27 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press, paperback edition, 1989, p. 190. See Chapter 11 for a full explanation of the idea of meme.
28 Marjorie Green, ‘Introduction’, in Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969, p. xi.
29 See ‘The Structure of Consciousness’, in Polanyi, op. cit., pp. 211–24.
30 Boyd, Destruction and Creation, p. 3.
31 In the 1990s his work has come to be seen by many philosophers as part of the shift to a postmodern context for philosophical thought.
32 Watson, op. cit., p. 472.
33 Polanyi, op. cit., p. 117.
34 Ibid.
35 This is taken from Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Challenging Constructs of Mind and Reality, New York: Pocket Books, 1974, p. 94.
36 Polanyi, op. cit., p. 118.
37 Ibid., p. 79.
38 Ibid., p. 119.
39 Ibid., p. 68.
40 Ibid., p. 49.
41 Ibid., p. 54.
42 Ibid., p. 66.
43 Ibid., pp. 55–6.
44 Ibid., p. 70.
45 Ibid., p. 31.
46 Ibid., p. 36.
47 As did Imre Lakatos. Lakatos will not be discussed here as available sources do not indicate specifically that Boyd read any of his material. For a general overview of recent history of the philosophy of science see, for instance, the essays of Peter Machamer, John Worrall and Jim Woodward, in Peter Machamer and Michael Silberstein, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. For more technical and more polemic studies see, for instance, Adam Morton, ‘The Theory of Knowledge: Saving Epistemology from the Epistemologists’ and Noretta Koertge, ‘New Age Philosophies of Science: Constructivism, Feminism and Postmodernism’, all in Peter Clark and Katherina Hawley, Philosophy of Science Today, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000; and Steve Fuller, ‘Being There with Thomas Kuhn: A Parable for Postmodern Times’, History and Theory, October 1992, Vol. 31, Issue 3, pp. 241–75. In this article the influence of Polanyi is also addressed. For a concise critique of Kuhn see Deutsch, op. cit., in particular Chapter 13.
48 Chalmers, op. cit., p. 91.
49 Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems, New York, Anchor Books, 1997, p. 5.
50 John Steinbrunner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 10.
51 Chalmers, op. cit., p. 118.
52 Ibid., pp. 108, 112.
53 Capra, op. cit., 1997, p. 5.
54 Ilya Prigogine and Isabella Stengers, Order Out Of Chaos, Man’s New Dialogue With Nature, London: Flamingo, 1984, p. 308.
55 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory, New York: George Brazilier, 1968, p. 18.
56 Chalmers, op. cit., pp. 115, 121.
57 Ibid., p. 118, emphasis is mine to highlight the connection with Boyd’s use of wording.
58 Boyd, Destruction and Creation, p. 7.
59 Boyd, The Conceptual Spiral, p. 22. All underlining in original.
60 Ibid., p. 23.
61 Ibid., p. 24.
62 Ibid., p. 31. Although it is likely that Boyd followed Kuhn in this idea of creative destruction, it cannot be ruled out that Boyd was also influenced by Joseph Schum-peter, whose work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy Boyd had read. Schum-peter is credited with the idea of the merits of creative destruction as an engine for economic growth.
63 Ibid., pp. 37–8. Italics are mine.
64 Watson, op. cit., pp. 740, 757.
65 Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point, New York: Bantam Books, 1991 [1975], pp. 56–7. I deliberately refer directly to this book as it is one read by Boyd in the early stages of his research but the issue of determinism is also discussed at length in other books Boyd read.
66 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn, New York: The Guilford Press, 1997, p. 203.
67 Ibid., p. 202.
68 See Rifkin, op. cit., p. 224; Prigogine and Stengers, op. cit., p. 309; and Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, New York: Freeman & Company, 1994, p. 136.
69 Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (Boston: Shambala, 3rd edition, 1991 [1975] [1982], p. 101.
70 At Georgia Tech Boyd had studied James B. Jones and George A. Hawkins, Engineering Thermodynamics (1960), but later works, such as Rifkin’s, take the concept far beyond the realm of engineering.
71 Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point, New York, Bantam Books, 1982, pp. 72–4.
72 Ibid.
73 Capra (1975), op. cit., pp. 61–2.
74 Ibid., p. 81 (note that this work was on Boyd’s early reading lists).
75 Gary Zukav’s, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics, New York: Bantam, 1979, is one of the books Boyd read that described these developments in detail.
76 Ibid., p. 125.
77 Cited in Capra (1997), op. cit., p. 40.
78 Prigogine and Stengers (1984), op. cit., pp. 222–5.
79 Boyd, Destruction and Creation, p. 10.
80 Jean Piaget, Structuralism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971, pp. 32–3.
81 Watson, op. cit., pp. 270–2.
82 Boyd, Destruction and Creation, pp. 8–9.
83 Rifkin mentions Heisenberg and the Second Law in one chapter, but not in all three.
84 Besides the already mentioned early works of Capra, Prigogine, etc., that are listed in the bibliographies of his first papers, his personal papers include a large number of other books on the history of science. Early works include, for instance, George Gamow Thirty Years That Shook Physics, The Story of Quantum Physics (1966) and Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1962).
85 Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, Boston: Shambala, 3rd edition, 1991, p. 54. The first edition of 1975 already included this passage.
86 Jean Piaget, Structuralism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971, p. 44.
87 Ibid., p. 140.
88 Another study on structuralism Boyd had read, Howard Gardner’s The Quest for Mind, Piaget, Levi-Strauss and the Structuralism Movement, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972, actually regards structuralism as the ‘worldview’ that took hold during the 1960s.
89 Capra (1982), op. cit., pp. 77–8.
90 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, op. cit., p. 186.
91 Prigogine and Stengers (1984), op. cit., p. xxix.
92 Uri Merry, Coping With Uncertainty, Insights from the New Sciences of Chaos, Self-Organization, and Complexity, Westport, CT: Preager, 1995, p. 100.
93 Watson, op. cit., p. 757.
94 Capra (1997), op. cit., p. 5; Prigogine and Stengers (1984), op. cit., p. xxvii.
95 Ibid., p. 309.
96 Capra (1997), op. cit., p. 31. A similar discussion can be read in Piaget’s Structuralism.
97 Ibid., pp. 29–35.
98 Bertalanffy, op. cit., p. 19.
99 James Bryant Conant, Two Modes of Thought, New York: Trident Press, 1964, p. 31. This short book includes several examples of scientific breakthroughs in the nineteenth century.
100 Ibid., p. 91.
101 Destruction and Creation; pp. 5–6.
102 The Strategic Game of ? and ?, p. 10.
103 In the bibliography of Destruction and Creation he lists also Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics (1971). The personal papers include U.S. Anderson; Success-Cybernetics: the Practical Application of Human-Cybernetics (1970), F.H. George, Cybernetics (1971) and Y. Sabarina, Cybernetics Within Us (1969), and Marvin Karlins and Lewis Andrews, Biofeedback: Turning on the Power of Your Mind (1973) and Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1967). Chilton Pearce’s works, too, include many references to cybernetics.
104 After Capra (1996), p. 59.
105 Joseph O’Connor and Ian McDermott, The Art of Systems Thinking, San Francisco: Thorsons, 1997, p. 236.
106 Capra (1997), op. cit., pp. 56–64.
107 Ibid., p. 43.
108 Bartallanffy, op. cit., p. 94.
109 Ibid., p. 39.
110 Ibid., p. 141.
111 W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1956, pp. 127–31.