metonymy4u

even a thorough systems thinker like skinner still from time to time picked up the language of cause and effect. the question here is not whether he or descartes or newton or anyone else was right to do so. the question i’m raising is the question of whether cause and effect is a useful metaphor anymore. could we contemplate another metaphor like the buddhist concept of dependent origination (emptiness) which directs attention to whole systems rather than discretely identifiable parts? how do we want to describe the system now and in the future? the description is itself a creation not a discovery, a part of the emptiness that it is looking at. and how does the system look back at its own description?