Configurative Criteria

Development beyond Science to Wisdom (Part #8)

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The above criteria are all expressed negatively and it is not clear that practical and constructive corrective measures can be formulated and implemented. Examining the above points however, many of them may be interpreted as due to an absence of a *'configurative' feature. By this is meant that the context for the generation of knowledge is not structred such as to facilitate any trend towards focus, integration, or paradigm transcendence. Rather any innovation in knowledge tends to 'create' or 'occupy' new territory, namely there is a sense of 'open expanding frontier' and a lack of need to respond to tensions arising from the 'sympathy'' or 'antipathy' of the innovation to previous or parallel innovations. There is no innovation 'population pressure' ; there is always the freedom to escape confrontation, the significance of alternatives, and responsibility for 'pollution' of the psychic environment by previous efforts. Each feels free to cut up the conceptual universe according to some new set of categories, thus defining as irrelevant (or non-existent) any alternative perceptions.

The question therefore arises as to what are the consequences of introducing limitations on this degree of freedom. Clearly, and typically in controlled settings (e.g. a conference, an institution, programme or an information system), participants, may be required to focus on a pre defined topic, geographical area, time period, method, ideological framework, etc. This appears to avoid the problems and even gives the illusion of an integrated ('wholistic') perspective, but in effect only ensures that others are brought up in other such settings - none of which are able to handle the question of mutual irrelevance or incompatibility.

Such a specialised approach constitutes a very primitive response to the problem. The question is whether 'irrelevant' or 'opposing' perspectives can be juxtaposed in such a way as to respect the felt 'distance' between them, recognising links of 'sympathy' or 'antipathy' . The results of such juxtaposition would depend upon the number of distinct or 'incompatible' perspectives and can be described as a 'configuration' (7, 16). The elements of a configuration cannot usually be related within a single theoretical framework, namely there are 'discontinuities' between them bridged by praxis as, for example, between the business management concerns of: finance, production, human relations, marketing, research, etc.

Such configuration would define and limit, to some degree, the freedom of the perspectives by showing how their relationship to their peer perspectives can be perceived. The distinction between 'peers' within a configuration and between different configurations (one being 'more adequate' or superseding the other) needs to be discussed separately (7).

Two questions are:

• Wwhether such configurations can lead to the emergence of more comprehensive, sensitive and strategically valid attitudes. This is a matter of experiment.
• Whether any existing communication technique could facilitate the emergence of such configurations. Communication technologies are now very sophisticated so that an appropriate experiment could be undertaken

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