, identifies a remaining tension between the private and the public. Historicists who emphasize self-realization and individual autonomy - like Heidegger and Foucault - tend to regard socialization in the same way as Nietzsche did - as something which is conflicting with something deep inside us. Historicists who emphasize a more just and emancipated society - like the pragmatist Dewey and Habermas - tend to regard such striving for self-realization as contaminated by "irrationalism" and "aestheticism". The suggestion is that the conflict should not be solved through a choice between the two historicisms but rather by means of a pragmatic, or rather eclectic, use of them for different purposes. Authors like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Proust, Heidegger and Nabokov could be used as individuals, or examples of self-realization and autonomy, while others like Marx, Mill, Dewey, Habermas and Rawls should be regarded as co-citizens who try to make our institutions and our activities more "human" in the sense of more just and less cruel.
It is at this point that Rorty uncovers his own implicit and truncated "metaphysics" in that he dogmatically states that there is no possibility that philosophy or any other theoretical discipline (obviously including any "systems theory" and, even more decidedly, theology) will ever create a synthetic vision of self-realization and justice, individuality and solidarity. "We should accept the fact [sic] that no theory of human nature, or society or reason, or whatever will create a synthesis of Nietzsche and Marx, or of Heidegger and Habermas", and then we should consider these poles like two different "tools" who do not need to be synthesized. Rorty finds that there is no possibility of speaking one only metalanguage. We must give up the attempts to gather all aspects of our life in one only vision and describe them in one only language. This is obviously also a denial of the "systems approach" and all monism.
A liberal ironic is somebody who believes that cruelty is the worst thing on earth, who accepts the temporality of his most central convictions and desires, and has given up the hope that they could refer to something transcendent beyond time and chance. Among these convictions and desires he includes his own hope that human suffering and reciprocal humiliation will decrease and eventually cease. Decisions about whether and when to emphasize justice or self-realization, family or society cannot be made referring to theological or metaphysical algorithms. In spite of this, it must be recognized that most people still embrace some form of religious belief or some form of Enlightenment rationalism. As an alternative Rorty proposes a liberal utopia with a universal irony. Such a postmetaphysical culture is deemed to be no less impossible than a post-religious one.
The liberal ironic utopia is supposed to attain humanity - or, rather human solidarity - neither by theoretical inquiries and struggles against prejudices nor by digging into unfathomable depths, but rather through the capability that fantasy and empathy give us to see alien people as suffering people of equal value. Solidarity is not discovered through reflection but it is created by increasing our sensibility for the pain and humiliations that strike alien people. This process through which we succeed in seeing other people more like "one of us" than "they" includes detailed descriptions of others and of ourselves, and it is not a task for theory but rather for ethnography, journalistic reports, documentary dramas and, mainly, for fiction literature like romances and novels. Authors like Dickens, Olive Schreiner, Richard Wright, Choderlos de Laclos, Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov are seen as giving us the details of "universal" sufferings and cruelties and helping to describe ourselves. Romances, films, and TV-programs are substitutes for sermons and treatises, with the function of conveying moral changes and progress. They imply abandonment of theorizing to the advantage of story-telling. Such a historicist and nominalistic culture would be content to link the present to the past and to the utopian future, and it would conceive development as an endless process - an endless branching out towards the implementation of Freedom, rather than a linkage to existing truth.
My rendering above of Rorty's historicist vision of humanism introduces the problematic coupling of humanism to metaphysics and religion. It also introduces the denial of metaphysics at the cost of introducing a new metaphysics of "impossibilities". Furthermore, it presents a striving towards a heightened fantasy, empathy, and moral sensibility coupled to a paradoxical wholesale dismissal - without close argumentation - of religious traditions. It seems to me that it is these very same religious traditions that mainly - through their socializing rituals, holy books, and social Church organization - attempted to develop the fantasy, empathy and moral sensibility that Rorty talks about. They also talk about freedom-from, but always in connection with freedom-to, i.e. moral responsibility. The Bible, for example, is a masterpiece of literature that combines different forms and contents of "romance", having exerted uncomparable influence on the whole of Western culture. To deny the value of the Bible and other holy books and put them at the "truncated" metaphysical altar of pluralism or polytheism (e.g. in the sense of Greek mythology) is to beg the question.
In this respect I find that Agnes Heller's criticism of liberal irony is justified (Heller, 1991). Liberal irony - in the spirit of postmodernism - escapes conflicts and antagonistic activities by identifying ethics with aesthetics - more particularly, by reducing the former to the latter. This is the same process that recently has been identified as constituting the background of the rise of "science as kitsch" (Montgomery, 1991). I think that it is reasonable to suppose that such a process is facilitated by the espousing of a defective, unfortunate conception of ethics, divorced from religion, which is in turn reduced to a purely personal private experience. Furthermore it is difficult to imagine, in such a world of pluralistic and aesthetically apprehended ideas, why a philosopher or whoever would try to convince, or elicit the attention of, other people for anything, including truth or love, or motives for participating in "language games". It seems to me obvious that pluralism - through the belief in each one of the multiple "plural" contributions of individual "perspectives" - still presupposes some kind of metaphysical ultimate grand monistic system synthesis, be it "religious" or not (Churchman, 1971, p. 71ff). Perspectivism precedes and follow negotiation or, rather persuasion (Ivanov, 1972, chap. 4; Ivanov, 1986, pp. 46-52; Ivanov, 1987). If not, why contribute or participate? The matter justifies, in any case, that we return to religion (and politics) in a later section of this paper. In fact, Webster's (Third New International Dictionary) gives for religion the synonym persuasion: "Persuasion may suggest conviction arising from evangelism or exhortation; often it is more or less interchangeable with faith."
In summary: I think that the postmodern escape from metaphysics does not work except, paradoxically, as just that: an escape. Metaphysics has just changed its appearance and shows up in disguise, like, for instance, in K.O. Apel's "transcendental self-reflection" (Stigliano, 1990, p. 91, quoting Apel, 1987, p. 277) . We get, then, a "transcendental language game" (Apel, 1980, pp. 144, 171f, 247, 290, 282ff), a "transcendental self-reflection" (ibid., 268, 273, 275, 282) and a "quasi-naturalistic reflexive self" (ibid., 152, 284)[12]. I personally feel that we would do better in going all the way towards a full acknowledgement of the quasi-metaphysical, metaphysical, and religious aspects of critical social theory (as suggested in ibid., pp. 237, 250, 274, and especially 290).
It is remarkable that such a quasi-religious and quasi-metaphysical language creeps in many other papers in the tradition of both phenomenology, and critical social theory. In a phenomenological discussion of the concept of intelligence as it should be found in the context of artificial intelligence, one refers, for instance, to something to be found in dialogue, through language, as but one historical moment in the "universal hermeneutic of mankind" (Boland, 1987, p. 374); paradoxically, this is done without even mentioning the possibility of having, in particular, to appropriate the message of the Bible which is indeed recognized as the source of hermeneutic science.
We can also read, for instance (Fuenmayor, 1990b, pp. 530f), that "critique can thus be understood as the progressive process of gaining awareness about our own 'state of mind' (scene) which is necessarily hidden in our judging (and acting in general). To put it metaphorically, critique is the attempt to see - not that which as an objective thing we are looking at, but rather - how we are looking at it...In a phrase, critique is the look of look...We can thus represent critique as a process of reaching out (stepping backward) toward new regions of awareness about the necessary concealing in our fundamental living-acting. This 'reaching-out' might be pictured as moving out in concentric circles (within the same plane or transcending to a new plane)".
In reflecting on this last reading, I find that any onlooker who happens to belong to an "outer" circle looking at somebody else in an "inner" circle will feel like a constructive perspectivist who looks down at a descriptive, representational objectivist. But who is looking at the whole process and defining what is outer and inner? And where will this whole process end up: at the most "outer" circle which corresponds to the realm of metaphysics and God, or in a vicious inner circle of reciprocal and inconclusive perspectives? This matter is certainly related to the Kantian question of the choice between a "minimal a-priori" and a "maximal a-priori" but also to the Hegelian-Singerian question of the "search for objectivity: infinite regress or vicious circle" (Churchman, 1971, p. 133ff, 168f). "If the search process 'converges' in some sense, then the 'limit' might be regarded as an objective description of reality...authority and control are pervasive throughout the system and have no location; the system is controlled, but no component is the controller (ibid., pp. 175, 196). But then, what is that which apparently drives scholars to express themselves in a quasi-metaphysical mode? The intriguing question is whether anything is added to the above by stating that "the solution of the problem is not to evade the onto-epistemological question but rather to construct (and always reconstruct) an onto-epistemology which does not become the source of hidden presuppositions, but which becomes the forum for the explicit debate of any kind of presuppositions" (Fuenmayor, 1990a, p. 590, cf also Flood, & Ulrich, 1990) .
Other roots of constructivistic "interactive" thinking (Butts, & Brown, 1989; Lorenzen, & Schwemmer, 1973; Schmidt, 1987) seem to have started with the term constructivism as it was originated in the German philosophical tradition with the operationism of Hugo Dingler (1881-1954). It should be noted that Dingler had among his masters the grand old man of formalist mathematics, David Hilbert, and also Edmund Husserl, the father of modern phenomenology. From the description of his ideas I gather that he may very well have been also influenced by Ernst Mach (1838-1916), whose struggle against depictive science in favour of a constructivist attitude constituted a heritage taken over by neo-positivism[13]. These original ideas were further developed in the so called "Erlanger School".
Constructionism has been made the object of more committed studies in other contexts (Berti, 1987, p. 66; Söderqvist, 1988a; Söderqvist, 1988b). They have not been, to my knowledge, recognized in Scandinavian computing science which, however, is recently showing increasing interest in a "marxist" constructionism (Kuutti, 1990; Nilsson, 1989). It opposes programmatically - as in Lenin's work on "Materialism and Empiriocriticism" - Mach's conceptions of abstract functional dependencies to the advantage of social and historical relations.
Humanism in the biological constructive perspective seems to be associated to a knowledge that is validated by the maintenance of "successful autopoiesis", even if the meaning or evaluation of "success" is not addressed. It comes close to consensual pragmatic truth directed towards survival in a domain that is scientifically characterized by a cultural unity of consensual observers acting in a methodological domain of a universal logic and of socially accepted operational statements (Mingers, 1990, p. 572). This recalls, of course, the embarassing image that was condemned above in the denunciation of the decline of metaphysics and the rise of biological success in terms of objective survival.
Having to choose among the classic categories of philosophies of science, empiricism, idealism, and realism (ibid., p. 573ff), this kind of pragmatic constructivism is placed close to idealism and to the new realism called transcendental or critical realism. Idealistic constructivism (Boyd, 1984; von Glasersfeld, 1979; von Glasersfeld, 1984) refers to the radical idea - common within social theory and phenomenology (Berger, & Luckman, 1967) - that our experiences of the world are essentially constructed by us, and as theories change, so does the world we experience. The new realism, in contrast, accepts the epistemological criticism that observations are theory dependent and that we cannot have pure access to an independent world. "It asserts strongly, however, that such a world does exist and that it is populated by objects and entities, some of which may be, in principle, unobservable, which have causal powers or tendencies. Against empiricism it argues that it is the interaction, in complex ways, of these generative mechanisms which lead to our observations. Science can no longer be seen as creating true theories, but proposing and identifying potential causal objects, the descriptions of which are at least approximately true" (Mingers, 1990, p. 575).
Symptomatically enough, however, the question of validation or determination of the "approximately true" is not discussed except in terms that are quasi-metaphysical (ibid., p. 576ff):
What makes an explanation acceptable? Not, Maturana argues, its intrinsic truth, but simply whether or not it satisfies the listener according to whatever criteria they [sic] find appropriate within their own praxis - whether it makes them content. This very pragmatic view Maturana terms "objectivity-in-parenthesis" in contrast to "objectivity-without-parenthesis". The latter assumes that there is an independent, objective world and therefore a single domain of reality. Explanations can be refuted or negated in terms of this reality without reference to the participation of the observer.
Exploring the former view, Maturana characterises it as follows:
"In the path of objectivity-in-parenthesis, [sic] existence is constituted by what the observer does, and the observer brings forth the objects he or she distinguishes with his or her operations of distinctions as distinctions of distinctions [sic] in language... [This path entails] the recognition that it is the criterion of acceptability that the observer applies...that determines the reformulation of the praxis of living that constitutes explanations in it....Each configuration of operations of distinctions that the observer performs specifies a domain of reality" (Maturana, 1988, p. 30).
We as observers always operate in and through a domain of language, which is a domain of consensual verbal and nonverbal behavior, which intersects with other domains of our experience. In acting within our praxis of living we create or construct distinctions and categories - and thus the objects of language. We do so in many different and nonintersecting domains, and each domain might be poetry, music, games/sports, each of which is a complex edifice of conventions and distinctions erected on its own self-referring foundations. The observer lives in a "multiverse...[of]...many different, equally legitimate, but not equally desirable, explanatory realities" (ibid., p.31).... As such, we construct the world we experience (constructivism). These constructions are not purely individual, but reflect the intersubjective nature of language...."If we ask for the characteristics of the transcendental substratum on which we expect everything to take place, we find...that we cannot say anything about it, not even refer to it as an it, because as soon as we do so we are in language (ibid., pp. 79-80).
We may ask ourselves what are these "domains" and which are the legitimate applications of the concept. Domain is a term originally attributed to the English mathematician and logician Augustus de Morgan (1806-1871), considered by C.S. Peirce as the father of relational logic (Stjazkin, 1980, pp. 179, 184). Does the recurrent and unreflective use of such a term mean an implicit or unconscious reversal to some kind of mathematical thinking? Who establishes that such domains are all legitimate, and according to which theory of ethics or law, since "organized crime" does not stand probably at the same "level" as, say, games/sports or music. Why and how are they not equally desirable, desirable for whom and according to whom? What is that "contentment" that explanations are supposed to bestow upon us, so far away from the careful discussion of contentment in other scientific traditions (Churchman, 1971, p. 199-200)? What are the "self-referring foundations" on which "we" erect the complex edifice of our conventions, which consequently are not only "conventions"? It is the case that even those who appreciate constructivism feel the need to rescue it from idealism over to critical realism. This is done by claiming that "accepting that all beliefs and descriptions are historically and culturally conditioned, epistemic relativism, does not force us to accept that all beliefs are equally valid, judgemental relativism....To reduce ontology to epistemology is mistakenly to make human beings and their experiences the measure of all things" (Mingers, 1990, pp. 581f).
But, which god gave us the two (only?) categories of epistemic and judgemental relativism, and what or who is the measure of all things? Here comes the rescuing metaphysical and monistic god, the World. In fact: "Maturana's espoused position is ultimately inconsistent but it can be successfully reconstructed in the light of critical realism as follows. There is a single, real, materially existing world. This has, through processes of evolution, generated organisms capable of creating distinctions, descriptions, and constructs, subject only to their own internal structure....What can, in any case, be shown is that the fact that our descriptions are always subject dependent does not preclude the existence of a world independent of such descriptions....(Maturana) thus shows in a clear and consistent way how even our most self-conscious philosophy emerges from the roots of our biological organism."[14] (ibid., p. 582, my emphasis).
These are for me a sort of dangerous metaphysical assumptions, and as such they have been clearly identified in other literature (Lewis, 1988, about "the funeral of a great myth" - evolutionism, and "historicism" pp. 110ff, 131ff). How does an ethic - or "natural" law - arise out of such a "world"? Despite all talk about participative constructivism this other literature is not acknowledged in our very limited cultural setting. These metaphysical statements are all questions which are not really addressed, and by far have not been debated so carefully as the denigrated religious dogmas. The same could be said of truth and its "approximation", or of language. How did it happen that language got its so central place in the discussion, including even "nonverbal" behavior, and which are the criteria for the creations of distinctions, etc. Can it be that language, transcending the "purely individual" is being used as a new metaphysical platform - the "transcendental substratum" about which we cannot say anything, just as once upon a time we could not name God?[15] It has been clearly noted that the simple determination of the rules for discourse or for communication is still insufficient for providing a proper real foundation for an ethics that is not reduced to a formal "fair play", but rather contains precise and positive values, capable of giving meaning to the whole human life, both individual and social (Berti, 1987).
Just for the purpose of establishing a concrete example, please compare the above with the discussion of the creation of "distinctions", or of partitioning and refinement with the purpose of teleological scientific measurement and "approximation to truth". That has been done in the context of pragmatically inspired "Singerian inquiring systems" seen as as a development of Hegelian inquiring systems (Churchman, 1971, pp. 175, 192ff; Ivanov, 1987). In contrast, it is remarkable that the bases of constructivism - in spite of its avowed proximity to pragmatism - have been formulated with such a lofty metalanguage which attempts to keep distance from both concrete "everydayness" and from religious language. A reasonable hypothesis is that at least some brands of constructivism - to which pragmatism also can be reduced - are appreciated and sought just because they offer through vague reliance on language and discourse a double escape from both metaphysical requirements and from empirical verifiability. In this sense they are really post-modern and spiritual brothers of those cultural currents that support the development of "science as kitsch" (Montgomery, 1991), and the anti-humanism implied by the unpowering or "Nitzschean" psychic destruction of the subject (Berti, 1987, pp. 176ff).
Pragmatic constructionism has inspired lately some smart attempts to implement "hypersystems" and "co-constructive" prototypes of computer applications (Forsgren, 1988a; Forsgren, 1991b; Forsgren, et al., 1990; Ivanov, 1991b). They are most promising as the only attempts I know to express some of the ideas of social systems science in terms of computer applications. The pragmatism of this pragmatic constructionism was originally conceived in terms of "Singerian inquiring systems" where the construction process was presumed to be modeled along systems categories and their interrelations. It would be further monitored in terms of the criterion of measurable error (Ivanov, 1972; Ivanov, 1987). These ideas were later summarized in the computer oriented version of "hypersystems" (Ivanov, 1991b). As this pragmatic constructive idea has lately evolved in practice, it seems to de-emphasize the particular "Kantian" categorial thinking that constituted the advantage of the late developments of classical pragmatism into a "dialectical social systems theory (Churchman, 1979). It also tends to play down the monitoring of measurement errors and of the quality of information. It therefore tends to follow mainly the instrumentalist pragmatism of John Dewey (1859-1952)[16]. Constructive protoypes of computer applications in this instrumental spirit have up to now utilized simple hypermedia programming languages like HyperCard for organizing and presenting test data. Such data are structured in terms of conventional relational databases in the form of "nodes and links", and "navigation" along their space (Forsgren, et al., 1990). The data are presented in a visual interactive way in order to elicit the opinions, wishes or suggestions of users - leaders, clients, employees - and of designers concerning the possible evolutionary improvement of the interaction and of the initial prototypal "embryonic" system definition. This would include desirable features, alternative options in form and content, etc. In this sense a co-constructive system can be seen as computerized expeditor and editor of data-collections as if from continuous reciprocal interviewing among those involved with - but not necessarily those affected by - the system. The interviews, recursively based on the stored results of earlier interviews are, so to say, made on a par with the operation of the system. As such, a co-constructive system can be regarded as a continuous computerized "statistical survey" where, however, statistical survey theory and interviewing techniques unfortunately are seldom - if ever - invoked. It has been suggested that such interviewing constitutes the core of a humanistic computer science.This presupposes, of course, that statistical survey theory is substituted by a careful application of that kind of systems theory that has the opportunity of subsuming statistical wisdom, including the context in which questions are put or answered (Ivanov, 1972, chap. 5.2; Ivanov, 1976a; Ivanov, 1976b; Ivanov, 1977a).
If this presupposition is not valid, pragmatic constructivism ultimately tends to collapse further from instrumentalism into the positivism that stands at the historical roots of constructivism. Decisions are, then, envisaged as "journeys through space" (Boland, 1987, pp. 368f, 372); individual decision makers are "in-formed" by the data when they conjoin data with a decision premise as a basis for action: "the process of interpersonal dialogue and historically situated language use, as a medium for making sense of organizational actions, events and objects, is replaced with a network of probabilistically determinate relations. The very real and continuous human problem of accomplishing meaning is replaced by a technology of packaging data... Information systems designers believe that they can orchestrate organizational life through intervention in the formal structuring of data".
In general I have the impression that pragmatic constructive prototypes paradoxically will tend to work best when they are least needed, when they do not address conflicts which are so serious as to jeopardize their functioning. They are meaningful in the circumscribed homely milieus of small engineering, to the extent that they tend to disregard historical and organizational dimensions, as well as issues of power, hard money, and emotion (Ivanov, 1991b, chap. 5). For instance, a case has been reported in terms of the task of describing the products of a sawmill industry (Forsgren, 1991b). Instead of attempting the hopeless task of depicting exhaustively or "photographically" the panel boards of the sawmill, a thought experiment suggested that it would be smarter to concentrate selectively on the description of those board attributes which are useful to particular classes of clients with particular uses in mind. If I understand this right, however, in this way one main social point of the whole concept of measurement and measurement system tends to be disregarded: its generality as a social good, with all those political and economic conflicts that this implies. If I want to narrow my allegiance to the local firm to which I act as a consultant, there may be no problems (unless, of course, it wants to sell also on, say, the Chinese market which is populated by unknown potential buyers with unknown preferences that I cannot afford to survey in detail). But in doing so I would be bypassing, for instance, the whole complex problem of scientific standardization (Churchman, 1971, pp. 11, 110, 186ff), including the economics and politics of standardization (Guillet de Monthoux, 1981). This is the issue which reappears today with full impact on the market of information technology. In the last resort this may call into question the difference between consultancy and science[17].
So deeply entrenched in contemporary theorizing is the assumption that people - whether individually or socially - somehow give meaning, significance, and the like, to meaningful, significant, and sensical things, particularly as regards linguistically meaningful things, that it may seem strange at first that sign powers are not conceived, from a semiotic point of view, as essentially constituted by their relation to people or other sign users. (Nor, I might add, by relation to a langue, which is a queer sort of group mind, nor by relation to the "linguistic competence of an ideal speaker/hearer," which is a ficticious individual or group mind.) According to the semiotic view, nobody gives meaning to any sign of any sort, if this is supposed to be a transfer of intended meaning from people's minds to objects, as a sort of infusion or transfusion through intentionality, will, stipulation, fiat, or any other sort of direct psychic injection. There is a sense in which people can and do create meaning, particularly as regards linguistic signs, but it is not the sense usually involved in discussions of the "conventional" or "arbitrary" or "unmotivated" character of linguistic meaning. Sign powers are in the signs themselves, and any changes in these powers, or the accruing of such powers to objects not previously having them, are due primarily to the signs themselves, and their actions, not to people's actions (though the action of people is usually contingently instrumental in this respect)....
There is surely a fine irony in the fact that our "advanced" theoreticians of language, who talk so earnestly of their belief in "human universals" proceed ab initio as if from a completely unquestioned assumption that the key to the nature of language is to be found in one version or another of a seventeenth century metaphysical doctrine according to which meaningfulness is something "arbitrarily" bestowed upon or infused into brute matter by the inescrutable will or wish of transcendent individual or group minds. But if any true human universality is to be discovered, perhaps it would be advisable to abandon the idea that the role of human agency in the production of signs is fundamental, without thereby denying that there may be special reasons in special contexts of inquiry for recognizing a relatively basic role for intentionality and will.
So much for the relation of humanity to language, and the question of "conventionalism" that hides important ethical matters (Churchman, 1971, pp. 71f, 114ff, 119, 123, 145, 150). Compare with the Wittgensteinian "language games"! That is certainly a hard blow to much extremely "soft" talk about humanism. The study of information systems and of computer systems development, at least in Anglo-Saxon during the last years, has in any case shown the rise of considerable interest for language. Following the original obvious interest deriving from attempts of computerized language translation and natural language processing, (Winograd, 1972), this interest was pioneered in the middle of the seventies (Nissen, 1976), and rapidly evolved in the direction of some particular schools, closely associated with the names of L. Wittgenstein and J. Austin (Goldkuhl, & Lyytinen, 1982). Today, under the aegis of cognitive science, it reaches the scope of forming a "new foundation of design" (Winograd, & Flores, 1986) and stirs a forceful polemics that is apparently very hard to evaluate (Whitaker, 1991).
This interest for language relates to basic issues in the development of Anglo-Saxon philosophy of this century (Apel, 1967) which stand at the very basis for the interest of our culture for logic and logic-machines themselves. The matter of language-origins, for instance, has been considered basic to the understanding of "humanistic" culture and thought and therefore it is expected to be basic to the design of thought-support as represented by the electronic computer. Most major philosophers and philosophical systems have dealt with the problem in one way or the other. It has been remarked that so universal has this interest been that its absence, as in the work of I. Kant, has been cause for wonder (Aarsleff, 1982, p. 11, 278). An understanding of this matter would probably require a criticism of semiotics, its relationship to language theory, and the possible role such disciplines play in inquiry and in the social milieu [18]. This becomes gradually more important to the extent that "semiotics" is increasingly adduced in the study of computer applications, not the least in the coming age of "visual" programming, and visualization programs .
Since the particular scientific tradition in which I have worked seems to be very influenced by Kant this may explain why in such quarters no need has been perceived for this kind of study. This fact by itself is very interesting and deserves to be investigated, but in any case the language perspective cannot be ignored, if not for other reasons because of the fact that an appreciable number of researchers in the computing and information field relate to theories of language. It has become a two-sided question of semiotics and interaction, or a reciprocal influence between language and systems development (Andersen, 1990a; Andersen, 1990b; Goldkuhl, et al., 1982; Mathiassen, & Andersen, 1986; Nissen, 1976; Whitaker, 1991).
Within the limited scope of this paper I will limit myself to indicate below, on the basis of one particular piece of literature (Aarsleff, 1982), how humanistic issues which will recur also in later sections of this essay appear in the context of language.
In the historical debate on language it was noted that its study tended to be the exterior observation of its forms. "In the description of language we must not forget man, who is at the same time both the foundation and the end, for in language everything proceeds from him and addresses itself to him"; this reintroduced mentalism into linguistics, the study of function as well as of form (ibid., p.13). It was also noted that it was important not to believe that words are as good as things or, as J. Locke (1632-1704) remarked, "as if the name carried with it the knowledge of the species or the essence of it", thus assuming that language is a safe and simple nomenclature to the inventory of the world. Locke notes that this belief is a serious mistake. Words are about ideas, not about things; but the speakers' habitually mistaken belief is tenacious "for without this double conformity of their ideas [to words and to things, my remark] they find they should both think amiss of things themselves, and talk of them unintelligibly to others" (ibid., p. 24).
This, seems to me, indicates that one can be Lockean and even positivist without ever believing that the language of science is a descriptive "mirror of nature". The issue is not one of depiction versus construction of reality but rather whether this reality is only conventional - consensual, in contrast to the ideal of an ultimate metaphysical reality[19]. This implies that, in a sense, the "social construction of reality", as in a constructive computing science, can very well be constructive and positive, in the sense that it is consistent with positivistic metaphysics. It is symptomatic that, for instance, not only various brands of biological and pragmatic constructivism with their unacknowledged or unclear roots, but also Habermas' critical social theory and hermeneutics, in the same way as analytical philosophy, individuate in communication, i.e. in language, the place for the foundation of ethics (Berti, 1987, p. 65). It is also symptomatic that the earlier mentioned origins of European constructivism with the German philosopher H. Dingler seem to be intimately related with the simultaneous development of P.W. Bridgman's operationism in the USA, both sharing an aversion for universal or general concepts, as motivated by the crisis triggered by relativism in physics. It is remarkable that some constructivists do not recognize that their constructivism is an application of relativistic engineering principles to the presumed construction of social reality[20]. It is a social engineering that assumes that everything can be pragmatically changed while disregarding the legitimacy of social and cultural relative inertia. It is an inertia that is summarily denigrated as metaphysical and representational, or dogmatic without ever reflecting on the theological meaning of dogma, and arrogantly presuming that we can have a sufficient pragmatic knowledge of the long-run consequences of alternative human actions (Hayek, 1967, p. 243).
For Locke language was not divine and natural, but made by man and conventional, created by people according to need for the convenience of communication with "ease and dispatch". It was a social institution that reflects the world of its speakers, hence Locke's insistence on linguistic relativism. Locke's analyses identified the supreme importance of signs, and he suggested a three-fold division of knowledge into natural philosophy, ethics or "the skill of rightly applying our own powers and actions for the attainment of things good an useful", and "thirdly, the ways and means whereby the knowledge of both the one and the other of these is attained and communicated". This last he called "semeiotiké" or "the business whereof is to consider the nature of signs the mind makes use for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others". Locke's view of language was, then, entirely functional, and, seeing the need for semiotics, he had gone a long way toward saying that all knowledge is about signs, but he never took the final step, attributed to E.B.Condillac (1715-1780), of asserting the global role of language (Aarsleff, 1982, p. 28).
Condillac made all knowledge a function of sings and words. He posited three things. (1) That man is a social creature, (2) that man is endowed with reason and with the capacity for its exercise in reflection, and (3) that all men are by nature endowed with the same gestural and vocal expression of mental states, such as pain, joy, fright, and surprise. Knowledge expands with the help of arbitrary manmade signs which, when attached to the ideas - not to sensations - initially suggested by communal need, put mind in control of knowledge. From the slow beginnings of artificial signs - or words and speech - man's control of the world steadily grew as reflection was offered new material to work on. The fruitfulness of language and reflection worked for the reciprocal benefit of each to produce the "origin and progress of language". This process opened the way for the history of thought. The refinement of language was made both possible and necessary by the inescapable linearity of speech. It was on this basis that Condillac developed the principle that good science is a language well made. The progress of knowledge is advanced by the linearity of discourse. For Condillac, taking a global view of language, there could be no limitation to the certainty and extent of human knowledge. Language was the first social institution and played a role in all human affairs. Condillac provided the philosophical foundation of the concept of the Volkgeist with its emphasis on the culture-bound quality of national languages. It involves the principle of linguistic relativity, and is on a national level a repetition of the principle that each individual has a private language (pp. 28-30).
Condillac's philosophy of language shared one quality with the Adamic language doctrine[21]: both were global. But whereas the Adamicists sought to recapture lost perfection and divine authority, Condillac pointed toward increasing states of perfection [sic] to be achieved by man in the future. More than anyone else he seems to have given life to the progress doctrine, with the concomitant temporalization of the history of thought and knowledge. His philosophy offered a pedagogical program for the perfectibility of man. The completion of this program was what the idéologues set out to attain in their idéologie, so called because it was a science of ideas based on language and words. But their efforts were soon foiled by Napoleon, who reorganized the Institut National to deprive them of their platform. Marx found the word "ideology" in one of Napoleon's contemptuous remarks about the school he had come to see as a threat to his ambitions (p. 31).
By means of the above excerpts from reflections about the study of language I wish to question the difference between their presuppositions and our present ones when applying modern theories of language to systems development. With this purpose in mind I stop short of further discussions about G. Cuvier's "functionalistic" systems theory for comparative anatomy, that reminds me of the present biologically base for theories of self-organizing systems and the like. For the purposes at hand - in the search for humanistic linguistic content of this approaches I see clear parallels between Locke's and Condillac's conceptions, and modern constructivism. Their rejection of the doctrine of double conformity (of words to both ideas and things) indicates that their were not supporters of any naive descriptive or "depictive" philosophy of mirroring of the world. Their concept of the Volkgeist with its emphasis on the culture-bound quality of national languages, involving the principle of linguistic relativity on a national level - and, we could add - at the social group level, recalls the later Wittgenstein's conceptions of "language games". Their emphasis on the social character of man in the context of reciprocal communication of knowledge, on attainement of good and useful things, on the capability of reason, on science as language and communication, on ways and means whereby the knowledge is attained and communicated, on linearity of speech that is analog to linearity of actors' input into computer terminals, etc. could stand as a program for modern constructive "computer-supported cooperative work" - CSCW. In comparison with CSCW that program would even have the advantage of presuming a quite sophisticated repertoire of gestural and vocal expression of mental states that are often ignored in the context of computer-mediated communication.
Modern pragmatic, or rather practical-utilitarian constructivism and semiotic approaches to systems development even share with Locke and Condillac the relative insensitivity to matters of power and politics, which builds the basis for the Marxist denigration of the "ideologues"[22]. Since they do not consider those questions explicitly, their position is further weakened by their disregard of spiritual and religious matters as well which, in my opinion, would allow an alternative way for considering political passions and related economic rationality. In fact, I suggest that this latter aspect and the lack of metaphysics proper is what gives to these language approaches their positivistic and utilitarian flavour and - in spite of their humanitarian claims - distantiates them from Kant, from Kantian philosophical pragmatism and its followers. As it has been remarked again and again, the mere criticism of ideology constitutes an exclusively negative foundation of ethics, and it does not offer a positive justification of values like freedom and emancipation (Berti, 1987, p. 65).
Much remains to be done in the field of linguistics or, rather, philology, and it is evidenced lately by several interesting hermeneutic studies of the relation between dialogue, agreement and truth (Sini, 1990; Tordesillas, 1990), as well as by studies that relate literature to ethics (Pecora, 1991). They are matters that, for all emphasis on constructive collaborative ethical communications, are usually ignored in the context of applying theories of language to the study of computer use and of systems development.
One of the few psychologists who has explicitly addressed the issue of a humanistic psychology in close contact with the phenomenological approach, including the complex issues of "constructive" psychological learning theory, is Joseph F. Rychlak (1976a; 1976b; 1977; 1981). In one of the works that deal explicitly with the humanistic issue (1977) he prefers, symptomatically enough, the title of "the psychology of rigorous humanism" rather than, say, "humanistic psychology". Humanism is there defined (pp. 497, 502) as a theory of behavior in which - knowingly or unknowingly - the theorist employs telic (goal directed) constructs, espousing the view that events are predicated according to plan, design, or assumption - that is, based upon purposive meanings - and therefore directed to some intended eventuality. Humanitarianism, in contrast, may be used for designating theories of either a mechanistic or a humanistic cast which seek to improve man's lot by raising his level of selfworth in a conceptual sense, or, by raising his level of material satisfaction in some scientifically managed fashion. Many humanitarians in this sense of the word, however, call themselves humanists: the point seems to be that "one can be a humanist without having to bear the weight of sociopolitical or psychotherapeutic advance on one's shoulders". This point can also be the basis for the political buzz-word-appeal of the term.
Rychlak insists (p. 188ff) in that humanism is the desire on the part of a theoretician to employ formal- and final-cause descriptions. We surely do indeed require a scientific revolution in psychology but science means a stand on evidence, not a stand on the human image. If science dictates the human image it is no longer science.
In spite of not being yet sure that I grasp and agree with the details of the whole argument I see that Rychlak's point seems to be very important in an age in which science tends to be completely relativized and reduced to a matter of cozy communications, presumed sharing of information and pooling of opinions. Such reduction is often summarized by the seductive but dubious statement that there are no facts, only opinions. This statement should appropriately be contrasted to the insight that the drawing of a distinction between truth and falsehood belongs to the very essence of thinking (Collingwood, 1940, p. 120). It should also be contrasted to the insight about the distinction between reality and truth: the problem, i.e. the task, is to clarify reality by means of the truth, while truth distantiates itself from reality (Norström, 1912, p. 114)[23].
"To expect a scientist to run after each person's phenomenal reality in hopes of capturing each possibility that might be subjectively concocted is surely unnecessary and a waste of time....Validation is important to science because there can be no science without it" (Rychlak, 1977, p. 201). The point may then turn out to be what is to be considered to be a satisfactory validation, a point that does not seem to be clearly stated by Rychlak but has been considered elsewhere in terms of the "criterion of measurable error" in the context of "quality-control of information" (Ivanov, 1972; Ivanov, 1987), and of computer-based "hypersystems" (Ivanov, 1991b).
Another paradoxical risk of "running after each person's phenomenal reality" is that of being dissuaded from giving serious consideration to a humanistic theory.
Some psychologists who might honestly prefer to give a humanistic theory serious consideration in their work are dissuaded from doing so because of the "goody-goody" connotations of humanism. Humanism has been identified with encounter groups and social reforms of various types - often framed in an emotionalized manner by dewey-eyed advocates.... It therefore appears to a listener when we speak of humanistic psychology that we are asking him to "view thy brother human being as worthy of respect and help" or some such. Desirable as this might be for a general approach to human relations, such ethical [or rather moralistic, my note] pronouncements are unquestionably harmful to an objective assessment of the data we must examine as scientists. They arise as short-cut solutions.... Not understanding that man's dehumanization is due to technical questions in theory construction, this kind of humanistic [sic] advocate thinks he can force his fellow psychologist into presenting mankind teleologically by going to telic pronouncements on how one "ought" to view man as a higher being. This is a misguided effort. Much better to follow the Jungian insight that human beings are no more elevated than they are submerged (Rychlak, 1977, p. 497).
Far from being convinced that man's dehumanization is due to technical questions in theory construction I still support this view of the humanistic problem in the sense that it may be a cultural issue of ethics and religion but not of moralism and easy exhortations. Such dewey-eyed "rhetorical" exhortations include those aimed at convincing people to apply a particular goody-goody method of democratic or participative systems development, perhaps even with the rationale that it may turn out to be the most profitable for all concerned in the long run. After all, what is the difference between ethics and moralism?
That is one important issue that may occasionally appear even in the context of e.g. "the moral element in free enterprise" (Hayek, 1967, pp. 229-236). It is an issue which will not be solved by exhortations to rely on a phenomenological technique of reduction. Such technique claims, as noted by Rychlak (p. 198) in a reference to a leading exponent of the phenomenologically based approach to psychology as human science (Giorgi, 1970, p.162ff), that "we should try to clarify and delineate the presuppositions that define our perspective". In this technique perspective means something akin to the Kantian spectacles that we bring to bear in formulating a precedent slant on things, a slant that in turn will determine sequaciously what we will say about them: "The fact [sic] of perspectivity is the main argument against all theories that posit absolute positions" (Rychlak, 1977, p. 198, quoting Giorgi, p. 163).
Once more objecting, as it were, against "running after each person's phenomenal reality" Rychlak observes (p. 200) that this reductive technique continually seeks an admission that there was a precedent to every meaningful term in the language and that there were - at least possibly - as many precedents as there were individuals thinking and talking and using conceptual language[24]: "Yet the facts of history and even of science suggest to the writer that at some point in our search for precedents - for the slants and subjective meanings of unique persons - we just do find a realm of objective understanding in the terminological meanings confronted. We have objectivities and we have subjectivities in the precedents to which every language ultimately relates. This objective realm - where a term or conception is understood by more individuals than just the single (subjective) person using it - used to be discussed at the most abstract levels as the question of the universals".
I understand that some of these matters have been treated with better detail in the context of the absolute mind in Hegel's philosophy, and in "Hegelian inquiring systems" as method for systems development (Churchman, 1971, chap.7). For our purposes it seems enough to indicate that humanism in information-processing theory is a question of confronting the implications of dialectical reasoning. It is extensively treated in the context of the "psychology of rigorous humanism" and other referenced works of the same author. The edifice of cybernetic theory and related approaches was originally built entirely on the grounds of demonstrative forms of reasoning. This was pointed out clearly at an early stage (Churchman, & Ackoff, 1950), more than thirty years before the matter was recognized by so called second-order cybernetics or co-creative constructivist science (Ravn, 1986). In any case, it is much more than a question of wholesale dismissal of descriptive thinking in favour of well intentioned conceptions of continuous cooperative pooling of computerized "statistical" interviews about subjective perspectivistic thinking.
Referring to the misuses of perspectivistic thinking at the edges of aestheticism and relativism I have never seen a more ardent poetic prose than Maurice Blondel's at the beginning of his famous book on "action" (Blondel, 1973, pp. 9f). It is a piece of work written in 1983 that today could have referred to the postmodern dance of art and science, a misunderstanding or misuse of the Kantian "perspectivistic" spectacles, and of the later Singerian search - for unattainable ideals (Churchman, 1971; Churchman, 1979). It is a piece that I barely dared to translate[25], and which will be appreciated mainly those who understand one great language of humanism, French:
Ardent et sceptique, s'amusant aux moyens sans souci du but, sentant qu'il n'y a que des manières de voir, que chacune d'elles contredit l'autre et que nous pouvons avec un peu d'habileté les avoir toutes sur un même objet, l'essayiste cherche la paix, le repos et le bonheur avec la conviction qu'il ne les trouvera jamais; et "pour échapper au malaise des enfants honorables qui naît d'une disproportion entre l'objet qu'ils rêvaient et celui qu'ils atteignent", il met sa félicité dans les expériences vaines qu'il institue, non dans les résultats qu'elles semblaient promettre...
Aux naïfs qui ont pris au sérieux leur conscience, et qui croient trouver dans leur expérience personnelle du devoir la confirmation certaine du prix infini qu'ils attachent à leur être, à leurs actes et à leurs sacrifices, on objecte, au nom d'une expérience plus pleine et d'une science plus ouverte, que toute certitude absolue naît d'un défaut d'intelligence et d'une ignorance partielle, que toute rigidité pratique est la marque d'un coeur étroit ou d'une obtuse sensibilité. Pour affirmer avec assurance quelque réalité que ce soit, pour poser résolument le problème moral, il faut un degré d'inexpérience et de simplicité dont on s'amuse, entre esprits de bonne compagnie, comme d'une gaucherie de paysan; la politesse des intelligences vit d'aimables fictions, mensonge et vérité tout ensemble: tout est léger et charmant, puisque tout est vide; l'affranchissement de l'esthète semble complet.
I want to suggest one possible way of bridging these apparently disparate fields and concepts by mentioning that the refinement of the Geisteswissenschaften - the sciences of the human spirit - was due, not only to the phenomenology of M. Heidegger and the hermeneutics of H.G. Gadamer, but also to the so called neokantian schools of Baden (associated to the names of W. Windelband and H. Rickert), and particularly to the school of Marburg (associated to the names of H. Cohen, P. Natorp, and E. Cassirer).
The school of Marburg is especially interesting in our context. One of its latest exponents, E. Cassirer (1874-1945), applied to the analysis of culture the Kantian "Copernican revolution" that substituted the conceptual construction of the object for the earlier concept of substance understood as some externally given reality. Cassirer formulated the basis of culture as being a symbolic activity that distantiates itself gradually from the immediacy of the natural and sensible datum, and so leads to the formation of autonomous conceptual frameworks. They are something which we now recognize as typical of the increasing application of computer technology. It is this distantiation from the natural and sensible datum which fosters the problematic easy acceptance of the virtual reality offered by the computer applications. And, further, the acceptance of the computer's virtual reality displays some of the characteristics of a "religious faith" in the capabilities of the computer.
It is therefore interesting also to note that one of Cassirer's forerunners in the school of Marburg, H. Cohen (1842-1918), elaborated some thoughts on the "religion of reason from the sources of Judaism" (postumous, 1919). How about computers and computing science representing a modern variant of the "religion of reason"? While Cohen proposed an elaboration of a general theory of experience in a logical key, in close relation to logic, ethics and aesthetics, the other main representative of the same school, P. Natorp (1854-1924) insisted on that logic cannot be put as unique basis of the philosophical system. It was seen to require other "forms" of knowledge like morality, art and religion, grounded on psychology that, in contrast with I. Kant's view, was thus elevated to the rank of philosophical science.[26]
It is also extremely interesting to note, in the context of Scandinavian socialistic currents of computer systems development, that both Natorp and Cohen worked on the development of a non-materialistic socialism or, in Natorp's title, "social idealism" (1920). We have heard very little about these works and these ideas, and perhaps they have been dismissed by our intellectual elite as being "heretical" in the light of Marxist dialectical materialism. The point, however, is that they were integrated in a body of knowledge regarding the place of logic in human inquiry. It is this kind of integration that could cast some light on the nature of the computer revolution where the computer, beyond many other countless and valuationally neutral "perspectives", is regarded also as a mathematical-logical machine or a physical electromechanical embodiment of mathematical logic. It is, for instance, symptomatic that already the preface of one of the most relevant works of Cassirer (Cassirer, 1962, p. vii, ix) refers to the historical relation between Leibnizian philosophy and the critical system of Kant, and to the relation between mathematics and the problem of reality. This is clearly related to the problem of the application of computer technology to the reality of the "users" (Churchman, 1971, chap. 2). It is remarkable that "humanistic" and, for that matter, even formalistic computing scientists, sometimes paradoxically in the name of anti-reductionism, seem to indulge in speculations about the ultimate destiny of methods of systems development while at the same unreflectively considering mathematics and physics as trivially transparent tools. This seems also to be done without ever needing to consider that mathematical logic and physics are the very substrate without which the very "material" machine, on which they make their living, would never have been built[27]. One is necessarily reminded of the earlier quotation that "As soon as 'philosophy' became synonymous with practical ethics, it replaced mathematics as the basis of thought about the world". Later in this essay I will dwell on what, in turn, has been said about practical ethics.
There are many other ways for exploring the humanistic content of mathematics. They are paralleled by attempts to integrate aesthetics and ethics in methods for development of computer systems that up to now have been mainly "logically" grounded in an engineering tradition (Stolterman, 1989). In limiting myself to up the last paragraph I claim, in summary, that here we have in embryo the fruitful meeting of human science, natural science, and formal science, a meeting that today is again forced upon us by the problems of application of computer technology. This is also the issue of the future development of the formal methodological sciences which traditionally have included mathematics, logic, statistics and hermeneutics, and now would include computer or information sciences. The understanding of this issue will also be the answer to whether we are justified in talking about humanistic computing science or whether we should think in terms of computer-supported human sciences, or something else. Humanistic computing science might simply be an attempt of expand illegitimately the scope of embodied formal science without going deeper in the understanding of what human science should be, in the first place.
Starting from a transdisciplinary systems approach to societal problems, Ackoff defines three central problems that arise in the management and control of purposeful (telic) systems: how to increase the effectiveness with which they serve their own purposes, the purposes of their parts, and the purposes of the systems of which they are part. These are, respectively the self-control, the humanization, and the environmentalization problems.
The problem that at first sight seems to affect us here most closely is the second problem, of humanization. As we will see, however, it is far from being explicitly related to humanism. It consists of finding ways to serve the purposes of the parts of the system more effectively and to do so in such a way as to better serve the purposes of the system itself. The objective of humanization is not to turn all organizations into instruments whose sole purpose is to satisfy their members. This might put them "out of business" because of the interacting environmentalization problem not being considered. Humanization is said to have two aspects: satisfaction and participation. Participation is itself a source of satisfaction, but satisfaction of a participant depends on other things as well: on the amount of conflict he is in, the nature of the activity he engages in, the environment in which he engages in it, the consequences of his activity (output or compensation), and the effect of his current activity on his future.
These insights are taken as a basis for going over to consider the humanization of government - viewed "humanistically" (p. 40) - in terms of representativeness, responsiveness to needs, and competence. Individual government agencies also require humanization, but then in terms that are the same as those of private organizations. "Humanization of an organization requires making its objectives compatible with those of its individual members so that they are mutually reinforcing" (p. 45).
I will drop this line of inquiry into so called humanization reduced to consensus in order to return more explicitly to the matter of humanism that Ackoff actually addresses under the first mentioned label above, of "self-control". The humanism of humanization that was surveyed above seemed to consist of the ideal of democracy. This very same ideal will also be found in the following development of humanism of self-control, an ideal with a Kantian flavour from the Enlightenment.
The issue of self-control is addressed (pp. 22ff) in terms of the following taxonomy of attitudes towards planning: inactive, reactive, preactive, and interactive (the latter being akin to the "constructive" attitude mentioned earlier in this paper). Using as metaphor the traditional political and administrative terms, the inactivist is a conservative, not believing in planning at all or, then, believing in minimum intervention. In contrast, the reactivist is reactionary, and the preactivist is liberal. But, what about the interactivist?
Ackoff describes the interactivists in terms that remind us of those who in other contexts call themselves constructivists. As a reader I get the impression that these interactivists, in this scheme, are a sort of self-appointed self-righteous radicals who compete with the "neohumanistic analyst-as-emancipators" (Hirschheim, et al., 1989) or the "organizational discursivist" (Lyytinen, et al., 1991), for the finest or most humanistic, social, and ethical taxonomic places in the literature. They are the ones who are telling us this paradoxically "objective" story. Ackoff states that they are supposed not to settle for survival and growth, as the previous two types. In a mood that recalls the Kantian Enlightenment ideal, "they seek self-development, self-realization, and self-control: an increased ability to design and control their own destinies: they are neither satisficers nor optimizers; they are idealizers." (Ackoff, 1974, p. 26). Unlike preactivists who are supposed to plan in terms of collective behavior, impersonally rather than individually, interactivists are said to try to induce cooperative changes, where no aspect of a system is precluded from change. They try to change the foundations as well as the superstructure of society and its institutions. They desire neither to resist, ride with it, nor ride ahead of the tide; they try to redirect it. Interactivists consider technology to be neither good or bad in itself, but to have potential for either, depending on how people use it. Thus they view behavior and technology as interrelated aspects of sociotechnical systems. They treat science and the humanities as two aspects of one culture, not as two cultures. Like the head and tail of a coin these aspects can be discussed or viewed separately, but they cannot be separated.
At this point (p. 27) Ackoff obviously addresses the humanistic problem. Let's see how he conceptualizes humanism, beyond apparently equating, in the lines above, technology with science, and humanities with behavior and use of technology:
According to interactivists, science is the search for similarities among things that are apparently different, and the humanities are the search for differences among things that are apparently similar. Scientists seek the general and humanists seek the unique. To deal effectively with a problematic situation one must be able to determine both what is common with previously experienced situations and how it differs from them. Awareness of similarities enables us to use what we already know; awareness of differences enables us to determine what must be learned if the situation is to be dealt effectively. The humanities furnish us with the problems, science and technology with the means for solving them.[28]
Let's stop here summarizing that there seems to be also an equating of humanists with humanities, and scientists with science, implying an unclear "division of labor" that also recalls the classic positivist distinction between fact and value, with all its implications of political power and ethical issues. The most problematic core issue seems to be that the interactivist's universal claim to potential change has no ethical reference platform[29]. The humanities are presumed to address us only to the unique and we will be solving only the unique without any possibility for "scientific" truth of general claims. We risk to remain by definition in a "situational" ethics. No aspect of a system is precluded from change but reason itself - whatever it is - tends to become a good candidate for being the less likely to change in the short run, and, as such, it becomes a sort of new metaphysical platform in an the age of reason. Together with, or equivalent to, reason we have to assume also a relative stability of what constructivists elsewhere have called constructive "design principles" which - metaphorically speaking, like new relative gods of our time - dwell in the heaven of an "incubator" for all future designs.
Apparently there is no need here for a metaphysics or religion. The choices seem to be done from what C.S. Lewis has seen as an ethical vacuum, or a simplified version of Kantian rational ethics deprived of its metaphysics (Ivanov, 1990c; Lewis, 1988, p. 104f). Humanism and ethics are apparently reduced to a social theology of democracy and self-autonomy. The references to similarity versus uniqueness seem, however, to attempt an incorporation of some of the historicist ideas. Nevertheless the critical question of bridging the gap (between people or aspects-disciplines?) is not really addressed.
That means that in spite of all attempts to develop and implement computer supported constructive interactive systems (Forsgren, et al., 1990; Ivanov, 1991b), within the more general wave of computer-supported collaborative communication and interaction (Bond, & Gasser, 1988; Dennis, Tyran, Vogel, & Nunamaker Jr., 1990; Greif, 1988; Lee, Cosh, & Migliarese, 1988), the issue of humanism in relation to computer support seems to have not been seriously considered.
The deepest insights on humanism in the tradition of pragmatist dialectical social systems theory seem to have been offered by Churchman. These insights could be formulated either as a matter of subjectivity-objectivity in the dialectical Hegelian tradition of thought followed by "speculations on systems design" (Churchman, 1971, chap. 7, and part II), or by means of contrasting the systems approach with its "enemies": politics, morality, religion, and aesthetics. (Churchman, 1979, pp. 197ff). "So, yes, there are important values that planning has tended to ignore, and that should be incorporated into our reasoning about change. Even if we can't quantify these important qualities of experience, we should find ways of incorporating them into our design criteria.... " Churchman goes on stating that if humanity is what carries this quality of experience then one may think of Kant's imperative telling us to act as to treat humanity, either in ourselves or another, never as means only, but as an end withal. "But perhaps he himself (Kant) did not realize the profundity of his imperative, for the "humanity" to which he refers is that unique quality each of us has, which makes up the reality of our psyches" (p. 199).[30]
Realizing the profundity of the concept of humanity in this tradition would take us to discuss Kant's conception of the two worlds of human values: virtue and happiness. That vision included the perspective of humanity gradually creating a world in which virtue and happiness begin to coincide - that is, where virtue produces happiness. It should be recalled, however, that Kant's critical conception of ethics may be regarded as having contributed to the split of its content on the one hand in logic, and on the other in psychology, akin to the split between law/duty/justice, and love [31]. It may be regarded as one main reason for the "neo-protestant" resilience, if not outright hostility, of young enlightened people to any talk about law, duty, justice, responsibility or authority, all concepts associated to the stability of truth or "authoritative depiction". They are namely seen as contraries of love, spontaneity and of warmth of personal relationships, and this elicits, in turn, the easy infatuation for superficial humanism, cooperation, participation, etc.[32] I guess that this is the problem which prompt some young researchers to explore the meaning of engagement, commitment and motivation in the development of information systems (cf. also "Thomism" and "Molinism" in the postscript glossary at the end of this paper).
It is this perspective of gradually approaching participative perfection that may have inspired all thoughts about "ideal seeking" behavior. It is also a perspective which stands as a historical and theological core issue at the confluence between protestantism and catholicism. It justifies a last excursion into some religious aspects of humanism, or, perhaps, humanistic formulations of religion that start close to pragmatism. As for evaluating pragmatism itself, ultimately we may have to apply Peirce's formulation of his pragmatic maxim to pragmatism (itself): "Consider what conceivable consequences the object of your conception has in its bearing on human conduct. Then the sum total of all these conceivable consequences constitute the total meaning of your conception". I think that with the passing of time the less we need to depend on "conceivable" consequences since we can experience them. My experience is that unfortunately all too often the bearing on human conduct of modern variants of pragmatism is very difficult to distinguish from utilitarianism's, and therefore they should be evaluated accordingly.
Writing on "pragmatism" in the 1911 year's edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica Schiller states that humanism refers itself to the maxim of Protagoras that "man is the measure of all things", and is best conceived as a protest against the assumption that logic can treat thought in abstraction from its psychological context and the personality of the knower, i.e. that knowledge can be dehumanized. It emphasizes the personal aspect of all knowing and its contribution to the "making of reality" which necessarily accompanies the making of truth. Pragmatism, then, "may ultimately lead to a number of metaphysics, each of which will represent a personal guess at a final synthesis of experience, while remaining essentially undogmatic and improvable". The ethical affinities of pragmatism spring from the perception that all knowing is referred to a purpose. This at once renders it "useful", i.e. a means to an end or "good". This relation to a "good" must not, however, be construed as a doctrine of ethics in the narrower sense; nor is its "utilitarianism" to be confused with the hedonism of the British associationists. "Useful" means "good for an (any) end", and the "good" which the "true" claims must be understood as cognitive. But cognitive "good" and moral "good" are brought into close connexion, as species of teleological "good" and contributory to "the Good". Thus only the generic, not the specific, difference between them is abolished. The "true" becomes a sort of value, like the beautiful and the (moral) good.33 Moreover, since the "real" is the object of the "true", and can be distinguished from the "unreal" only by developing superior value in the process of cognition which arrives at it, the notion of "reality" and "fact" also turn out to be disguised forms of value. Thus the dualism between judgements of fact and of value (the "Is-Ought" controversy) disappears. The "making of truth" is conceived as making for greater satisfaction and greater control of experience. It renders the truth of any time relative to the knowledge of the time, and precludes the notion of any rigid, static or incorrigible truth. Thus truth is continually being made and re-made. To this process there is no actual end, but an "absolute" truth (or system of truths) would be a truth which would be adequate to every purpose (ibid., "Pragmatism" in Enc. Brit., 1911).
This is in my view, for all its similarity to Dewey's and Singer's pragmatic "ideals", a dubious development of the relations between truth and ethics, not to mention religion. It seems to me that such absolute truth would make it, by definition, independent upon ethics. The main "father" of pragmatism, C.S. Peirce, argued that logical theory rested utlimately on ethics because logic aims to determine what sort of reasoning we ought to adopt in conducting our inquiries into truth, and ethics is the science of what we ought to do. Peirce, however, goes on understanding that what we ought to do ultimately depends on what goals we desire to achieve [not what we ought to desire, my note], and what is desirable in the end is a question of aesthetic judgement[34]. Peirce, however, cannot offer any criterion of what would constitute a reasonable basis for aesthetic judgement in his hierarchical triad of logic, ethics, and aesthetics (Dictionary of the history of ideas: Studies of selected pivotal ideas, 1973, P. Wiener's article on pragmatism, p. 568). What is at stake, here, is the nature of this "hierarchy"; many people around the world are convinced that ethics and religions, must stand at the top. Ultimately this kind of issue will rest on an understanding of the scope of ethics and of the character of human spiritual - humanistic - activities (Schleiermacher, 1988, pp. 36f, 143f). If these problems are not understood we may find out in due time that we have incurred into "not just a confusion but an actual blending of the ethical and the aesthetic: namely whatever is capable of beauty exists in order to be beautified. Or, put more bluntly: the 'scientific' achieves its highest beauties, its fullest powers of presence and observation, just at the moment where it becomes the incarnation of the banal" (Montgomery, 1991, p. 48f).
In contrast to the "anti-humanism" of positivists and Hegelians, Schiller insists on the psychological-emotional nature of knowledge and on the essentially practical nature of science. He raises therefore a polemics against the classic and modern formal logic, which he sees as an intellectualistic game that is alien to real interest and vital needs of man (Schiller, 1912). On several occasions in other contexts I have called the attention of readers on this particular criticism of formal logic as particularly interesting for its bridging potential towards the formal content of computing science. I realize, however, that the fascination exerted by mathematics and logic on many scientists may be related to their search for the - by now profane - absolute which tends to be interpreted so frivolously in the more superficial branches of the pragmatic tradition. A cultural hypothesis would then be that the motivation for increasing application of computers in society has one of its sources in an understandable but unconscious and probably misplaced religious quest for the absolute. This logical-technological quest for the absolute becomes more exacerbated the more such quest is paradoxically implemented in terms or the relativity of the metaphysics of "personal guesses" and of the pluralism of decentralization, networking or electronic communication[35].
Schiller himself still managed to conceive humanism as an evolutionary metaphysics concerning the world, man and God. Man transforms his environment into a progressive and historical ordered unity according to his feelings and goals ("Faust"). This is done in continuous struggle with chaos and negation ("Mephistopheles") who is doomed, however, to be eventually defeated by the redeeming force of God. God is personal conscience and final cause of the universe who, in cooperation with man, operates towards the ultimate perfection of a pure kingdom of finite and eternal spirits.
It is easy to sense in this rough religious description of evolutionary metaphysics a somewhat more profane interpretation of the Kantian ideal of "kingdom of ends". It is the profanity that was implicit in Hegel's dialectical process and as it was expressed in the context of the ethics of the systems approach: it is the profanity of a statement like the following "We can cut off Kant's metaphysical base and appreciate his idea on its own" (Churchman, 1979, p. 123). The same secularized evolutionary metaphysics would also be expressed as the constructive epic of the trilogy of cooperation, production and progress (Churchman, 1971, pp. 201-204, 254), in the spirit of the "experimental idealism" of E.A. Singer Jr. (1873-1954). It does not take much fantasy to imagine how such a kind of ideal-seeking would in time become progressively more relativistic and profane. Ideals would soon come to mean any wishes, wills, or aesthetic "tastes" about, say, the ideal car or the ideal vacation, on a par with ideal ways of life in the sense of an ideal marriage, an ideal education or ideals of ethics and religion[36]. The metaphysical background of such "ideals", however, can constitute the powerful historical heritage that explains the rhetorical attractiveness of the rougher conceptions of ideal-seeking in the present wave of computer supported constructivism. The difficulties that are revived recall Schiller's unclear matching between different kinds of "good" and "values", including their relation to British hedonistic utilitarianism and to the particular absolute goods of God. That type of questions indicate the problematic coupling of pragmatic ethics to aesthetics and to religion[37].
At the roots of these problems we will find the modern attempt of rehabilitation