CONSENSUS AND CONSENSUALITY
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(1) |
| ID | ◀ 633 ▶ |
| Object type | Human sciences, Epistemology, ontology or semantics |
Following R. HARNDEN: “With respect to a constitutive ontology as proposed by Humberto MATURANA and based on a refined physio-psychology of perception and conceptualization, consensuality is about shifting currents of discourse and understanding in the present they realize.
- “This is not the same as ”consensus“, which implies transcending such shifting currents in order to secure some sort of ”meta“ vantage and be able to pronounce this the ”norm“ or ”average“ (as agreement)” (1990, p.298).
In other words, consensuality is a psycho-social process, whose result is consensus, a stable evaluation, which may of course be reviewed at any moment by reversing to the consensuality process.
Consensuality protects human groups from conceptual sclerosis and their organizations from blockage.
However, it would be excessive to admit that any scientific theory or model can be refuted (or falsified in Popper's terminology) simply by some new psycho-social consensus. In AULIN's words “NEWTON was never refuted by EINSTEIN” (1987, p.76): There is “something” in the real world that, at some scale and within defined conditions, endows some models with a bedrock stability that no shift of consensus could alter. After all, classical gravitation calculus is what permitted the successful steering of the PIONEER and Template:Ency entity probes, three bodies problem notwithstanding.