The title to this posting may seem rather, even doubly, anomalous to the reader familiar with the blog’s themes. First, what does this have to do with MIFO and, second, how could anyone suggest that Einstein was in any way under-rated? Well, under-rated is precisely what I will argue Einstein is. As to the relevance to the blog, maybe it’s a bit tenuous. But regular followers of the blog will know that my approach to organizational theory is very much concerned with abstract reasoning – getting beyond the received wisdom about organizational practice and seeing into the deeper inner workings of the processes. Additionally, like Einstein’s relativity, MIFO derives its unique virtues from the fact that there is no absolute, fixed configuration of knowing possible; each context requires its own configuring of knowledge relevant to the prevailing circumstances. This is the same whether one is trying to measure time in different contexts or finding solutions to problems in unstable organizational circumstances.
In this way, Einstein’s contribution to MIFO studies is important both in spirit and in fact. He both sets the tone and lays the material basis for MIFO studies. So, this brief ode to him is certainly relevant to the theme of the blog. And, as will be seen, it is precisely in the ways that he has been underappreciated that constituted his greatest contribution to MIFO and organizational studies.
Again, though, how could one suggest that Einstein was under-rated: he is the most famous scientist and quite arguably the most famous intellectual of all time? The problem is that all that fame is uninformed. Here’s the extraordinary thing about Einstein: he completely changed the historical course of not one, but two separate disciplines. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that he’s the greatest single thinker in the history of the world. But, again, being an icon of popular culture is irrelevant to proper appreciation of his accomplishments.
Most people are aware that he made a major contribution to physics – some even have a vague notion of what that contribution was. That of course was a major achievement and if that was the extent of his legacy, the verdict would certainly have to be that he was one of the greatest thinkers of all time. My point, and the focus of the rest of this posting, is that his achievement in and contribution to physics was equalled (if not surpassed) by his achievement in and contribution to epistemology. Indeed, it’s arguable that this latter was the more important contribution! Of course, without the success in physics, his contributions to epistemology may well never have been taken seriously. However, while most of us still go on, day after day, basically living in a Newtonian universe, in which Einstein’s contribution to physics has no appreciable impact on our daily lives, his contributions to epistemology have had a pervasive impact – changing the way we all live and think. Whether we’re conscious of it or not?
The contribution to epistemology – reasoning about the defensible grounds for reasoning – was in some senses even more remarkable as he broke not one, but two new paths in the field. Appreciating the first of these requires us to recall the response to his initial famous essays about a hundred years ago, now. Today, the popular culture version of the story has it that the reaction against Einstein was that he was overthrowing one of physics’, and science’s, great deities. No doubt there is some truth in this interpretation, but, for the previous decade or so, some serious questions had been raised which Newtonian mechanics didn’t seem to adequately address. It wasn’t so surprising that Newton was being challenged at that point. And, of course, there was some consternation that this challenge came from a nobody: someone with no standing in the scientific community. But all that was in second place; the biggest ground of contention with Einstein, presumably related to this later fact, was the allegation that what he’d done wasn’t science, at all.
Where was the laboratory work? Science was supposed to be working experimentally with the material world. This guy came along and wrote up a handful of mathematically speculative essays and this is supposed to be science? Many dismissed his work as mere philosophy – and metaphysical philosophy at that. But, of course, it was science. What was special here was the unapologetic deductive nature of his work. As Karl Popper has demonstrated, this is of course how science always has and must work. But scientists didn’t see themselves that way. Rather they’d been misled by the writings of their great early cheerleader, Francis Bacon, with all his gushing about the fundamental role of observation to science. Observation, of course, has its place as does experiment, but as Popper demonstrated, scientific knowledge can never come from that. Observation and experiment have to be put to use as instruments for the testing of hypotheses that already derive from the educated imagination: scientific knowledge is deductive.
This may have always been true of science, it may in fact be in the very DNA of science, but Einstein was the first to unapologetically, unabashedly, base his scientific work and reputation on deductive reasoning. Of course, the theory still had to stand up to tests in the material world. Einstein knew that as well as anyone and already knew what those tests would have to be when he proposed the theory. And, of course, in 1919, during the Eddington expedition his theories did past the experimental tests. And, on that day, when the experimental tests in the natural world showed that Einstein’s mathematical speculation provided more successful predictions than Newton’s (supposedly) observational scientific practice, everything changed in the self-understanding of intellectual life about what constituted science and how knowledge could be discovered. This contribution, alone, would have put him among the giants in epistemology. As I’ve said, though, that was only one of his two contributions to the field.
The second was the extraordinarily unique worldview of knowledge which he proposed and had confirmed on that day in 1919 on the Portuguese island. To my knowledge, Einstein is the first person in history to propose a worldview that separated the validity claims for epistemology and ontology. In all of previous history, everyone else had based their understanding of both fields upon the same validity claims. By this I mean, one was either a relativist or a realist. If a relativist, one’s view of both epistemology and ontology was relativist: we can’t know an absolute truth, because there’s no absolute reality to know. Or, if a realist: there is an absolute reality, so we can gain absolute truth of it. Obviously, through history, there has been nuance, gray areas, spectrums, and so on. At the core, though, these were the positions available for thinking.
It was Einstein who uncoupled these apparently inseparable domains. He was an ontological relativist, as the title of his famous theories implies. Changing circumstances change the configuration of the dimensions of what we would call reality. From a philosophical perspective, Einstein’s biggest break from Newton was in that while the latter held firmly to a background independent view of the world, Einstein had demonstrated a background dependent view: the background didn’t exist as an independent variable, but was constituted out of the relationships between the elements of reality. Ontologically, this was certainly a relativist position. Again, such views were not unique, one thinks of Leibniz’s ontology as a kind of forerunner. And of course today we’re inundated with science studies types who gush over their mutual relativist bona fides.
What made Einstein’s contribution so remarkable was that, despite his uncompromising ontological relativism, he was an equally ardent epistemological realist. Rather than surrendering to soft-headed intuition – if the material world were composed of relativist relationships, how could anyone know anything? – he insisted on the know-ability of even that which was relative, in the context of its relativity. Just because reality was slippery, didn’t make it any less real, and if it were real, it was subject to understanding. This was logically implied in his very creation of the famous essays themselves. Notwithstanding the relativity of dimensions and their background dependence, he was able to make predictions about the bending of light in the tangible world. In this sense, the apparent inconsistency of his ontology and epistemology was actually much more consistent than the odd exceptionalism of the postmodernists and poststructuralist – in which all forms of knowing are unmasked as foundationless and meaningless (except of course the one form of knowing making this claim for foundationlessness and meaninglessness).
The key difference for Einstein was that being relative didn’t imply being random. That radical change of dimensional circumstances could completely defy one’s ability to understand a specific context, did not preclude the ability to understand that defied ability nor to understand why and how it happened. If Einstein believed the universe were random, then a realist epistemology would have been impossible, but then, so would have been the success of his essays on relativity. If that logical proposition isn’t adequate, one need only look at his debates with Bohr over the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The latter, despite its almost universal acceptance, again in the same popular culture that carelessly lionizes Einstein, is intellectually impoverished and actually fails the test of science. This is something else I’ll blog on in the weeks to come. The point here, though, was Einstein’s position in the debate, famously summed up in his quip about God not playing dice with the universe. As Einstein had explained elsewhere, if he in fact believed in a god at all it was Spinoza’s god – not the kind that intervenes in wars and sporting events. Spinoza’s god is better understood as a kind of motive force, a tendency within the universe. One might think of the tendency in natural selection toward ever greater fecundity and diversity. There’s no guiding hand or wise overseer here. There is though an idea that certain tendencies are at work in the unfolding of the world. They may be manifested in countless, elusive ways, but their very existence reveals that the world is not random. If the phenomena of the world were random, predictive science would be impossible.
It was this theoretical leap of Einstein’s – acknowledging a world that couldn’t be reduced to billiard ball mechanics, on the one hand, and yet, despite that relativity, was still subject to the knowledge of the searching mind – that allowed him to advance his unprecedented worldview: ontological relativist, epistemological realist. As we look at MIFO practices, with their emphasis upon precisely the contingency of shifting problem complexes, which defy reduction to simple recipes prescribed by hierarchical authorities, but, still, are subject to a moving, adaptive solution space, generated out of the nimble search to understand the problems in their existing configuration, it should become clear that, in addition to all the other laurels dispensed to him here, minor as it might be on the totem of his great achievements, Einstein is as well the intellectual father of MIFO theory.