So today we're going to talk about our subjective
filters, which is a central concept or series
of concepts in this class. And I'd like to
start by showing you an excerpt of one of
my favorite movies, by one of my favorite
American directors, whose name is Richard
Linklater, and it's called Waking Life. Has
anybody seen the movie?
No?
Okay. Maybe this will entice you to see it.
In the ontology and epistemology of organizational
behavior, which is the nature of reality and
how do you come to know reality. The movie
Waking Life, to come back to it, the central
idea of the movie is the central character
has an amazing dream. It starts with him having
a dream, and then he wakes up and he wants
to call his friend and say, "Hey, I had this
really strange dream and I want to tell you
about it." And then he realizes he's still
dreaming, and as the movie progresses, he
keeps waking up and he's trapped in a dream.
So this leads him to question, is this reality,
is this a dream, am I in hell, am I in heaven,
am I dead?
What's happening. And that's kind of a central
question that we may ask in philosophy - how
can we be sure that we're not dreaming?
How do we know that this is reality?
How can we be sure that there's an objective
reality out there happening right now?
Are you guys still asleep in your bed, or
are you in class?
Did you really wake up this morning?
So how do we know that?
You know, it's a question with no clear answer.
Nobody can prove the answer to this question.
But there's a few philosophers that have thought
about this.
So ontology is a philosophical study of the
nature of reality, so different models and
arguments about how do we come to - what is
reality?
What is your experience, your personal experience?
And epistemology is the philosophy of science.
So science is one of the approaches that we
use to understand reality, and there's different
stances about how we come to know reality.
How do we create models of reality?
The interesting thing is that science today
is one of the strongest models that we adopt
to understand reality, and we take it as true.
But some of the assumptions that it relies
upon are not provable in the sense, in a hard-work
foundational way. So it's interesting to,
when you study something, when you discover
a new science, organizational behavior is
a type of social science that was introduced
yesterday, to ask yourself "What is the epistemology
and the ontology of that science?"And it's
particularly important to think about it in
organizational behavior, because as I mentioned
in the first class, it's a social science
that studies a different side of reality than
most hard sciences tend to study. So to simplify
things, if we wanted to do a - we could do
a whole course on ontology and epistemology,
and it would be very interesting. I love philosophy,
and I love to geek out on those things, but
we don't have the time to do that. So let's
do a very extreme simplification of two stances
that can be had. On one end, you have radical
subjectivism, and on the other hand you have
scientific reality.
So what's radical subjectivism?
One - there's different proponents of that,
one such proponent is a philosopher called
Berkeley, who illustrates radical subjectivism
with the following example, the example of
"How do you know the cherry is real?"
Let's take any object, it could be an apple,
it could be a table, let's take a cherry.
How do you know it's real?
And his argument goes as follows: Mainly you
get to know the reality of the cherries through
your senses. So you can - you pick up the
cherry and you feel its weight in your hands,
maybe you can smell what the cherry smells
like, then you see the red color, so you use
your eyes to recognize a pattern, the roundness
of the cherry, the red color, the green stem.
Then you put it in your mouth and you feel
with your mouth its roundness, its softness,
and when you bite into it, you taste the taste
of cherry. And all of that tells you that
it's real, it's an object that actually exists.
I can gain consciousness of it through my
senses. But Berkeley then says, well, your
senses are a property of yourself. Are they
a property - how do you know that the object
is exactly out there, is really out there,
and not a figment of your imagination?
When you dream, you might be dreaming that
you're eating a cherry, the same cherry, and
you might taste it and see it and experience
it, and it doesn't really exist out there.
It's in a dream, it's a figment of your imagination.
So if you push this line of thinking to the
maximum, you might say, "I have no way of
ascertaining that there's a reality out there."
So maybe the only person that's alive in this
world is me, and you guys don't exist, this
classroom doesn't exist, the world doesn't
exist at all. I've been living in a dream
since I came into existence, and have created
a reality entirely, and I - there's no way
for me to know whether it's out there or it's
in there. Kind of like extreme, right?
A little trippy, but extreme point of view.
Kind of like the movie Waking Life is built
a little bit around this idea.
Now the sort of other extreme, which we're
more used to, is scientific objectivism. So
it's really based on the scientific method
that you know about - the assumption here
is that there is a reality out there that's
different from us, and the way we understand
it is we experiment. We do experiments. So
when we're children, we do natural experiments.
One of the things that children do routinely
- I have a 3 1/2 year old son, and when he
was an infant, they love to do that. They
bring things and throw them on the floor,
and it's annoying. They do experiments - is
this going to fall again?
Yeah, it's falling. Look at this - it's falling.
They discover gravity as a rule, and they
have to experiment with it many many times
to develop a rule of what happens when you
let something go and it falls down to the
floor. They don't have a theory of gravity
with the equations and all that yet, but they're
experimenting and building models of reality.
So we all do that, from the moment we're born
till now. We have various experiences in reality,
and we develop models in our minds. The scientific
model is a little bit more organized than
that, so you ask a question, you state a hypothesis,
you conduct an experiment that can be replicated
- that's a key aspect. Analyze the results,
make a conclusion. And if you work collectively
with other scientists throughout history,
you have certain models and theories that
get adopted and refined and that's your view
of external reality that we rely upon. Now
most of us, interestingly, don't understand
all of the theories that science is based
on. Most of us don't have the exact knowledge
of that, but we accept it as, yeah, that's
reality. Scientific models of reality are
real.
So which one is the correct one?
Which one do you subscribe to?
This one or this one?
How do you know which one is the correct way
to believe in?
The real answer is, you can't. You can't prove
any of this, but you have certain hunches.
I'll give you my hunch. I believe that the
truth is in between this one and this one.
The two extreme positions is a simplification.
And one of the best - the philosopher who
articulated this first, and the best for me,
is Immanuel Kant, who explains that there
probably is a reality out there. That's a
guess, you can't prove it, but it's most likely
there. But you can never experience, you can
never gain cognizance of that reality outside
of your experience of it, your subjective
experience of it. So it's going back to the
idea of Berkeley, that we first gain consciousness
of external reality through our senses, our
five senses, which in his model we put together
in a form of intuition that then we consciously
observe - so we try to interpret what our
senses bring up to our consciousness. And
we build an image, a coherent image of a phenomenon
that we see out there. So what you see here
is that the way we apprehend reality, the
way we understand reality, is a mixture of
external reality itself, the thing itself,
like a tree, for example, or a situation that
you're trying to interpret, and your senses,
your intuition, your mind, your reason. And
as we grow in life, from children to adults,
as we progress in life, we keep changing our
models. We sometimes change a model that's
something that we thought was true, we realize
maybe it's not true, or maybe it's more complicated
than that. So we refine the model. But the
thing is that it's hard to know which part
of the model you've created is the reality
itself, and which part is the product of your
own filters. So Kant says, essentially, we
can never be sure - we hope that the models
of reality we have are somewhat a faithful
representation of what's out there, but we
can never be fully sure of it. A good analogy
is the idea of a map vs a territory. You have
a map, you are going to take a seven-day hike
in the wilderness, you have a map of the different
trails and mountains and obstacles and rivers.
The map is not the reality itself, it's a
simplification of it. You couldn't have every
possible thing that you could encounter there
on the map. You have to make some choices
about what is the most important thing to
represent, maybe obstacles to cross, maybe
the path that you are going to follow. And
you hope that your map is faithful to the
reality you will encounter there. And throughout
history - now we have GPS, but throughout
history mapmakers kept refining maps. The
first navigators that went around the world
kept changing the maps based on the experience
of it. That's kind of like, again, how we
function and how we develop our models of
reality and how science functions.
