Science is about reality, so it is told. But what reality?

Let me pose four questions:

1. Do scientific results come from data (empiricism) or from the scientist’s speculation?
2. In a paraphrase: do they emerge bottom-up or top-down?
3. And: do constituencies define the reality for politicians who represent them, or vice versa?
4. Do managers adjust their actions to reality, or do they change the reality?

A cautious reader might notice that I have forced an answer to the initial hypothesis already by selecting these four questions. And it seems as if each question is easier than the previous one. At least for the last one, we know (do we?) that the leader is the one who can change reality and, before that, the way his company operates. Yet, don’t we have quite a few examples of leaders who underestimated the resistance of already established reality and, for that reason, failed?

Multiple realities?

So there is more than one reality: one already established, and another that a leader is striving to acquire? At least in management, we do! Should we not have actual reality and many potential realities, there would be no change. David Kellogg Lewis (Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, 1999, Cambridge University Press) was not the first to claim that, and I’m certainly not the last. However, the notion that the reality is only one, that science is only one, and so on, is so pervasive that we must refute it constantly.

The rather controversial case

Are emerging political figures, such as Donald Trump, for instance, brought up by the populace (bottom-up) or do they show a different reality (autocratic) that the populace agrees to participate in? What if Donald emerged from the failure of so-far dominant intellectuals, commonly led by collectivist dogma? What if contemporary intellectuals strayed too far from actual reality and forced another reality that, beforehand, seemed impossible?

(Forgive me for being elliptical in the previous paragraph. The majority of posts try to shed light on the concepts of collectivism, intellectuals, and the complexity science that denounces the commonly accepted linear logic. )

We do not need George Orwell’s dystopian nowspek and the erasure of the past and memories forced by Big Brother and the party to see that reality is not only one. Realities compete. A competitor that wins does not erase the past, but makes it different as much as it makes the future reality something that was not thought about before. Here, evolutionary biology with its concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) helps. The memetically stronger competitor wins. The memetic field that wins over shadows the memetic fields that lose their memetic powers. No Big Brother needed. 

We could thus say that neither top-down nor bottom-up but evolutionarilly emerged realities happen. Politicians like Donald or whoever are agents as much as they know how to co-create realities that are already winning.

Does the same rule apply to science and scientists?

The branding case

Practicing the Standard Branding Model©, I always face the following question: Should I suck brand identity out of those who live that brand’s identity, or should I bring in my own idea of what the best identity for that particular brand is? (bottom-up or top-down).

Brands rest on brand identity, which is nothing but a complex of identity traits lived through the brand’s moments of truth. Since employees represent prime vehicles of identity traits, one should go for the ‘sucking’ alternative, obviously. Well! I do not. Why?

There are two reasons:

1. The ‘Sucking’ alternative does not really work.
2. I do not believe that science is empirical.

What I really do through the branding process is that I enter it equipped with all kinds of empirical data. I study the brand category, competitors, and all available internal brand data, including information from formal and informal conversations with brand employees. This represents the existing reality. Based on such knowledge, I sketch a possible future reality that would be different (more efficient and effective) from the existing one, yet achievable. In a process that seems bottom-up to participants, I test my drawing (my vision of that brand) against existing reality, against the workshop participants who strive to define their brand’s identity. They develop their brand bottom-up while I test my top-down hypothesis. Eventually, we then meet somewhere in between and have a nice farewell drink.

The case of science

The method explained above does not differ from a scientific method.

Scientists, when testing their hypotheses experimentally, study scientific category questions; they study what their competitors found out, and they use all the knowledge about internal affairs they have gained during their education and later. With that acknowledgment of the present reality, they try to prove their hypothesis about the envisioned reality. They know in advance what the future reality should look like, and they test it with the tools available or those they design for the specific purpose.

Yes indeed. The same procedure is used by managers, politicians, brand developers, and scientists.

Two lessons are coming out of this conclusion:

1. Science is as objective (based on empirical data) as any other human (memetic) activity.
2. Even if you are not a scientist, you cannot avoid reality.