Very rich conversation this morning, the second on Inquiry as Emergence: Product and Contributor. Thanks to all. Some notes about interesting issues that arose in the first conversation are included in the linked material. Here some additional notes, for myself and anyone else interested.

Its genuinely hard for people to let go of "Truth" and "Reality" as touchstones, even when acknowledging they can't be known and hence can't in fact be used to evaluate "stories". The upshot is that the cracks, and the associated inevitable "subjectivity" is difficult to see as features rather than bugs. People want badly to hold onto "objectivity", even while acknowledging its impossibility, and onto "Truth" and "Reality" despite agreeing they aren't things against which one can effectively measure.

My guess is that there is actually a good reason for that, an historical one. One might see the rise of science/empiricism as a reaction against periods of western thought that were dominated by the unconscious/story telling ("intuition") and intersubjectivity (cultural stories, dogma) loops, without effective encouragement for contributions from the inside/outside loop ("empiricism"). And one might argue that the inside/outside loop still needs special support. But that can't be done effectively without acknowledging the existence and significance of the other two loops as well. The empirical loop is valuble but overemphasizing it, by asserting it (and it alone) is capable of characterizing a "Reality" independent of the observer, is a mistake, conceptually and pragmatically.

I was intrigued by the interest in "pathologies" of the triple loop organization, and by the idea that there are important and characteristic ones associated with different loop interruptions. The basic problem with "Truth" or "Reality" is that it discourages continuing looping, by suggesting that some things are no longer challengeable. This is the "empirical" interruption of both the unconscious/story teller and intersubjective loops. The "faith" interruption is, of course, of the inside/outside or empirical loop and, perhaps of the unconscious/story teller loop as well. Its worth thinking more about various different kinds of interruption and associated different pathologies, but also worth noting the generalization: things that discourage any of the three loops create problems. Another way of saying this is that the system is designed (evolutionarily) to sustain ongoing inquiry (ie it depends on profound skepticism).

And that in turn suggest that one of the major benefits of having three loops is that each of them is likely, at any given time, to have a different story to tell, and so their disagreements are an incentive to continuing inquiry/skepticism. My guess is that it was in fact that tension, rather than any test against "Truth" or "Reality" that led to the increasing consensus that the earth is round rather than flat. And it is confidence in the continuing function of the three loops that is the most reliable assurance of continual reduction of fundamentalism of all kinds in human societies generally.

Along these lines, a major practical message is that we shouldn't be trying to create standards to adjudicate between existing non-falsified stories. What we should be doing instead is to work on finding new stories that don't have the problems of any of the existing ones. And this, I would argue, is what education should really be about. Existing stories are the grist for new ones, if one encourages onself (and students) to not simply learn them, but rather to examine them in terms of the observations they summarize and the inevitable context dependence they reflect. The point of taking them apart is not to show they aren't "True"; that's a given. The point of taking them apart is to build from the pieces "less wrong" stories.