The knowledge dimension of the sustainability challenge.

• Author: Mebratu, Desta

Abstract

With the increasing awareness of the global environmental challenges, society expects a concerted intellectual leadership from the scientific community in terms of knowledge acquisition and solution generation. This is not a task to be left for few specialized sciences. It requires the mobilization and utilization of human ingenuity within each and every discipline. This leads to the following questions: Is science, as we know it today, capable of fulfilling this expectation? If not, what kinds of epistemological re-orientation do we need to make? Are there any historical parallels in the development of science, which could be used as the basis for a change? This paper takes the position that: yes, science has the capacity to respond to the environmental challenge, however, both the mono-disciplinary sciences and the interdisciplinary environmental sciences have their own limitations which can only be overcome through the development of a transdisciplinary paradigm.

Introduction

The term sustainable development 'rose to the prominence of mantra-or a shibboleth-'(Daly 1996) following the 1987 publication of the report of the UN-sponsored World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). WCED defined sustainable development as 'development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of future generation' (WCED 1987). In the following decade, numerous efforts of defining and redefining have been made. A comparative analysis of most of the definitions shows that they all share an inherent vagueness in terms of the core concept. But they differ in their identification of the solution epicenter, the solution platform, and the leadership center (Mebratu 1998). Some argue that the vagueness surrounding the concept of sustainable development is dictated by practical necessity. This point had a strong validity in the eighties. In the mid-eighties, a consensus on a vague concept was better than disagreement over a sharply defined one. Hence, despite its vagueness and ambiguity, the WCED definition on sustainable development has been highly instrumental in developing a global consensus on our planet's future. By 1995, however, 'this initial vagueness was no longer a basis for consensus, but a breeding ground for disagreement' (Daly 1996). Acceptance of a largely undefined term has set the stage for a situation where whoever can pin his or her definition to the term will automatically win a large political battle for influence over our future.

Others say that it is practically impossible to apply our scientific knowledge and develop a concrete body of theory on sustainability and sustainable development. This is, also, true if we attempt to define sustainability within the entrenched disciplinary context. Our current structure of scientific thinking, which is locked to the reductionist epistemological foundation, has a limitation of applicability in dealing with regions of organized complexity such as the environment. Thus, re-engineering our scientific thinking is a fundamental prerequisite for enhancing our understanding about the environmental crisis and developing a conceptual framework for sustainability and sustainable development.

The development of science and technology has been the major catalyst for the unprecedented speed and magnitude of change since the industrial revolution. Although nobody can deny the positive effect of these changes, it is equally true that 'science and engineering have been unable to keep pace with the second-order effects produced by their first order victories' (Weinberg 1975). As a result, we are faced with global environmental challenges that include global warming, desertification and loss bio-diversity. The disciplinary and interdisciplinary responses of the scientific community to the environmental challenge have demonstrated that science is an important tool in our effort to overcome the environmental challenge. However, the full-scale utilization of science for sustainability will require addressing the limitations that have become evident during these disciplinary and interdisciplinary stages.

According to the dominant scientific thinking, science is the study of those things that can be reduced to the study of other things. Science, in other words, is essentially reductionist. However, it should be noted that the reductionists have not yet succeeded in reducing all phenomena to physical and chemical primitives (Weinberg 1975). Environmental issues are one of the complex and dynamic subjects that will always be beyond the reach of the reductionist scientific thinking. Scientific understanding of the environmental challenge will require overcoming the limitations of the reductionist approach that is inherent in our way of thinking. This implies the need for a shift of paradigm. This paper addresses the inherent possibilities and limitations of current scientific thinking with respect to the environmental challenge with which we are faced. The first section looks at the major epistemological elements that have significant bearing on current way of thinking. The second section analyses the possibilities and limitations of current scientific thinking in our efforts to understand sustainability and sustainable development.

1. The epistemological challenge

   Scientific thinking constitutes one of the greatest tools of mankind in the transformation of the agricultural society to the industrial society. Today, its influence is so immense that it permeates through most of the day-to-day decisions of an ordinary life, through the dominant mental models it has created. Scientific thinking has passed through different stages of refinement before assuming its current status. Hence, any discussion on scientific thinking must be conducted within the historical context of its development. Although there could be a number of epistemological issues that constitute the nature of the scientific thinking, the discussion in this section is limited to the following three topics which are of primary relevance to the objective of the paper.

   1.1 The logic of truth

   The ultimate objective of science is enshrined as the search for facts or truth. But what is truth? This question seems to be the supreme question underlying the philosophy of science and the pursuit of knowledge. The search for truth is also where the logic of bivalent and multivalent truth begins. Looking back at the ancient history surrounding the logic of truth, one stumbles upon the history of logic of the West and the East. For the West, Aristotle offered a binary logic chop which always draws the line between opposites, between the thing and the not-thing, between A and not-A, between black and white. According to Aristotelian methodology, 'the better you drew those lines, the more logical your mind and the more exact is your science' (Kosko 1994). In contrast, the great cultural leaders of the East were "mystics." They tolerated vagueness and even promoted it. Buddha rejected the black-and-white world of words on his path to spiritual or psychic enlightenment, while Lao-tze gave humanity the Tao and its yin-yang emblem of opposites, both thing and not-thing.

   Aristotle's logic and scientific bent have shaped much of the modern Western mind and defined its range of parameters, its boundaries, its listing of correct and incorrect. Each generation has refined Aristotle's model of the mind and the universe. To a large degree Aristotle is till the accepted authority on what is philosophically correct in logic and reasoning. Science has been less critical of Aristotle's model of the mind until the beginning of the twentieth century when the challenge to Aristotelian truth started to emerge with the evolution of new theories such as the quantum theory.

   At the root of the difference between bivalent and multivalent truth lies the mismatch problem. The mismatch problem--gray worlds but black-white scientific description- reduces to a truth problem, the problem of gray truth. In terms of truth, the mismatch problem recounts the antagonism between bivalence and multivalence, between the black-or-white and the gray. Multivalent (Fuzzy) logic says all scientific truths are gray. Bivalent science says none are gray, but are tentative and may pass from all true to all false in the light of confounding data. Multivalent logic agrees that scientific truths are tentative but holds firm to the concept of grayness. That is the conflict. Whether truth is gray or not and to what degree (Kosko 1994). Multivalent logic views truth as accuracy. And accuracy is clearly a matter of degree. Scientific truth with 100% accuracy brings us back to the mismatch problem of gray world with black-white description. As was stated by Kosko (1994), the bivalence of modern science ignores or denies or whitewashes and blackwashes gray truth. The multivalent view says that almost all truth is gray truth, partial truth. It allows mathematical truths to remain black or white as extreme cases of gray.

   The rivalry between the bivalent and multivalent interpretations of truth has been a long-standing one in the philosophy of science...