Instrumentalism and Essentialism

Introduction

Rationalism and essentialism are targeted in much of postmodern social theory today because they are believed to have been the epistemological and ontological doctrines most responsible for legitimating oppressive hierarchies and stifling  diversity.  Social theorists argue that these positions create a tiered reality where historical contingencies are recast as natural necessities founded in a transcendent world of eternal ideas.  

Gilles Deleuze's position is especially interesting inasmuch as it seems in every respect an effort to fully invert the ontic priorities attributed to rationalism and essentialism.  Deleuze's position is clearly articulated by Manuel DeLanda who assesses rationalism and essentialism as totalitarian in their tendency to exhaust possibility, close horizons, and emphasize unity and uniformity.  DeLanda sustains Deleuze's emphasis on flux, spontaneity and heterogeneity.  This effort to advance a position congenial to pluralism, however, should not be taken to mean that Deleuze and DeLanda are relativists or social constructivists.

It is certainly important to reconsider, as DeLanda does, the kind of Ptolemaic attitude that has characterized social theory for a number of years.  To reduce reality to what can be socially constructed is anthropocentric and disregards the eons during which life and matter existed prior to our emerging in the universe. Deleuze rejects both social constructivism and “a realism based on a correspondence theory of truth,” because, according to DeLanda, it is “a realism deeply committed to essentialism and rationalism.”1  At the heart of this rejection is his criticism of the view that matter is an inert receptacle for the impression of forms, either as social constructs or eternal essences.  In much of contemporary social theory, it is believed that elitism, the denigration of physical labour and the political imposition of ideals of existence are  insidiously supported by this “rationalist” view of matter.

I join those hoping to advance pluralism and counter reductivism and its pernicious social and ecological effects.  Yet I question whether rationalism and essentialism are appropriate targets in this battle and will argue that this focus merely diverts attention from the forces that now telescope horizons. This is definitely not to say that I am a proponent of rationalism or essentialism as they are usually characterized. A pantheon of forms or atemporal idea-entities such as “zebrahood ” are notions that hardly warrant attention.  Rather, I will argue that possibilities of conceptual and material expression are reduced and compromised by instrumentalism, and that, while instrumentalism is a framing, it is not an idealism but its inversion.

Uniformity and empiricism

DeLanda states that “the complexity and variability of behaviour of materials has always been the concern of empirically oriented craftsmen or engineers, not of philosophers or scientists.”2   He adds that philosophy tended to “despise the senses” while science atomized its subject and at best could only talk about matter as “mass.”  In other words, rationalism and essentialism are accused of ignoring the complexity that Deleuze highlights so successfully with an unconventional empirical orientation.

DeLanda discusses Deleuze's concept of the “machinic phylum,” which is described as “matter-energy in flux” to which all expressions of materiality are subject.  The machinic phylum is characterized as dynamic and in continuous variation. “Unlike essentialism, where matter is viewed as an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside (transcendental essences), here matter is seen as possessing its own immanent, intensive resources for the generation of form from within.”3  As an illustration, DeLanda describes the blacksmith, who “treats metals as active materials, pregnant with morphogenetic capabilities, and his role is that of teasing a form out of them, of guiding, through a series of processes (heating, annealing, quenching, hammering), the emergence of a form, a form in which the materials themselves have a say. His task is less that of realizing previously defined possibilities than actualizing virtualities along divergent lines.”

It is this context in which DeLanda discusses industrial production and notes that “industrial metals have undergone in the last two hundred years an intense process of uniformation and homogenization in both their chemical composition and their physical structure. The rationale behind this process was partly based on questions of reliability and quality control, but it had also a social component: both human workers and the materials they used needed to be disciplined and their behaviour made predictable. Only then the full efficiencies and economies of scale of mass production techniques could be realized.” 

The anti-teleological teleology of efficiency

It is interesting that DeLanda cites the quest for efficiency as the factor that homogenizes matter and behaviour.  An overriding concern with method has led to the “disciplining” of human workers and their materials. This has obscured or even removed the motivation for those involved in the process to determine and assess the intended purposes of production.  The exclusive focus on methods grinds other horizons under foot as “ the ends of our activities … become sedimented beneath an all-encompassing concern with the means.”4 

The overriding concern with method is reflected in “technological thinking” that conceals an “anti-teleological” teleology; one which posits the  “norms of a purely instrumental rationality, such as punctuality, efficiency, productivity and the like” as ends in themselves.  Therefore, it should be apparent there is nothing intrinsic to craftwork that prevents an instrumentalist attitude toward it.  In fact, it is when the material possibilities of technical production determine the form of what is produced that the homogeneity so despised by critics of rationalism and essentialism is engendered.

Empiricism is a methodology, not an ontology

It is plain that Deleuze's empirical orientation is not exemplified by orthodox empirical methodology and his orientation to the world of sense, in this context, may perhaps be better labeled an aesthetic orientation.  Yet by examining empiricism in its in its more orthodox aspects, it becomes clear that an empiricist methodology is what drives the machine of efficiency.

One area where there had until recently been a great emphasis on an empirical orientation is the so called “soft sciences.”  This “cult of empiricism” has had laughable results in the area of empirical psychology which, according to psychologist Jack F. Martin, “has typically placed its methodological cart in front of its ontological horse.”  He explains that “psychologists' conceptualizations of complex phenomena ... often are impoverished to the point where they are equated ... with sets of responses to rating scales on which individuals indicate the extent to which they attribute their actions to a small number of predetermined factors.”  Here, it is not only the case that methodology determined and reduced its object, but that it did so by impoverishing conceptualization; i.e., by limiting meaning to responses that could be managed technically.

Technical framing

As a methodology, it begs the question to say that empiricism serves to justify or discredit any kind of ontology.  However, empiricism frequently does worse than place its “methodological cart in front of its ontological horse.” While it reduces both material and conceptual complexity , it conceals its own operation in a cult of facts, information and “clear communication.”  Thus it exemplifies an extreme form of reductivism.  This “technical framing” is the source of the empty teleology of efficiency.  It produces a tautology that culminates in a nihilistic form of pragmatism:

The outcome is justified because / therefore the process that produced it was effective.

Pragmatism tends to reframe ends as “outcomes” of pre-established processes rather than the goals for which the processes were established.  It is as if one were to justify the existence of public institutions exclusively in terms of their capacity for fiscal responsibility, which is a means, not a goal.  A method of production is chosen for its efficiency, while choice of product (or a concern with environmental and social by-products) is precluded by the exigencies of production. For me, this aptly defines alienation.

The Technical Reduction of Matter

To paraphrase one theorist, the issue of whether technical framing itself can subsume ontological totality through its own strictly instrumental logic -- or whether its own project parasitically remains dependent upon what can never be understood within the parameters of technical framing -- defines the social and historical crisis of our lives today.5

What can never be understood primarily in terms of technical framing?  What always exceeds a methodological grasp? 

It is becoming increasingly difficult for human beings to face the reality Deleuze describes here:  “The non-organic life of things, a frightful life, which is oblivious to the wisdom and limits of the organism.  It is the vital as potent pre-organic germinality, common to the animate and the inanimate, to a matter which raises itself to the point of life, and to a life which spreads itself through all matter.” Deleuze's “matter” is clearly not the technically reduced version insisted upon by methodological empiricism.  But does that mean that we must accept the modernist cliché that the real is the material revealed by the senses, so “despised by philosophers”?

I would like to suggest, rather, that whatever in human life and experience has escaped technical control is thus despised because of its startling uncanniness.  Uncanniness is not restricted to effects of materiality.  In fact, one could say the uncanny is just that because it is not amenable to technical control and and manipulation, whether it is affective, aesthetic, numinous or noumenal.  Wherever possible, it is active manipulation and management that we look to, not archetypal images of zebrahood, in order to reconnect with the "reality principle" and dispel anxiety.  (This explains our fascination with technology and its near identification with science.)

Continuing to deny what exceeds the capacity of technical framing means that this excess will return in a destructive aspect: hence an anti-ecology of waste-driven production and the compulsive manufacture and distribution of weapons capable of unconscionable devastation.  In the failure to face the uncanniness of life itself as an ungraspable horizon or open place, life and nature are reduced to technically manipulable quantities in the world of kitsch and "products" - and the excess is left to explode in violence or anorexically consume itself.

The shadowy excess to technical framing both causes (by deterring awareness) and results from denial of the uncanny.  We can learn to face unstructured possibility as an open horizon, as DeLanda has pointed out, or objectify it in a cycle of oppression and destruction.  Courage is needed to break the cycle.  How can we turn to an open horizon that we expect will face us as primal material chaos?  We should ask about the conditions under which the ungraspable hovers darkly on the horizon as an evil sea-monster, like Tiamat before her body was split into heaven and earth by Marduk, the city god of Babylon, and when it emerges rather as an open horizon generative of possibility.

The complex, aesthetic and affective dimensions of experience are just those intrinsically valuable (“useless”) elements of life that open the horizon of becoming because they cannot be exhausted in any action or thing.  It is these creative, intrinsically sustaining, self-defining normative and aesthetic dimensions that have been divested of energy, reduced to tastes and values, commercialized and ultimately pounded out of consciousness, only to re-emerge, as oppressive instrumentalities.  Nihilistic pragmatism leeches meaning, reduces ends to outcomes, and deprives human beings of the capacity to freely choose and evaluate their own ends both in thought and action.  The legacy of instrumentalism is that we are left with no horizon, with no place to stand.  This very effectively subjects us to marketing strategies and creates a climate of political apathy.

Mathematics and the imposition of form

The old "essentialism" is characterized as positing a set of discrete forms and abiding, eternal "natures" and of course, such a view is belied by the reality of dynamical, intensive processes emphasized by DeLanda.  The inspiration for that essentialism was not technological reduction, however, but the question of the relation between the intelligible and the real.  DeLanda reminds us that in the Deleuzian framework, “The achievements of theoretical physics are seen not as linguistically interpreted general laws, but as correctly posed problems, that is, as the posing of the distribution of what is singular and ordinary (i.e., what is important and not).  DeLanda's reconstruction thus stresses that Deleuzian ontology discloses not a closed world capturable by sentences, but an open world to be explored.”6

So ingrained is the association of reason with a static and atemporal ontology, it is necessary to consider whether intelligibility really does require “a closed world capturable by sentences” and whether the stress on dynamism thereby releases the real from potentially homogenizing constraints.

In “Virtual Enviroments And The Emergence Of Synthetic Reason,”7 DeLanda provides an account of stability produced by the diversity of its material components in a variable, dynamical state.  He explains that “these ... forms of stability have received the name of "attractors", and the transitions which transform one type of attractor into another have been named "bifurcations".” Emphasizing that “The 'key' concept ... is emergent behavior” he asserts that “Natural life emerges out of the organized interactions of a great number of nonliving molecules, with no global controller responsible for the behavior of every part.”  For example, “Each of the particular adaptive traits which we observe in real zebras developed along different ancestral lineages, accumulated in the population under the action of different selection pressures, in a process that was completely dependent on specific (and contingent) historical details.”  I think that DeLanda's concluding that there is “no such thing as a preexistent collection of traits defining "zebrahood"” is a bit of a dénouement.  He goes on to say, however, that emergent properties do not arise in “an unstructured space of possibilities, but a space "pre-organized" by attractors and bifurcations.”8  

The salient point is that order is not programmed or imposed from without, but that it emerges from within.  Still it is possible to ask whether the complex patterns or ratio that can be discerned in (rather than imposed upon) the behaviour of chaotic systems are emergent properties, “pre-organizing” fields, or heuristic constructs.  

What is an attractor, or even a dimension?  Dimension appears both real and ideal, infinite and finite, sensible and intellectual.  It is neither a thing nor a property of things, nor a discrete idea-entity.  

It is quite consistent with DeLanda's position to conceive that the noumenon is actually and immanently here with us, not as a formal entity but as place or “chora”, a dynamic field of complex and richly structured possibility.  Since mathematics is not daunted by possibility, there is nothing in this account to distinguish  intensive materialism from what might be called a dynamic rationalism.  Nor is there  anything here that protects diversity from reductive instrumentalism.  In fact, industry even now is exploring new ways of obtaining “effective maintenance goals” (i.e., efficiencies) from chaotic systems.9, 10  Maybe this is why we should leave open the door to a discussion of ideals.

....

 1 http://www.diss.sense.uni-konstanz.de/virtualitaet/delanda.htm

 2 http://museum.doorsofperception.com/doors/doors3/transcripts/Delanda.html

 3 http://www.societyofcontrol.com/library/htm_pdf/delanda_openended.htm

4 http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/93_docs/BLACKER.HTM

 5“The issue of whether capital itself can capitalize social totality and time itself through its own logic of value and production - both within Western societies and the global as a whole - or whether its own logic parasitically remains dependent upon what is, and can never be understood primarily in terms of capital value and management, defines the social and historical struggles of our lives today.”  

6 A caricature that suggests physicists mistake principles for generalizations.  “As regards the present state of the world, such as the existence of the earth on which we live and on which Galileo's experiments were performed, the existence of the sun and of all our surroundings, the laws of nature are entirely silent. ” http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html

7,8  http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/delanda.htm

9 http://www.erim.org/~vparunak/ims99.pdf

10  In emphasizing sensitivity to initial conditions, bifurcations, self-organization, autopoiesis, autocatalytic networks, etc., complexity discourse has opened up a space where possibilities proliferate, but now accompanied by models and control points to which 'means' of monitoring and choosing other possibilities might be attached." http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:xphGLXmhJbkJ:www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/mackenza/papers/non-metaphorical-complexity.pdf+delanda+attractor&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Why hierarchy and innovation rarely mix: A Paean to Creative Nerds

There are thought leaders who can invite and harness the wealth of insight of creative and committed people. People who are creative and committed are often described as nerds. What distinguishes nerds from those reluctant to identify with nerdhood is that they are curious and creative as a matter of course, regardless of external incentives. In other words, their creativity is disinterested in the sense of being motivated to move the mental models forward and expand the frame of reference in their respective fields without reference to partisanship or entrenched tribal norms. They are the innovators who get us thinking, nudge us outside our comfort zone and drive the better side of what is called progress.

Although not inspired by extrinsic rewards, innovators are indeed hampered by disincentives, it should go without saying. Why would anyone disincentivize disinterested creativity and innovation rather than harness it? The only reason would be that it threatens the established order, that it is viewed as subversive to the order, and that the order is hegemonic.

Throughout history, great art was produced by unparalleled artists employed by the ruling class. Yet, the art is easily identified by era, indicating that style innovations were slow to accrue. Today, an exponentially expanding field of possibility is available to potential innovators, yet social structures  reproduce disincentives and thought innovation doesn't keep pace with the increase in available information and platforms to make it world changing. There is a canon that supports innovation-limiting social structures, a Canon of "objectivity" that belies its true nature.

The main value of The Canon resides in its false assurances of control:

• We set up a list of outcomes, assuming that no better / deeper understanding will emerge in pursuing them that might change them. We set up measures that readily stand in for the outcomes, although pursuing measures as ends can yield perverse effects. 
• We make a plan according to current knowledge, not in terms of the real world of ever-emerging possibilities.
• We then outline contingencies, assuming that we can adumbrate the list of relevant determinants of change.
• We execute a plan and consider deviations remarkable, requiring no end of justification and scrutiny, as if stasis were the norm. 
• We assign people formal titles and units, and expect their talents not to leak beyond these pre-defined impersonal roles.
• We break down challenges into discrete parts, and assign various disconnected units to tackle them and then wonder why everyone isn't on the same page. We might even measure the discrete successes of the units assuming that the sum of the parts is equal to the sum of the aggregate (not necessarily a "whole").
• We evaluate performance against set criteria in a changing landscape, although performance evaluations have been proven not to have any performance-enhancing value except in simple, transactional or mechanical activities. 

Where in the above is room for leveraging potentials? Whence engagement? The closure is almost complete. This perverts the ideal of the enlightenment and turns it on its head.

Nevertheless, the trope of objectivity allows the powerful to maintain control of the story of what should be done, how it should be done, and how well it was done, regardless of what actually happens, which tends to depend on ever shifting natural and cultural contexts. There is little to distinguish innovation from heresy, insubordination or subversion. The status quo is reproduced ad nauseum with nothing given legitimacy to challenge it.

That is not to say all people with high position are officious innovation stiflers. Many are thought leaders. What characterizes them?

They are open to possibility, have a desire to expand thought horizons for the greater good without any extrinsic incentive to do so. They have a keen eye for viable potential and encourage it. Their comfort zone is strong and wide, not because they control, but because they inspire trust and enthusiasm. They have a collegial appreciation of talent, seeing their employees as people with expanding potentials, not as pre-defined competency sets or roles.

Change Discourse: An Aside on Planning and Evaluation

In large organizations, in the accepted practices of planning and evaluation, we are hampered by our inability to acknowledge unanticipated benefits, i.e., the creativity of what is proposed. We seem to be unable to value options that we haven't anticipated in advance or even to accommodate valuations of unanticipated options. What would count as legitimation in these instances?  The unanticipated benefit cannot be considered relevant, based on pre-established criteria.

Why do we deprive ourselves of anything more than our presupposed potential?  The standard (ontological and meta-ethical) notions of objectivity and fairness in evaluation are in need of a major rethink, especially in a complex, rapidly changing world where future potentiality becomes at least as important as present actualities. Adaptability and responsiveness are more important than adhering to artificial and outdated notions of objectivity, which for at least two millennia, have been more about projecting our conceptual filing cabinets on events than on encouraging openness to new an novel ideas and approaches. To add irony to insult, in today's variant, to mimic the successful model of reductionist science, it is assumed that the ability to assign a number to some evaluative criterion makes that criterion objective. 

The difference between living and mechanical linear/reductionist notions of objectivity needs to be emphasized. In the linear/reductionist model, the relevant determinants of an event  are isolated and identified in a rigorous way, such that they can be arranged and used in planning experiments and building machines. As successful as this method has been, however, according to scientists such as Eugene Wigner, the approach legitimately applies to only a small set of relatively easily manipulable things (which is why basic physics is about necessary laws and anything more complex is statistical at best at the lowest level of granularity.)  The attempt to apply it to a large open-ended organization occasions the kinds of issues described by Burt Perrin (Paragraph 103). 

Stuart Kauffman shows that a living system is one where the boundary conditions are intrinsic to the phenomena under investigation, which are not "placed by hand" as they are in a more mechanistic model. He further argues(cf. pp. 131-143) that there is "no way to pick out the relevant collective variables that will play a causal role in the further evolution" of living systems.  (p.140-1) Nevertheless, we put our methodological carts before our ontological horses, and worse, we justify our aims based on our methods, rather than the reverse. This is not only reductionist. It reduces us.


Our model of measurement needs to change from a mechanical one to one that respects that we work in living systems. We need to use something a bit less pedantic than a pre-established list of specific criteria for evaluation and learn how to acknowledge context, the context being our actual overall aims in relation to what is being evaluated both now, and as they change, with learning, over time.  We need to look at a higher level of granularity if we're really serious about innovation or getting beyond a nihilistic means-focused outlook (a hamster wheel).  This will require a sea change at every juncture. Responsiveness and resiliency will be key.

Conceptual Filing Cabinets are not Reality

Ever noticed that when corporate downloads an initiative to remedy an internal management problem, the effects on the ground tend to be the opposite of what was intended? Without going into details, this may explain why. Mintzberg said:

"Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. One is analysis, the other is synthesis"*

The fact is, the corporate structure tends to be organized in terms of business lines or branches, so initiatives get forumulated around compartmentalized resources.  That means analytical thinking will predominate in planning - and analytical thinking relies on compartmentalized categories – checklist items. People mistake their conceptual filing cabinets for reality and are rewarded for substituting numbers for facts. But as some astute Brit said not long ago, “You don’t fatten a pig by weighing it.”  The success of mechanistic models of the past has seduced us to seeking "simple" solutions in  complex arenas, much more complex than are tackled by the hard numbers of "hard science." 

Most activities in business are dynamically interconnected and adjustments in one area can be offset by failing to consider their impact on other areas. Thinking strategically involves connecting the dots, lateral thinking, the use of the right brain, which is basically grounded in intention, will, and commitment (caring).

The first thing required for an effective strategy is that you genuinely care.

The second thing is flexibility and openness.

Some folks believe that analytical thinking is a cut above more poetic sensitivities and that it is the sole defender objectivity and of fairness. I'd like you to consider that such a view is rather narrow, sometimes honest but simplistic, other times useful to people with a power-for-power's-sake agenda. Models of evaluation based on analytical thinking are just as prone to manipulation and bias as any poetic kind of perspective. They are also dangerous as one doesn't need brute strength or mass hysteria to convince, but one can just point to "the numbers"as an incantation. This is less likely in very precise areas such as physics, but in business, there are just no exhaustive and exclusive definitions that can be reliably used for evaulative purposes. Our definitions and indicators are handy rules of thumb, never meant to be the be-all and end-all of evaluation. (ISO - I despair.) A planner can pick a few handy items from a potentially infinite list of possible indicators.  Nevertheless, those who employ a definition, a methodology, who fail to think things through broad-mindedly with an honourable meaning, purpose and value, who yet check a list of measures, have the advantage of the appearance of objectivity. This is a pernicious effect of the "trope of science" and needs rooting out.

*link no longer available.

How Organizations Remain Bureaucratic

When people mistake efficiency for effectiveness (means for ends), there is a pointless adherence to the administrative rules (i.e., bureaucracy in its pejorative sense.) To avoid making this mistake, what has to happen in organizations is a cultural change around the reporting requirements, because people will do (and generally restrict their attention to) what they are measured on.

If the measurements are all about either efficient transactions (e.g., in purchasing, staffing) without reference to context and objectives, or an assessment of the value of the objectives, then nothing has been measured. How can you measure efficiency without some reference to a strategic, big picture, generally not-easily-measured end, especially in public sector and non-profit organizations?

When bureaucratic controls slide from being necessary evils to being just plain counterproductive , something is dreadfully wrong. Controls need to be aligned with goals.

A very crucial element in remedying such a situation is to help people understand that reports are not results, they are just means of getting information, which might be more or less (but is quite often less), helpful to broader planning and information sharing.

A report is information subset covering some aspects of what happened. It is not identical to the concrete events that actually happen. Neverthlesss, some people seem to spend more time bean  counting  than doing, following procedures, rather than innovating, challenging, and leading change. Their efforts need to be undertaken with a view to deep, quality results. Quality and depth of results is important, and that does not mean pulling out an army of accountants immured in a quantophrenic vision of quality control. It means having inspiration, courage, and support to use one's own judgement and discretion in assessing how to best align one's activities with the organization's goals, or even to question the broader social value of the ends being sought.

So it's not just a web of institutional regulations, it's the stifling amount of reportage that is not aligned to anything other than short term means and efficiencies that makes an institution overly bureaucratic (and therefore less efficient). And this adminstrative kind of bureaucracy eventually becomes an entire focus, even a way of life, providing some (i.e., the uninspired and officious) expediencies and a sense of power and accomplishment, having done everything "by the book".

The rest just wither away, eventually.

And thus bureaucracy sustains itself.

Concrete Deliverables: Watch out for Goal Displacement

Burt Perrin, in a report entitled, Implementing the Vision: Addressing Challenges to Results-Focused Management and Budgeting writes,

Goal displacement occurs when indicators become the objective, where the focus is on “meeting the numbers” rather than doing what the program was created to do or improving actual outcomes. Thus it represents the distortion of program activities.

In fact it is conceivable that working to meet number targets may even produce "perverse effects" such as serving those easiest to serve rather than those in most need, or focusing on procedural efficiencies to increase numbers (of transactions, say) rather than improving system efficiencies, which might decrease them. This occurs for two reasons.

First, efficiencies, which numbers measure (more or less accurately), are not goals, but ways of achieving goals. Numbers are not targets, but for tracking. Second, as Perrin notes, "It does not always make sense to attempt to represent a complex initiative by just a very small number of quantitative indicators. There typically is an inverse relationship between what is important and what is easiest to count and to measure."

So as people focus on meeting the numbers and confuse the report for the result, they close off to the complexity of the situation, and actions become skewed to achieving "concrete deliverables" which could be anything but. What do we take to be objective today? Is it the evidence of the senses, all the flux and change that happens in real time? Well, not really! It is rather what can be measured, quantified and counted.

Getting the numbers right is not an easy matter. To count measure and something, you need to have a category or definition, which is a static mental compartment and sorting device. For example, in order to count employees, you first have to establish a category or definition of "employee" for your organization. If your definition of employee changes, your numbers will change, even if nothing "concrete" changes.

So now, the question about what constitutes objectivity moves up a level. How many of the categories and definitions we use are given and natural like mammal and bird and how many are social and historical like person or fiscal year? Many categories may seem self-evident but to what extent is our confidence in our categories due to social and historical factors, including learning, rather than natural ones? Have we arrived at the end of learning? Of course not.

When it comes to precision measurements and results, physics is the archetype. To discover physical laws, physicists have to establish that their results are reproducible. They need to determine what factors need to be controlled and what properties are internal to the phenomena under investigation. When developing tests they carefully articulate operational definitions, which define phenomena in mathematical terms. There is no algorithm or checklist procedure for these activities, and it takes a great deal of skill, knowledge and insight. You might say, there is an “art” to ensuring objectivity.

Scientists in areas such as biology and geology and even some areas of physics, are investigating things where there are innumerable factors that cannot be isolated and controlled. Scientists are beginning to question whether we have been acting as if something is real because it is measurable, rather than the reverse. (See for instance, Robert Laughlin's A Different Universe.) They emphasize the need to think of nature more as a dynamic complex system. This moves the question of what constitutes objectivity up yet another level because it means considering not just how we define something for the purposes of counting instances of it, but how we frame and contextualize it to distinguish relevant from irrelevant factors in understanding how it behaves and changes over time as a part of a system.

If anything is complex, human organizations, and especially public service organizations, are complex. How closely do the auditor's and comptroller's categories ally with those of the organizational or program strategist's? In the public service, how do you know when you have contributed to the public good? rather than burdened your employees with administrivialities and set them on the straight and narrow road to pursuing "concrete deliverables" that are anything but. Is being quantifiable a necessary quality of all worthwhile goals? How realistic is that?