Thursday, March 14, 2013

Greg Fisher — Chinese Thinking and Complexity

Last week I attended an excellent conference in Singapore, which had the intriguing title of “A Crude Look at the Whole”. The title was attributable to Murray Gell-Man who was one of the founding fathers of the Santa Fe Institute and also the winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics. Gell-Man is famous for a few things, including being the first to postulate the existence of quarks. Another is the idea of coarse-grained cognition. This is the (to me sensible) idea that reality is extremely fine-grained in terms of detail, like a ultra-high definition movie, whereas human cognition is very crude (or coarse) by comparison, like a blurry still picture. Gell-Man was at the conference as were two other giants of the complexity community, John Holland and Brian Arthur.
It was an excellent and wide-ranging conference, organised by Jan Vasbinder of the Complexity Programme of the Nanyang Technological Universoty (NTU). A thought occurred to me during the last session, which I thought warranted a blog article. Or, rather, it was more of a question: is the Chinese mind-set more conducive to understanding Complexity theory than the Western mind-set? There are good arguments to say that it is.

Don’t worry, my question is not based on some flimsy notion of Confucian group-think. In fact it emerges from some serious academic studies which show fascinating and important differences in how Westerners and Chinese think. Some of this material was presented at the conference by Professor Ying-Yi Hong of NTU’s business school but interested readers might look at the excellent book The Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbet.
Synthesis
Chinese Thinking and Complexity
Greg Fisher

This is significant in that it suggests that the preference for methodological individualism and microfoundations in Western social sciences, including economics, is cultural rather than universal. The dominant mode of Western thinking and mindset tends to be analytic rather than synthetic, and Oriental thinking and mindset, the opposite. The dominant mode of Western thinking and mindset also tends to be structural, while Oriental thinking and mindset, functional. The West tends to be reductionist and the East, holistic. I don't say this as a casual observation but as a scholar who has studied comparative philosophy for many years.

As Fisher observes, it is will be interesting to see how this plays out historically over this century.
All of this makes me think of a quote which one of my other colleagues shared with me a few months ago, which originated from the US defense establishment (specifically it was from Heinz Pagels, cited as the epigraph to the volume “Coping with the bounds: Speculation on nonlinearity in Military Affairs” (1998) National Defence University): 
“I am convinced that the nation and people who master the new sciences of complexity will become the economic, cultural and political superpowers of the next century.”


2 comments:

David said...

“I am convinced that the nation and people who master the new sciences of complexity will become the economic, cultural and political superpowers of the next century.”

The very idea embedded in this quote is so quintessentially "western" in itself that it serves to underline the point. I mean, we assume that we can "master" another way of thinking just so as to "utilize" or "weaponize" it. I've been reading Richard Bronk's "The Romantic Economist" and he could never really get away from that way of thinking either. Take the "Romantic way of thinking," more holistic, organic, saturated with color, etc., and turn in into another weapon in the trader's (trader as Byronic hero) arsenal! I've also been reading Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man in which he, fascinated by Goethe's "Greek way of thinking" sought to establish the possibility for the individual and social betterment of man through an art oriented education. Whenever we in the West think about culture we hark back to the Greeks, but we don't really understand them. They weren't nearly as "Western" as we became and our view of them is distorted by the lens in which we view them. Our adversarial political and education systems just can't seem to ever achieve the sorts of harmonies upon which cultures are based, however endlessly we may talk about them. Schiller's idea was simple and self-evident to Plato and a number of other people, and yet it continues to elude us.

Tom Hickey said...

Right, we are trapped in our way of thinking for many reasons. As Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy sought to elucidate, it is embedded in the structure of ordinary language, whose context is a "form of life." The forms of life in East and West are fundamentally different, as are the languages. There are even marked differences within the West, and within countries in the West, especially large ones like the US, where there are subcultures.

These differences are the subject matter of cognitive science, behavioral science, and social science. although economics other than heterodox ignores this.

I was talking to a woman who is fluent in English and Chinese and is a translator. She told me she was translating a rather difficult philosophical work that I was familiar with, and I asked her about the challenges. She said that the work was basically untranslatable into Chinese because Chinese people don't think like Westerners, so she had to do the best she could to convey the ideas in Chinese characters.

Moreover, the issues are not only cognitive but also contextual. Meaning is context-dependent. People living in different geographical, historical, cultural, and social contexts use the same terms differently and therefore the terms have different meaning for the different groups.

Of course, it runs both ways in trying to translated Chinese into English. For example, there are literally dozens of translations of the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) into English, and many convey quite different ideas. But accomplished Taoists will say that unless ones has the experience that is its foundation, even understanding Chinese is insufficient, and if one has the experience, then it is not necessary to understand Chinese.