Pragmatism

One of the themes that (hopefully) runs through this blog is that context is vitally important to knowledge. This notion of context has important implications with respect to our notion of Truth.

Classical academic knowledge production is organized around the pursuit of Truth. In the sciences that truth is unique and fairly immutable. Popper's falsification and Kuhn's paradigms dealt blows to the notions that we can know that Truth and to its immutability. And while Science marchs on in reasonable health, concerns remain regarding exactly what priviledge we should affort to "the physics way of knowing."

As a very minor participant in discussions along these lines over the years, I have noticed that a few of my colleages and myself have developed a test that allows us to escape from the nihilist postmodern spiral that is so tempting in this debate.

Aside
At the moment, I can blame Descarte for this mess. His escape was "cogito ergo sum". Perhaps the ultimate relativistic framework?...
End

That escape hatch is the notion of pragmatism. This follows from considerations of why we pursue knowledge. In my view, we pursue knowledge because we believe, and to some extent experience suggests, that knowing more about our world and our place in it will allow us to improve our lot and the lot of generations to come. That is we pursue knowledge because it is useful. It allows us to predict the weather (sort of), it helps us to be more healthy, and it provides for a strong defense.

If knowledge is going to improve our lot, at some point it has to be put into action. At some point we have to be willing to accept something as true, or at least true enough, and make a decision or implement a policy. Engineers do this all of the time; problems related to the aeronautics of bees did not prevent us from building airplanes. Similarly corporate actors who are taking action with respect to greenhouse gasses are not terribly worried about the nuances. In my experience, they are acting on the first order picture (more GHG -> more uncertainty) and to the extent they worry about the detail they are making strongly hedged bets.

I think that it is important that we continue to fund and encourage our brightest minds to expand the knowledge frontiers. The leading edge of our current understanding of our world will always be confusing and, at times, things we have known for decades will turn out to be only partially correct. But at any given time, we must act on what we think we know and "Does it Work" can prove to be a more powerful discriminator in that regard than "Is it True".

Climate Signals - New York Times

In an editorial this morning (Climate Signals - New York Times), the NYT suggests that perhaps the strength of the link between the carbon cycle and international politics is strengtheing....

Earth System (singluar)

Imagine a surface of constant, but very low, nitrogen concentration that encloses Earth. That surface is closed and it bounds the Earth System.

While that surface is closed, it does not mean that there are no fluxes across it. Mass crosses in both direction: incoming mass includes meteorites, but also, depending on what nitrogen concentration is chosen to define the surface, a selection of space junk; outgoing includes helium and space probes. The energy balance across that surface determines, among other things, Earth's room temperature.

The scale of that surface defines the largest scale in the hierarchy of Earth systems. The fluxes across that surface connect the Earth System to the Solar System and other systems beyond. That is clearly a loose coupling, but it is just the sort of thing that allows a hierarchical scale to be defined.

Within the Earth System, there are many subsystems. Those subsystems include the carbon cycle, international economics, my body and the computer on which these ideas are being composed. Many of those subsystems are linked and the links between them can be stronger or weaker. The link between the carbon cycle and international economics is reasonably strong; for better or worse the link between the carbon cycle and international politics is weaker than that with economics.

Our challenge then is to work out the connections and workings of subsystems of the Earth System and in so doing find levers we can pull to ensure that the possible futures for our planet include a reasonably large set that are satisficing.

Sustainability as Satisficing

I would like to propose yet another definition, or perspective anyway, for the idea of sustainability. The classical definition of the Bruntland report suggests that sustainability is a state of meeting the needs of today without sacrificing the needs of the future. Joel Cohen has pointed out that the Bruntland definition assumes that we have some idea of what the needs and capacities of the future will be, which we don't. He introduces a more dynamic notion of sustainability that incorporates changing needs and abilities.

Both the Bruntland and Cohen approaches to sustainability bring our responsibility to future generations into the picture. This is important and they do it through an emphasis of the future and on an implied sense that if we are good then we might achieve sustainabilty sometime in the future.

I would like to propose that we move our sustainability focus closer to the present. In particular, I propose the following:

Sustainability is the existence at any given time of a set of possible futures which are acceptable in some satisficing sense.

Central to this recasting is the idea that sustainability is something that we have or don't have at the moment. My definition does a couple of other things:

• It recognizes that decisions that we make today, determine what is possible and what is not possible as we move forward.
• It introduces the notion that sustainability is not optimizing, but satisficing and through that notion brings ideas of bounded rationality to bear on our discussions of Earth management.
• By introducing ideas related to administration and organizations, it introduces the idea that sustainability is a management problem.
• By focusing on the present, it recognizes that there are some messes that we are simply going to have to deal with (an ice free Arctic for example).
  

The notion of an evolving set of satisficing possible futures is central. It does not imply futures are given, but that they are created. The need to steer toward desired possible futures will illuminate priorities with respect to resource allocations.

For instance, I expect that Earth will burn a lot of coal in the coming century. There is a possible future where this happens and we avoid acidification of the oceans, but that future requires the development of technologies to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. CO2 sucking technologies are also possible both theoretically and economically. I think we should decide to develop such techologies so that the possible future of cheap energy for economic development along with continued functioning of surface ocean ecosystems is attained.

Social Networks

In a recent article in Wired Bruce Sterling comments on the role that social networks might play in the evaluation of impact and the identification of funding partners. A couple of points from that article:

He notes that "Allocating money for scientific research has always been highly problematic. Science just doesn't sit still for the usual forms of cost-benefit analysis..." and then goes on to postulate that social network maps of citations and peer review can provide a proxy for the all elusive impact. He then leaves us with an unfinished discussion of a scenario in which the scientist in the middle of a strong network is funded while his (gender assignment is mine, read into it what you will) less connected colleague is left unfunded.

My initial reaction is "great - now we can really reinforce the middle of the road". A number of pernicious assumptions underlie this analysis:

First - there is the assumption that past performance is a good indicator of future performance. This is self-fullfilling.

Second, and perhaps related - there is an implicit assumption that new ideas will come from well established sources (individuals?...)

Third - there is an implicit assumption that citations and peer review are good proxies...

I was attracted to the article for another reason - I am trying to fund new ideas. Can I use social networks to find new sources of funding. What is the map I need to connect my ideas with funding sources?...