Stumble it!Rat poison
posted in Philosophy by themaiden |A friend recently introduced me to Santiago Theory (ST) and his brief description and, honestly, over-trumpeting, of the theory quickly led to some debate.
The theory is essentially an application of systems theory to life and as such is not terribly revolutionary. Systems theory has been applied by the sciences to living organisms and groups of organisms for decades. There really is no other way to treat ecology, for example., and cultural ecology plugged humans into the equation. Practically speaking, most people know that flowers depend upon insect to reproduce. In other words, flowers are part of a system. Santiago theory carries the idea a bit further than this colloquial understanding though and makes the point that even individual organisms are agregates– systems, or patterns of constantly changing parts. This, also, is common knowledge in the sciences but perhaps ST could find its reason to be in popularizing the idea.
So far, I find nothing striking nor objectionable to the theory, but there is one component I’ve not mentioned. Santiago Theory suffers from a disease shared with much of modern academia. That disease is the tendency to redefine language, to co-opt and alter common verbage in such a way as to render it nearly universally confusing. And this, unnecessarily.
I’m picking on Santiago Theory, but it is not alone in its crime. Read virtually anything coming out of a university Liberal Arts department, and you’ll see the same trend. It has infected everything, even the sciences to lesser extent. And it is poison. The practise lends itself to– no, encourages– confusion, isolates the intellects of our time both from each other and from the world at large (where that intellect is most desperately needed), and quite disasterously hampers clear thinking. The application of definitions comes to substitute for thought and minds get lost in webs of jargon.
I saw this first… I realized this first while working toward my undergraduate degrees more than a decade ago, but the trend, I realized was far older than that. It seems to have began in earnest more than a century ago, but that is an approximate and somewhat subjective figure and is not really relevant.
But what is this crime?
Santiago Theory takes the idea that living organisms are complex systems– self-reorganizing systems, a process called autopoiesis– and renames such systems cognitive.
In other words, the Theory takes a term commonly understood to mean complex mental processing and uses it to refer to such things as a skin cell’s reacting to sunlight by becoming burned.
I understand the reason’s for this. ST is as much metaphysic as science and is an attempt, it seems, to solve the classic mind-body problem in philosophy, but that problem is solved by an understanding of the systems theory underlying ST without need for redefining the system itself as cognition. The mind, or cognition, is a label referring to a particular portion of the system. It does not follow that other portions of the system, or the system as a whole, should be considered cognitive any more than it follows that the whole of the US highway system is “Route 66″ because that label is applied to a particular stretch of asphalt within the US highway system.
It may seem that my reaction to mere semantics is a bit extreme. I don’t think so. Words that lend to confusion hamper understanding, and damage knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge. Understanding our world is difficult enough without having the first step be the deciphering of obscure linguistic code.
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