Openness: Avoiding environmental fallacy

In 1905, German chemist Alfred Einhorn invented Novocaine to be used by doctors as a general anesthetic in surgery. Unfortunately, doctors didn’t find it a suitable anesthetic. While they turned him down, dentists were dying to use it for local anesthesia. But the inventor didn’t want to sell it for the “mundane purpose” of drilling teeth and continued marketing to doctors and surgeons. Einhorn persisted until his death, constantly denying the willing dental industry as a fitting market. He felt the intrinsic value of Novocaine as a general anesthetic was enough to sell it as such. That is an example of what our pal Churchman called “environmental fallacy.”

An environmental fallacy is the blunder of ignoring the environment. Other examples of this fallacy include failing to see long-term implications because one is preoccupied by the short-term, winning battles but losing the war, as well as precisely and meticulously solving the wrong problem. You could describe these all as failing to see the bigger picture, but in systems we call that the environment. The significance of which is governed by the principle of openness.

Openness is the principle that open systems can only be understood in the context of their environment. This is because open systems are dependent on and co-determined by their context. Unlike a closed system that can function entirely based on its own internal structure and process, an open system interacts with and is inextricably linked with its environment. This environment is context. It represents the greater system of an embedded or open system.

Now, a simple question: which major human effort is devoted to our understanding of objective reality? The answer might be obvious, but consider this: it was founded on principles that deny the principle of openness and treat most things as closed systems.

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