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(Margaret Mead, Continuities in Cultural Evolution, 1964)
I am proposing a practical way to correct an error.
Problems—including the unsustainability of global trends and the discontinuities in cultural evolution—need to be seen and treated as its consequences.
In his 1969 MIT report and call to action—to institute transdisciplinarity by anchoring it academically, as the necessary first step toward enabling the post-industrial democracy to comprehend and resolve its problems—Erich Jantsch quoted Norbert Wiener, the iconic progenitor of cybernetics:
“There is only one quality more important than ‘know-how’…… This is ‘know-what’ by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.”
Academic disciplines cannot provide us the know-what that will match and complement the know-how we've acquired by giving us a viable direction; and the media informing, such as it is, won't do it either. A system that will empower us to act as our new situation demands must combine disciplinary and other evidence; it must transcend academic and cultural fragmentation; it must communicate to the public with authority of science—in ways that are well beyond the modalities of outreach that the sciences have been able to produce.
I propose to institute a transdiscipline.
Which is a new kind of institution. And I make this proposal concrete by offering knowledge federation as a complete prototype of the transdiscipline; ready to be examined and put to use.
This website is intended to complement my book called Liberation, which will soon be in print; and outline a vision of a post-Industrial order of things or "world" called holotopia, which is in significant dimensions radically better than the world we live in; which will render the requisite evidence as brief and entertaining real-life people and situation stories called vignettes; and ignite an initiative, which bears the same name, whose aim is to enable comprehensive change—of our social and cultural order of things or paradigm as a whole. Here my aim is to set in motion a parallel academic initiative; by submitting an academic case for it to begin with.
On these pages I will condense my case for transdisciplinarity, or knowledge federation, by outlining its structure; and I'll let you reconstruct its details by browsing through the book and participating in the public dialog the book will ignite. You'll have comprehended my argument when you see that it's founded on a single principle called knowledge federation axiom; which is not an axiom in the usual sense but a convention of language and my definition of knowledge; which states that knowledge must be federated; and means that we cannot say that we know something unless evidence has been duly accounted for; and that we cannot say that something is known unless it's reflected in everyday awareness and action. My point will follow from evidence—from what the giants of science have found out and reported; by connecting the dots.
Historical attempts to institute transdisciplinarity have been ignored; and the experiences of my knowledge federation colleagues and myself have been similar; I will now allow myself to be blunt—because we have no more time to lose.
I will demonstrate that knowledge is no longer possible.
That our comprehension of the most basic or pivotal themes of our lives and times is at a similar level as the comprehension of natural phenomena was before science; that this is due to a fundamental error, which has been uncovered and diagnosed by creative leaders of science; and that correcting this error will open up a vast and magnificent creative frontier—where the next-generation academics will be empowered to be creative in ways and degrees that their and their world's situation will necessitate. It will follow that the keys to solutions to "the huge problems now confronting us" are in our, academic hands; and I'll invite you to act as the human and civilizational situation we are in, the social role of science and the academic traditions' time-honored values demand.
In the remaining four main pages of this website I'll let knowledge federation speak for itself; and thereby also illustrate some of its techniques.
- Federation through Ideograms will explain the nature of the error I've been telling you about, and how I propose to correct it
- Federation through Keywords will help you comprehend both precisely
- Federation through Prototypes will illustrate knowledge federation by a few examples of application
- Federation through Action will make it clear exactly how I propose to go about correcting the error; and invite you to take part.
Dino Karabeg
