All Life Is Problem Solving

I think your twin posts on knowledge management and its possible relevance to national governments raise some very interesting and creative ideas that warrant a serious pause for thought. I have just been in the United States and revisited the Washington Mall, and the axes of the Mall including the White House, the Congress and […]

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I think that a musical composition is different from a text asserting logical and semantic content. There still might be a “correct interpretation” of musical compositions, but I don’t think the issue here is one of a true theory about the semantic and logical content of a text, but of the aesthetic value of different […]

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First, I think that true and false are terms we should apply to linguistic networks rather than single statements. Networks are necessary, because single statements generally assume a good deal of background knowledge illuminating the meaning of those statements. If the background knowledge is expressed in language also, we have a network of statements, and […]

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I don’t think there are empirical truths. The idea that there are such truths is a hangover from positivism and empiricism, now discredited epistemologies, even though many social scientists seem unaware of this. Also, from my viewpoint one really needs to distinguish between three kinds of knowledge: biological knowledge, mental knowledge, and cultural knowledge. Biological […]

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Historically, since Plato, the most frequent definition of knowledge has been Justified True Belief (JTB). Until recently (the 20th century), philosophers believed in a foundation for JTB. The Cartesian Rationalists believed that some beliefs were certain because they were self-evident truths that survived Descartes method of doubt. The empiricists believed that some beliefs were self-evident […]

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Introduction In my two previous posts I’ve talked about the OODA loop framework and its relationships to the Decision Execution Cycle (DEC), Single- and Double-loop learning, and the Knowledge Life Cycle (KLC) frameworks. Here I want to discuss the relationship of Recognition Primed Decision Making (RPD), a primary type of Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) to […]

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Introduction In my last post, I examined John Boyd’s OODA Loop framework and discussed its relationship to double-loop learning. I mentioned there that OODA was one of a number of similar Decision Learning Cycle (DLC) frameworks developed by various writers over the years, including my own Decision Execution Cycle (DEC) framework. In this post, I’ll […]

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Decision and Learning Cycles There are a number of examples in the organizational learning field of frameworks that conjecture a cyclic agent behavioral process of decision, action, experiential feedback, and then adjustment followed by new action. Such frameworks are not new. Russell Ackoff and Kolb and Fry in the 1970s, Kolb in the 1980s, and […]

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  This post is about “safe-fail experiments.” The essential idea in safe-fail experiments was expressed well by Dave Snowden in this way: “I can afford them to fail and critically, I plan them so that through that failure I learn more about the terrain through which I wish to travel.” And again, in another place, […]

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  There are three interesting questions we’d like to take up in this part. — First, assuming that the approach taken by Cynefin, requiring sensemaking through first selecting the context type one is dealing with is appropriate, is the Cynefin framework complete enough as it stands or does it fail to identify important types of […]

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