I am forwarding this purely on the strength of Hilgartner's message.  I
make no assumptions about the clarity or validity of his ideas; rather, I
notice that he is talking about communication.  All voices should be heard...

>To: announce@isss.org
>From: "C. A. Hilgartner" <cah5@hilgart.org>
>Subject: [announce] A reply to Ken Baskin's question/invitation
>
>At 10:54 AM 9/12/2001, via the International Society for System Studies
>listserve, Ken Baskin  <bman47@netaxs.com>  wrote:
>
>><snipped>
>>
>>I would hope that all of us receiving this post are committed to peace.
>>The issue is the means. Does anyone on this list want to venture an
>>attempt to define the position that systems thinking or complexity theory
>>might develop to meet such terrorism?
>>
>>Ken
>
>
>Dear Ken Baskin,
>         By declaring yourself and your audience "committed to peace", you
> show that, like most other speakers of western Indo-European languages
> (Dutch, English, French, German, etc.), you have a systematic blind spot
> -- which, in the present context, gets in your way. You don't know how
> polar terms work.
>
>         WIE languages do not explicitly use polar term-pairs, in this
> sense, the way that, for example, Sino-Tibetan languages such as Mandarin
> Chinese do. With a polar term-pair, you cannot have one member of the
> pair without the actual or clearly implied presence of the other.
>         So -- you fail to notice that the construct of "peace" remains
> logically inseparable from that of "war", and that in our system of
> "nation-states", conditions that we label by one member of the pair
> alternate with conditions that we label with the other. Over one interval
> we have "War", and over the next, "Peace", and then "War" again, and then
> more "Peace", etc., endlessly.
>
>         From my present standpoint, "committed to peace" looks like
> "committed to tails" in an on-going coin-toss performed with a coin that
> has both "heads" and "tails".
>
>         If we don't want more "War", then we must abolish both "War" and
> "Peace", and play some other game entirely.
>
>         "Some other game entirely." What might that look like?
>
>         I cannot give a brief answer, in the context of an email. So
> please allow me to make some "unsupported assertions" -- and if they
> sound at least vaguely interesting to even one member of this audience,
> then I invite that member to get into further contact with me.
>
>         I have generated an alternative frame of reference (terms such as
> "World-View" or "weltaunshauung" don't seem drastic enough to catch what
> I mean by that phrase), which in turn have made it possible to generate a
> non-standard notation of the "Let's Keep Track of What We Say" type
> (entirely unlike the mathematical theory of sets or any mathematical
> sub-discipline we can base on set theory).
>
>         This "framework" has made it possible to develop a relatively
> simple-sounding model of "how any human -- or for that matter, any
> non-human organism (from a virus to ... to a chimpanzee or an oak tree)
> manages to keep itself alive, for at least a few moments more, in its
> environment (ultimately, in the biosphere)".
>
>         And it gives a model of how the ecosphere works (manages to
> persist from one moment to the next for at least a few moments more).
>
>         It also makes it possible to model how a human or group of humans
> can generate enough "self-righteousness" (more accurately put, generate
> the conviction that s/he/they operate(s) from "absolute certainty",
> analogous to the "omnipotence" and "omniscience" which some theists
> attribute to their god(s)) to "justify" using verbal put-downs, or
> fisticuffs, or knife or gun, or "weapons of mass destruction", or
> concerted genocide, or even to mount what looks like concerted efforts to
> bring about species-suicide and extinction, and in the process, to
> annihilate the ecosphere.
>
>         At the other extreme, the foundations of this alternative frame
> of reference show how to re-draw the boundaries between paired terms such
> as "US vs. THEM". As one way to express this alteration, these
> foundations teach humans how to include anyone who can talk -- anyone who
> has at least one native language and culture of origin -- as one of "US."
>
>         Does a theoretical system which makes such promises seem worth
> taking a good look at?
>
>         As I said, I offer an invitation. Do I find anyone willing to
> consider putting in enough serious study to come to understand the
> alternative frame of reference and the non-standard notation? If so,
> please get in touch with me. Agenda: to figure out how I might go about
> making these only partially-published formulations accessible.
>
>         Meanwhile, I have a website, at http://www.hilgart.org, on which
> I have posted some sixty of my 100 papers on these topics. Feel free to
> visit it, and take a look.
>                                                         Andy Hilgartner
>
>C. A. Hilgartner        .               Phone: 660-627-2519
>2413 North East Street  .       FAX:   660-627-2930
>Kirksville  MO  63501   .       email: cah5@hilgart.org
>Website: www.hilgart.org.


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