Cascadian Pragmatism
A Look Ahead
Distilling a novel regional brand of Synergetics, Cascadian Synergetics, was likely the easier step, in meeting little-to-no resistance; “Synergetics” as a namespace flies mostly unclaimed and unrecognized, under the radar of most curricula (outside of our Cascadian ones anyway).
Most tuition-payers will have learned little to nothing about either Bucky Fuller or Hermann Haken nor therefore about this early name collision (they both used the same term), long since disambiguated.
Pragmatism, on the other hand, has a well-established meaning, a broader base, and branding around that might generate more pushback, without persuasive rhetoric in favor of our pioneering a Cascadian version.
Let me introduce the Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy, indigenous to the Silicon Forest, past producer of one Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series, headed by one president Terry Bristol, fluent enough in philosophy, especially that of the ancient Greeks.
He knows about pragmatism, as do I, in my case in part through Dr. Richard Rorty, one my philosophy teachers and principal thesis adviser at Princeton (I was Class of 1980) wherein I wrote about Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (i.e. Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics).
The kind of foundational work Wittgenstein was doing, under the tutelage of Bertrand Russell at first (see Logicomix), helped me make sense of the extraordinarily remote Synergetics namespace. I would come to better understand “word-meaning revectoring” and the link between “meaning as use” (Wittgenstein) and Fuller’s “operational mathematics” (a type of mathy prose, mixed with other tool use).
Terry points out the terminological ambiguity of the term “pragmatism” i.e. a lack of cohesion around what it means. In his own journey, he has moved on, to a Philosophy of Engineering, based on two flavors of thermodynamics, each with its own lineage. His philosophy stems from one of them (the engineering one) more than the other (the one he calls scientific).
If the meaning of “pragmatism” has become blurry in the rear view mirror, maybe that situation might be addressed with our Cascadian Pragmatism.
We accomplish our re-vectoring by enlarging the contextualizing scope on both ends, extending back in time to that of Newton, most especially to William Blake, and extending forward in time, through William James and John Dewey, to Jane Addams and WILPF (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom) to Ava Helen (WILPF member) and Linus Pauling (with two Nobel Prizes: for Chemistry and for Peace).
Mention of the Paulings reconnects us to ISEPP (and its lecture series), but not without my own jumping in with “the Bucky stuff” meaning the Buckminster Fuller corpus, Synergetics included.
In sum, Cascadian Pragmatism widens the temporal brackets, such that we say it’s from Blake to Bucky, after which point some new Philosophy of Engineering might be taking over, or — as I sometimes think of it (the new heuristics) — GST (General Systems Theory).
The old lawyer-capitalism (LAWCAP — Fuller’s terminology) has by now been replaced with different animal, with once proud nation-states of yore in the rear view mirror. We still celebrate our heritage, even as we undertake the pragmatic task of re-envisioning and reimplementing our “USA OS” (the governing operating system) in our bioregion.
Those following my Silicon Forest computer science curriculum may recognize GST from another angle: our emphasis on computer game simulations, such as around electrical grids and other infrastructure (think Sims and SimCity).
The Silicon Forest features a hydro-dam economy, which in the Fuller corpus links us into World Game and its prophetic Geoscope, heralding Google Earth and similar big data driven models.
Silicon Forest computer science shows up through my Digital Mathematics curriculum, implemented through my School of Tomorrow.
Synergetica appear more widely in Cascadia than through my Martian Mathematics however, and yes, I’m thinking of Synergetics University in particular, and of Crescent City, another powerhouse of new curricula, new circuit designs for Motherboard Earth.
