Participant: Will Varey
Affiliation: School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Murdoch University, Western Australia
Format: Presentation and Conversation
Themes: recursion, paradigm, praxis

In developing sustainability policy for large-scale social systems a continuing barrier to innovation is the capacity of the social system to discern its capability for prediction. Even with the most informed and expansive motivations, policy decisions for sustainability are made with the capacities held at the time of deciding. Effectively, there are limitations for the system in seeing the implications of its own actions.

A recent research project has asked the open-question: How to enable generative learning for large-scale systems of thinking? This paper reports on the results of that research. The study of ‘conceptions’ is proposed as a means to ‘think about thought’. Using principles of psychological panarchy (drawing on ecological systems theory), a method for the visualization of complex thought-ecologies has been developed. In this approach networks of conceptions are depicted as three-dimensional representations of the ecology of thought in social systems. Essentially, this provides a means to walk around in the environment that is the garden of thought.
The development of this paradigmatic shift in epistemology generates consequential questions of ethics and praxis. The question asked is: ‘What are the ethical implications of the proposed metonym of depiction?’ Fundamentally, when a social-system is presented with a depiction of its own thought-capacities will it engage with the opportunity for learning by rejection, recognition or recursion? The outcome sought is to enhance praxis by using recursion as a process of generative reflection.

To prompt discussion, three categories of responses are considered: for Learning I, Learning II and Learning III scenarios. The different cybernetic configurations generate a matrix of alternatives for ethical praxis. This heuristic device provides one means to consider, when presented with reflexive learning opportunities, do thought-ecologies tend to contract, continue-as-is or co-evolve with their environments? Suggestions are offered for the praxis of how the visualization of the ecology of thought might enable adaptive and generative learning pathways.