Descartes Does It! February 25, 2007
Posted by FluxBlogger in : Uncategorized , add a commentDoing some side reading I came across some sage words from Descartes that appear all to applicable to business change and how to approach the usual thicket of organisational issues. These are from Discourse 2 and his precepts are as follows:
1. Never to accept anything as true that I did not know to be evidently so: that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to include in my judgements nothing more that what presented itself so clearly and distinctly to my mind that I might have no occasion to place it in doubt.
2. To divide each of the difficulties that I was examining into as many parts as might be possible and necessary in order to best solve it.
3. To conduct my thoughts in an orderly way beginning with the simplest objects and the easiest to know, in order to climb gradually, as by degrees, as far as the knowledge of the most complex, and even supposing some order among those objects which do not precede each other naturally.
4. Everywhere to make such complete enumerations and such general reviews that I would be sure to have omitted nothing.
I realise such precepts are still open to criticism around the fact that they work in relation to deduction but inductively do not allow for the true issues that are not ‘provable’…