1994 INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM DYNAMICS CONFERENCE
The Epistemological A ptions of the (Main) Soft System Methodology
Advocates
Stephen K Probert
Department of Computing
University of the West of England
Frenchay Campus
Bristol, BS16 1QY, UK
Tel: 0272 656261 ex 3131
E-mail: sk_probert @uk.ac.uwe-bristol.csmvax
Abstract
A number of writers have argued that Soft Systems Methodology embodies a distinctly "subjective"
philosophical approach and (or) yields a systems methodology based on a "subjectivist"
epistemology, and as such it is distinct from "objective" methodologies. It has also been argued that
Soft Systems Methodology avoids, or attempts to avoid, the "reductionism" inherent in traditional
approaches to the study of natural phenomenon. In this paper it is argued that such arguments contain
a number of conceptual and historical confusions, and that whilst the advocates of the developed
form of Soft Systems Methodology in fact subscribe to a subjective mode of enquiry, such a mode
has its history firmly grounded in the natural sciences. It is also argued that the Soft Systems
Methodology advocates (in fact) subscribe to the thesis of epistemological reductionism, and this
thesis will be d with that of epi. l ! holism.
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1994 INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM DYNAMICS CONFERENCE
The Epistemological Assumptions of the (Main) Soft System Methodology
Advocates
1. INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this paper is to examine the basic epistemological assumptions of the Soft
Systems Methodology (SSM) advocates, as these are relevant to understanding the nature, scope, and
coherence of SSM. It will be argued that whilst the advocates of SSM subscribe to a subjective mode
of enquiry, such a mode has its history - and its rationale - firmly grounded in the early modern
philosophies of the natural sciences. It is also argued that the SSM advocates (in fact) subscribe to ithe:
thesis of epistemological reductionism, and this thesis will be d with that of ep
holism.
A number of writers have di d the phil hical ini of SSM; the general
conclusion being that SSM embodies the phi i pti of (some form of) subjectivism
(eg Mingers, 1984). Unfortunately, in recent years, two sorts of accounts of the basic process of human
enquiry have been put forward by the SSM advocates. Although these two accounts are ultimately
contradictory they are similar in that they are both highly psychologistic accounts of epi
they both focus on the process of enquiry. The two accounts will be termed: (1) the so-called Kantian
account, and (2) the Lockean account.
2. THE SO-CALLED KANTIAN ACCOUNT
In the most recent and detailed account of the developed form of SSM, Checkland and Scholes
(1990) see their epi logical tradition as ing from Kant (1724-1804):
When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in what is now Mexico, the indigenous people,
unfamiliar with horse riding and seeing riders dismount from horses, thought that creatures had
arrived on their shores who could divide themselves in two at will. This story provides a good
illustration of the way in which we have in our heads stocks of ideas by means of which we
interpret the world outside ourselves. Philosophically the story supports the view of Kant, that
we structure the world by means of already-present, innate ideas, rather than the view of
Locke [John Locke, 1632-1704] that our minds are blank screens upon which the world writes
its impressions. But it seems clear that the supposedly "innate" ideas may have two sources.
They may indeed be part of the genetic inheritance of mankind, truly innate; or they may be
built up as a result of our experience of the world... What is being argued is that we perceive
the world through the filter of - or using the framework of - the ideas internal to us; but that
the source of many (most?) of those ideas is the perceived world outside... As human beings
we enact this process everyday, usually unconsciously. (Checkland and Scholes, 1990, pp.
19-20)
(It should be noted immediately that Locke's theory of perception is not as vacuous as the
SSM advocates suggest in this quotation, as should become clear shortly.) The essence of this account
is that ‘ption is rep I, but ions are only possible via the mediation of ideas
pre-possessed by the perceiving subject. As ideas are the necessary pre-requisites of coherent
perceptions some ideas must be “innate” - they are "born with us" as part of our genetic inheritance.
Kant's transcendental idealism is far too complex to be explored in this paper, so suffice it to
point out that Checkland and Scholes’ (1990) account of epistemology should not be construed as
Kantian:
No name can do justice to this profound and complex philosophy which arose out of the two
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most important philosophical theories of his time: the rationalism of Descartes and Leibnitz
and the empiricism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume... Kant agreed with the empiricists that
there cannot be innate ideas in the sense of anything known prior to any sense experience, but
he was not prepared to say that therefore all knowledge must be derived from experience...
Kant's procedure differed significantly from the generally psychological empiricist method, for
rather than seeking for the impressions upon which certain ideas are based, he investigated the
relationship that exist between the fundamental concepts related to a subject's having
experience of objects. He was with i i of a sort he calls
"transcendental", such as "under what conditions is experience of an objective world
possible?". (Flew, 1979, pp. 175-176 [emphases added])
Kant was not really i din the p of perception - he was more interested in what
must be necessary for a subject to be capable of having any perception; not how it is that one has a
perception of something.
There are two main aspects to the so-called Kantian account. Firstly, the observer is seen as
“trying to make sense of” his or her perceptions of the world by applying ideas to his or her "raw"
perceptions; secondly, that some of these ideas are innate. The claim that observers try to make sense
of the world in this way most closely resembles accounts put forward in the tradition of the Cartesian
project of "pure enquiry" - first articulated by Descartes (1596-1650) around 1640.
3. CARTESIAN EPISTEMOLOGY
There are three related features of Descartes's account of epistemology (all of which are central
features of the of the SSM advocates’ so-called Kantian account). These are: (1) the doctrine of innate
ideas, (2) the subjective representation of reality, (3) the intellectual construction of models. These
features will now be discussed.
The notion, advanced by Checkland and Scholes, that our thinking is "structured" by innate
ideas also hails from Descartes's rationalism (rather than from Kant's transcendental idealism):
Another controversial tenet of Descartes's position is that some of our ideas are innate... [One
reason] for the necessity of i innate ideas is that we can apprehend the specific quality of our
experience only if we posse leas with which to interpret it. (Aune, 1970, pp. 28-29)
Descartes himself argued:
.. I cannot doubt but that there is in me a certain passive faculty of perception, that is of
receiving and taking knowledge of the ideas of sensible [physical] things; but this would be
useless to me, if there did not also exist in me, or in some other thing, another active faculty
capable of forming and producing those ideas. (Descartes, 1912, p. 133)
Checkland and Scholes ground the “active faculty" both in "our genetic inheritance" and in
the psychological processes of the individual subject. Descartes also argued that this “active faculty"
does not just arbitrarily make up these ideas:
{And] what I here find of most importance is ... that I discover in my mind innumerable ideas
of certain objects, although perhaps they possess no reality beyond my thought, and which are
not framed by me though it may be in my power to think them, but possess true and
immutable natures of their own. As, for example, when I imagine a triangle, although there
is not perhaps and never was in the universe apart from my thought one such figure, it
remains true nevertheless that this figure possesses a certain determinate nature, form, or
essence, which is immutable and eternal, and not framed by me, nor in any degree dependent
on my thought ... and which accordingly cannot be said to have been invented by me.
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(Descartes, 1912, p. 121)
It should be noted that Descartes ultimately argued that these innate ideas are "transferred" to
us from the mind of God, whereas Checkland and Scholes’ account is entirely secular, and is expressed
in terms of "our genetic inheritance".
For both Checkland (and Scholes) and Descartes, knowledge is to be produced or created in
the mind of an individual subject; the basic epistemological notion is of an attempted representation
(or interpretation) of the world by a subject, and this is clearly a Cartesian legacy:
... Descartes's account ... is expressed in terms of a ional theory of p ion. We
are given a picture of the mind in direct contact only with its own experiences or ideas,
"outside" which there are objects, causing these experiences and imperfectly represented by
them. Descartes thinks that, strictly speaking, the purely mental ideas involved in perception
do not resemble the world at all, and even with regard to the corporeal representations of the
world in the brain, which he believes to occur as part of the Perceptual process, he emphasizes
that the important point is that they should be capable of g the required
of information about external things, not that they should resemble them (Dioptric vi 113).
(Williams, 1978, pp. 239-240)
Checkland’s account of the purpose of building the conceptual models (used extensively in
SSM) is strikingly similar in important respects:
The important point is that, in using SSM, we must never lose sight of the fact that the models
are not would-be descriptions of parts of the world. They are abstract logical machines for
pursuing a purpose ... which can generate insightful debate when set against actual would-be
purposeful action in the real-world. (Checkland, 1988a, p. 311)
For both Descartes and the, SSM ad , the same implicati are drawn from this
pproach to human enquiry: the need for "models" of reality. Of course the
ssM advocates are primarily concerned with modelling "social reality", which they believe to be
(strictly-speaking) “unmodellable" owing to the free-will that they attribute to actors in the real-world
(see Probert, 1992), however this aspect of SSM is not strictly relevant to the discussion herein.
Bernard Williams has recently summed up Descartes's contribution to epistemology in the
following manner:
... Descartes is, rightly, said to be a rati ist phil But it's i that
he was such a strong rationalist that he thought the whole of science was to be deduced from
physics by purely ical or logical ing ... He thought no such thing. In fact,
he is absolutely consistent in saying that experiments are rernecessary’ to distinguish between
some ways of explaining nature and others. You can build different models. This is a very
moder aspect of his thought. You can build or construct different intellectual models of the
world within his laws, and experiment is needed to discover which truly represent nature.
(Williams, 1987, p. 90)
(Note that this account is only related to the natural world, and not the social world.)
Checkland’s philosophy of (natural) science is quite definitely of this sort:
. Natural scientists cannot fail to be aware of two fundamental considerations: first, that in
the professional talk concerning the work, words are used as carefully defined technical terms
.- Second, that the words so carefully defined refer to models, to intellectual constructs rather
than supposed physical reality. The natural scientist is well aware that he or she is playing a
game against nature in which the intellectual constructions are used to predict physical
happenings which can be checked experimentally. (Checkland, 1988b, p. 235)
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Just how Cartesian Checkland and Scholes' so-called Kantian account of epistemology is can
be shown by the following observation:
. any passages showed that he accorded a crucial role to experiment. Descartes's actual
of ific method often bles ... the model where a hypothesis is advanced,
and the results logically deduced from it are then compared with actual observation. (Flew,
1979, p. 86)
The conclusion to be drawn is that the epi logical ions of the prop of the
so-called Kantian account of epistemology are those of Cartesian rationalism.
Two objections might easily be made to the account of the epistemological assumptions of the
SSM advocates’ so-called Kantian account that has been provided. Firstly, Checkland (1981) explicitly
rejected the idea that any form of systems thinking could be grounded i in a Cartesian epistemology.
Secondly, and related to the first point, this whole epi i 1 app (C. ianism) is
somewhat surprising, given Checkland's (1981) "Popperian" orientation. These objections will now be
discussed, but in doing so it will be necessary to examine the SSM advocates’ use of the term
‘reductionism’,
4, THE ISSUE OF REDUCTIONISM
Checkland's use of the term ~ ism’ is dard in modern epi logical terms,
but standard in the "looser" general philosophical sense and this can be (potentially) misleading. Flew
defines ‘reductionism’ as follows:
REDUCTIONISM (or Reductivism). 1. The belief that human behaviour can be reduced to
or interpreted in terms of that of lower animals; and that, ultimately, can itself be reduced to
physical laws... 2. More generally, any doctrine that claims to reduce the apparently more
sophisticated and complex to the less so. (Flew, 1979, p. 279)
It is the latter, philosophically looser, sense that the SSM advocates seem to intend. However,
in modern epistemology, a more usual definition would be:
REDUCTIONISM: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical
construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. (Quine, 1980, p. 20)
NB here “meaningful' means (basically) "grammatical and intelligible" eg ‘Barking dogs bark.’
is meaningful (but vacuous), as is “Paris is the capital city of Antarctica.’ (this is meaningful, but
false). Quine's is that and not exclusively do not refer to
particular sensory experiences in isolation. Consequently particular experiences will not always give
tise to particular statements:
The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography
and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic,
is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the
figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A
conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field...
But the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is
much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary
experience. (Quine, 1980, pp. 42-43)
An example may help here. Prior to conducting chemical experiments we may be told that if
sulphur is present on a splint then a bright yellow flame will be present if the splint is immersed in
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a bunsen burner flame. If we were to do such an experiment and a bright yellow flame did not appear
(although there was good reason to believe that sulphur was present on the splint) we might conclude
that there was something wrong with the whole of chemical theory, but p ically we would
probably search for a simpler explanation - say that some other chemical was present which inhibited
the experiment from working properly, or that there was an insufficient amount of sulphur for the
experiment to work properly, and so on. We would not immediately rush to the conclusion that we
had falsified the chemical theory that gave rise to the periodic table of elements. As such Quine's
epistemological holism stands as a rebuttal to Popper's critical rationalism. Somewhat ironically
Checkland (claims to) support a Popperian philosophy of science, which is ultimately dependent on
the validity of epistemological reductionism, and which (for example) Quine explicitly rejects:
If a hypothesis implies observations at all, we may stand ready to drop the hypothesis as false
as soon as an observation that it predicts fails to occur. In fact, however, the refutation of
hypothesis is not that simple... there is the matter of the supporting chorus. It is not the
contemplated hypothesis alone that does the implying, but rather that hypothesis and a
supporting chorus of background beliefs. (Quine and Ullian, 1978, pp. 102-103)
5. "POPPERIANISM" AND THE SO-CALLED KANTIAN ACCOUNT
There is clear evidence of a Popperian orientation in Checkland (1981):
.. [A] number of very distinguished scientists ... have attested to the importance of Popper's
ideas in their thinking ... We have a picture of science, then, as a method of enquiring or
learning, which offers us, at any moment of time a picture of our understanding of the world's
reality which consists of certain conj blished in i bl iment:
which have not yet been demolished... [This] outline of science ... will be relevant to later
discussion of whether or not systems thinking can contribute to the difficult problems which
face a social science which aspires to be scientific in the full sense of that word. (Checkland,
1981, pp. 57-58 [emphasis added])
Popper is fully aware of the need for the ptability of epi: logical reductionism for his
philosophy of science to be satisfactory:
... though every one of our ptions may be itis quite i ical to
all of them at the same time ... Quine formulates (with reference to Duhem) [a view that], ...
our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually
but only as a corporate body ... it should be said that the [Quine's] holistic argument goes
much too far. It is possible in quite a few cases to find which hypothesis is responsible for the
refutation... (Popper, 1972, pp. 238-239)
It is very important to note that Checkland ( 1981) supports Popper's reductionist view of
logy. This ing support for epi is h
the SSM advocates! various discourses.
Checkland (1981) argued that Descartes's epistemology was based on reductionism in the
looser philosophical sense, and was therefore not systemic:
The core of Descartes’ approach to science ... was "reductionist", in the sense that science
should describe the world in terms of "simple natures" and "composite natures", and show how
the latter could be reduced to the former. The process of identifying the simple natures in
complex phenomena was what Descartes meant by “analysis”... (Checkland, 1981, p. 47)
The above may be the case, but there is some considerable evidence that Descartes was not
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as naive as such accounts make him appear:
... it is an important feature of his [Descartes's] physics that ... We cannot consider how a body
would ideally move if it were not in an environment of other matter influencing its motion,
since such a state of affairs, through the equation of matter and physical space, is absolutely
unintelligible. For Galileo, by contrast, the consideration of how a body would move under
ideal conditions (for instance, a body falling in a vacuum, or a ball rolling on a surface under
zero friction) was fundamental to his analysis of motions, and could be coherently employed.
(Williams, 1978, p. 255)
Knowledge, for Descartes, was a unified system, For Descartes, “All the sciences are
interconnected and dependent on one another..." (Flew, 1979, p. 83). So there is some evidence of a
systemic orientation to Descartes's account of epistemology. However this point is not central to the
argument that the basic P of the SSM ad fe led Kantian account
of epistemology are those of Cartesian Rationalism, and that pi logical ions include
epistemological reductionism.
Furthermore, the h placed by Checkland on enquiring and learning are somewhat
puzzling as Popper rejects the idea that scientific progress (ie the growth of knowledge) has anything
to do with learning - because learning necessarily involves a (learning) subject:
The commonsense theory is simple. If you or I wish to know something not yet known about
the world, we have to open our eyes and look round. And we have to raise our ears and listen
to noises, and especially to those made by other people. Thus our various senses are our
sources of knowledge - the sources or the entries into our minds. I have often called this
theory the bucket theory of the mind... The important thesis of the bucket theory is that we
learn most, if not all, of what we do learn through the entry of experience into our sense
peni so that all & ledge consists of i ion received through our senses; that is,
by experience... My thesis is that the bucket theory is utterly naive and completely mistaken
in all its versions, and that unconscious assumptions of it in some form or other still exert a
devastating influence ... the bucket theory is a theory of our acquisition of knowledge - and
thus it is a theory of what I call the growth of knowledge. But as a theory of the growth of
knowledge it is utterly false... The commonsense theory of knowledge ... took it for granted
that there was only one kind of knowledge - knowledge p d by some knowing subject.
I will call this kind of knowledge “subjective knowledge" , in spite of the fact that ... genuine
or unadulterated or purely subjective conscious knowledge simply does not exist. The theory
of subjective knowledge is very old; but it becomes explicit with Descartes: "knowing" is an
activity and presupposes the existence of a knowing subject. /t is the subjective self who
knows. (Popper, 1979, pp. 60-73)
However, the SSM are concerned with enquiring and learning on a subject-centred model. The
conclusion, again, is that Checkland and Scholes' so-called Kantian account of epistemology is
Cartesian, rather than Popperian, in character (although no implicit advocation of Popper's
epistemological arguments is intended). This is somewhat surprising given the espoused early research
aims of SSM (see Checkland, 1981, pp. 100-101). However, in more recent accounts it is clear that
the epi logical problem, as by the SSM ad) is always di: din terms of “what
can I know, and this is a Cartesian legacy:
.. it was Descartes, and almost Descartes alone, who brought it about that the centre of
Western philosophy for these past centuries has been the theory of knowledge. He brought it
about that philosophy started from the question “What can I know” rather than questions such
as * What is there?’ or ‘How is the world? Moreover, the question is not ‘What can be known?’
or even *What can we know?’ but what can J know? That is, it starts from a first-person
egocentric question: (Williams, 1987, p. 94)
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A more detailed discussion of the issues concerning epistemology without a knowing subject
lies outside the scope of this paper, but Haack has carried out a thorough analysis of these issues
(Haack, 1979).
6. THE LOCKEAN ACCOUNTS
These accounts of epistemology are entirely "Lockean" in character, and appear both before
and after publication of Checkland and Scholes’ 1990 account (the so-called Kantian account). Their
main difference lies in the outright denial of the possibility of innate ideas:
I shall drastically summarise the development of systems thinking ... a human observer tries
to make sense of his or her perceived reality ... by means of some intellectual concepts used
in some mental process or methodology ... "System" is one of the concepts used in this
process, but considerable confusion is caused by the fact the word is used not only as the
name of an abstract concept which the observer tries to map onto perceived reality, but also
as a label word for things in the world - as when we refer to "the education system" or "the
legal system". The confusion is of course not helped by the fact that the ultimate source of
“concepts” ... is (can only be) perceived reality; that is the ultimate source of the concepts
through which we try to make sense of perceived reality in a never-ending cyclic process of
learning ... Perceived reality and the intellectual concepts steadily create each other.
(Checkland, 1988a, pp. 305-306)
A similar account has been propounded in a more recent article:
.. we may note that in the end the ultimate source of abstract notions ... is the perceived world
itself... the world as we perceive it yields concepts by means of which we perceive the world;
there are no absolutes, only a continuous process in which the concepts create the perceived
world which creates the concepts. (Checkland, 1991, p. 27)
These are Lockean accounts because Checkland quite explicitly states that the only source of
ideas (or concepts) is perceived reality - and therefore ideas (or concepts) cannot be innate - and this
is one of Locke's most important and influential theses:
... Locke argues in detail in book 2 [of Locke, 1977], we can account for all of the ideas in
our minds by experience. Experience is of two sorts. There are ideas of sensation, derived
from the outer senses, and ideas of reflection, which are those ideas of which we become
aware by introspection... (Flew, 1979, p. 190)
In Locke's own words
Whatever idea is in the mind 1s either an actual perception or else, having been an actual
perception, is so in the mind that by memory it can be made an actual perception again... ideas
are no more born with us than arts and sciences... (Locke, 1977, pp. 27-29)
However, it will be worthwhile to indicate the full extent of the Lockean nature of the
logical ptions of the SSM (as prop in the non-Cartesian accounts). The
main difference between the Lockean and the so-called Kantian accounts is their denial of innate ideas,
however it has been noted that there are considerable similarities between Descartes's and Locke's
accounts of epistemology:
Locke's theory of thought and knowledge, too, can look superficially like Descartes's. He takes
thought to involve a series of ideas which exist ‘in the mind’, or “before the mind’, and which
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represent things outside the mind. Reasoning is a sort of mental operation on ideas which —
leads to knowledge or belief. (Ayers, 1987, p. 121)
Put this way it may seem that the SSM advocates’ account of the relationship between
ontology and epistemology is more sceptical than Locke's - that mental ideas do not strictly represent
the natural world:
.. the world is taken to be very puzzling: there is no reason why we should have evolved
brains beyond those needed to survive on the planet's surface; there is no reason to suppose
our senses and brains can tell us what reality is really like. (Checkland, 1983, p. 672)
But Locke's argument was that our senses only give knowledge that there are some things
outside ourselves (which is clearly assumed above). Locke did not argue that our senses can tell us
what those things are really like:
... Locke developed a ... line of thought ... Although the senses give us knowledge, they give
us limited knowledge - knowledge of the existence of things, not knowledge of their nature
or essence. And because all our thought is restricted to the concepts that we have acquired
through our senses, even our speculations about the world are restricted. He thought that there
was no method by which scientists could expect to arrive at the underlying nature of things.
So, despite his rejection of absolute scepticism about the external world, he was himself a sort
of modified sceptic. We know that the world is there, but we don't know what it's really like.
(Ayers, 1987, p. 123)
The SSM advocates are also "sort of modified sceptics", and they are at their most Lockean
when they are articulating their ideas that holons (systems' in everyday parlance) somehow "reside"
in the enquiring subject, rather than being "in the world". Even here, they are cautious to refer to
“perceived reality", rather than invoke a raw ontological notion of “reality itself":
.. the process of using ‘system’ consciously to interpret the world has been rather too
successful. It has been so successful that the system idea, though abstract, has long been used
as a label for parts of the world... in everyday language we ... casually refer to “the education
system’ ... But it is too easy casually to say ‘education system’ as if the arrangements for
providing educati ically meet the i of the notion ‘system’... The error
here is to confuse a possibly plausible description of perceived reality, with perceived reality
itself (Checkland and Scholes, 1990, pp. 20-21)
For the SSM advocates. systems thinking is a purely mental activity; its validity is therefore
something "internal" to us - something constructed by the enquirer. We can apply systems thinking
to "perceived reality" etc, in an unfolding flux of events and ideas. This notion is entirely Lockean in
character:
His [Locke's] of the possibility of th ical science, and geometry in
particular, is importantly different from Descartes's. For Descartes geometry is part of the
science of space, indeed of matter. It's a part of reality. But for Locke it's an abstract science
which is created by us. We so to speak pick geometrical properties of things, and we can go
on to construct such properties ad lib beyond the limits of our experience. In this way we can
create the subject matter of a sort of non-empirical science. Such a science is possible because
it's not really concerned with the nature of things at all. It's simply concerned, as Locke puts
it, with our own ideas. (Ayers, 1987, p. 130)
Although at no point do the SSM advocates involve themselves in discussions about primary
and secondary qualities (these are Lockean notions); the conclusion to be drawn is that, broadly
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speaking, the epistemological assumptions of Checkland's 1988(a) and 1991 accounts are those of
Lockean empiricism. It should be noted that such accounts were precisely the sort of accounts that
Kant was keen to deny.
The illustrious Locke ... meeting with pure concepts of the understanding in experience
deduced them also from experi and yet ded so ii ly that he
with their aid to obtain knowledge which far transcends all limits of experience. (Kant, 1933,
p. 127)
Kant's argument is that Locke's ultimate mistake was to conduct his analysis by reflecting on
the process of perception, rather than on the conditions of its possibility. It is not argued here that
Locke's, or Kant's, accounts of epistemology are superior or inferior to other accounts of epistemology,
this is a question for philosophical discussion that lies outside the scope of this paper.
7. "POPPERIANISM" AND THE LOCKEAN ACCOUNT
To use a theatrical metaphor, where Popper displaces the subject to the fringe of the
epistemological scene, in the Lockean account the SSM advocates place the subject back into the
centre of the epistemological stage. Such an account is one that Popper would surely deny, as it is
grounded in the subjectivism characteristic of both Descartes and Locke - which Popper calls the
“bucket theory":
Among the many things which are wrong with the bucket theory of the mind are the
following:
(1) Knowledge is i of as isting of things, or thing-like entities in our
bucket (such as ideas, impressions...).
(2) Knowledge is, first of all, in us...
To sum up: what I call the theory of k ledge is thing very close to the
empiricism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume and is not far removed from many modern
positivists and empiricists... Almost everything is wrong in the commonsense theory of
knowledge. (Popper, 1979, pp. 62-63)
Checkland and Scholes’ Lockean account of epistemology can neatly and accurately be
characterised as a (Popperian) "bucket theory" - and as such, Popper would surely deny that such an
account has anything whatsoever to do with the study of epistemology.
It should be noted that the so-called Kantian account is characterised only once in a major
work (ie Checkland and Scholes, 1990), whereas the Lockean accounts can be found in several journal
articles, and -some passages of Checkland and Scholes (1990) are quite definitely in the Lockean
mould. A very recent article is also biased towards the Lockean account:
«. it is useful to remember that ultimately the only possible source of ... ideas is our perception
of the world outside ourselves... (Checkland, 1992, p. 1026)
Problem - Solving Methodologies, page 179
1994 INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM DYNAMICS CONFERENCE
5. CONCLUSION
It is clear tia at least as regards epistemology, SSM does not embody a mode of enquiry that
could be d as Popp in except insofar as the SSM advocates accept the notion
that the strict reduction of to data is achi ionism). Such
epistemological reductionism can be clearly contrasted with epistemological holism. What is less
definite is whether they ibe to ep on the model of Cartesian
rationalism or on the model of Lockean empiricism, as there is icti id in their li
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