\}N ìo THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE School of Mathematical Sciences David Matthews B.Sc. (Maths & Comp. Sc.) (Hons) Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2004 Where, after the meta-narratíves, can legitimacy reside? Jean-Francois Lyotard 2 I hereby declare that this thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other Degree or Diploma in any University or any other Tertiary Institution and that, to the best of my knowledge, this thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference is made. I also give consent for a copy of this thesis, when deposited in the University Library, to be made available for photocopying and loan. David Matthews 1 December 2OO4 3 Acknowledgements '"The intense view of these manifotd imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me and heated my brain, that t am ready to reject allbelief and reasoning and can look on no opnrcn as more probable or likely than any other ... I dine, t play a game of backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends and when after three or four hours amusement I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold and strained and ridicutous that I cannot find it in my heari to enter into them any furfher." - David Hume All too many students present a list of names in their acknowledgements thanking everyone from their kindergarten teachers to their pet cats. Like an actor who has just received the Palme d'Or, students are tempted to see their doctoral theses as their Opus Magnum, the pinnacle of their life's achievement. As such, they feel compelled to thank anyone and everyone who has had a role in their life up to that point. I suppose I could also thank my pet cats. However, at some point during the course of this intellectual journey, I ceased to be driven by the idea of gaining a doctorate and began to be drawn by the profound and yet ultimately unanswerable questions posed by the terrain I was exploring. Accordingly, I no longer see this work as my coming of age; the vehicle through which I have passed from student to expert. Rather, this work has awoken in me a yearning for exploring hitherlo unchartered intellectual territories that I suspect will never be completely satisfied. lt has created the opposite of an expert - a forever-student. As such, I am very much aware that the journey is just beginning and will spare the reader the usual list of major life influences. Notwithstanding the above, there have been a few people along the way who have been more than just influences but absolute necessities, without which this work could not have been completed. To begin with, I would not have had the opportunity to start this journey had it not been for the unequivocal support of the various people who were in some way responsible for me at my 4 place of employment, DSTO, during this time. Thank you Phil, Terry and Jennie for giving me perhaps the most valuable gift of all - time. I can only hope that when I am in your position I will be able to exhibit the same farsightedness and generosity that you have shown me. After securing support from DSTO, I then had to find someone within academia willing to take on a mathematics graduate who fancied himself as a bit of a polymalh. lt would be understating the point to say that the project I had in mind was counter-cultural and risky. However, whilst already burdened with an excessive student load, my erstwhile mentor and friend, Professor Charles Pearce, accepted the challenge and, by so doing, allowed me to continue my association with the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Adelaide. Thankyou Charles for making an exception for me, it would never have been the same without you. Charles' eclectic interests, broad knowledge base and immense popularity have always conspired against him having a light supervisory workload. As such, it was necessary for me to find a co-supervisor for this work. I will be forever grateful for having Associate Professor Martin Burke of the Systems Engineering and Evaluation Centre at the University of South Australia as my co-supervisor. Martin went far beyond the expectations of a co-supervisor and in many ways this thesis would not exist in its present form without him. Of the many things I learned from Martin, perhaps the most important was to take joy in the intellectual journey. For Martin it was never solely about the final product, but the intellectual passions that the journey awoke. Throughout the journey Martin has been an unfailing source of encouragement for me. At the same time, he has been wise enough to encourage me to keep everything else in balance. The quote from David Hume (above) describes what I have come to think of as the psychosis of the intellectual. Martin's support during this time has helped lowêr this to at least the level of a neurosis and perhaps even squeezed out a few moments of health. Martin, I feel both enriched and undeserving to have had you as a supervisor. Thankyou. On the same note, the few moments of health and balance that I have been able to enjoy during this time would not have been possible without my family and close friends. I do not have the space to list them all, but they know who they are. One that deserves a special mention, however, is my best friend and my wife, Elizabeth. There is a truism I have heard which states'. "the onty thing more frustrating than writing up a doctorate is living with someone writing up a doctorate". Elizabelh has handled this latest fancy of mine with all of the wisdom, grace and poise that she has done all of the others, whilst continuing to excel in her own career. Thankyou so much for your ongoing support Liz. A final note; writers are parasites, always leeching ideas from other people. I am particularly grateful to have had the opportunity to leech (re-view and re-contextualise) the ideas of some 5 truly extraordinary thinkers. Many of them have already helped change soc¡ety in profound ways and some of them may yet do so in the future. lt is impossible to acknowledge my debt to all of these thinkers, so I will not even try. However, I would like to dedicate this work to one of them, Charles West Churchman, who, sadly, passed away during the preparation of this thesis. No thinker has had a greater influence on the systems movement over the course of their intellectual life than Churchman. Moreover, it is hoped that his influence will continue to be felt well into the twenty first century, helping to shape both the epistemic basis and ethical motivation of generations of systems theorists to come. 6 "Most students think that writing means writing down ideas, insights, visions. They feel that they must first have something to say before they can put it down on paper. For them writing is little more than recording a pre-existing thought. But with this approach lrue writing'is impossible. Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals what is alive. ... The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisety that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we stafted to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know." - HenriNouwen Overview 'We find ourselves at the end of one epoch, and on the threshold of entering a new one whose contours, as far as I can see, are not yet fully visible-" - Gerald Midgley The above statement appears in Midgley's (2000) book Sysfemic lnte¡ventrbn. One of the aims of this book is lo "undertake a Íundamental rethínk of systems philosophy". ln regard to this aim, Midgley acknowledges that: "it would be arrogant of me (not to say foolish) to think that t could achieve it in just a few chapters ... Nevertheless, I hope that I can make a reasonable sta¡t so that we can begin to shape a credible alternative to mechanism for the 21't century". Following Midgley, this thesis aims to continue the rethink. Like Midgley, I accept that a reorientation of an entire intellectual community is not about to happen through the work of one thinker. However, it is hoped that the ideas embedded within these pages will help keep the conversation that Midgley initiated going, and by so doing, help shape 'Íhe contours" of the systems community in the 21'r century. 7 Like the writings of the thinkers I most admire, this thesis aims to be perspicuous rather than systematicl. lnstead of attempting to construct a monolithic, all encompassing theory on the nature of systems, it attempts to bring into a clearer light the folly of some of the core presuppositions of Occidental thought since the Enlightenment, and by way of implication, the folly of adopting these presuppositions within the systems communityl. It offers a reason why many of our so-called 'scientific' attempts at solving difficult, contemporary, socio-cultural, socio-technical and socio-economic problems have been seen to fail. Such problems include environmental problems, problems involving management, strategy and high-level decision making, problems involving the economy and its relationship to complex societal issues such as welfare, education, and health, problems involving the human mind, mental illness, psychology and psychiatry and problems arising when the natural sciences 'come out' (of their laboratory conditions) and attempt to come to terms with the incredibly complex wider world around them.