44 Ethics and Systems Thinking
evolved ‘not simply in response to damaging impacts of specific industrial and
social practices, but also, more fundamentally as a social expression of cultural ten-
sions surrounding the underlying ontologies and epistemologies which have led to
such trajectories in modern societies’.
Such is the nature and focus of epistemic cognition; its importance returns our
gaze to the concept of the ‘knowing system’ and a further application to it of the
systemic principle of ‘three dimensionality’ with the suggestion that the knowing
system be regarded as an integral subsystem of every system under consideration
along with the environmental supra-system in which that, in turn, is embedded.
This fresh ‘three-dimensional’ view is consistent with the emphasis in the hierarchy
theory as being propounded by Ahl and Allen (1996) that the observers (knowers)
need to be ‘reunited’ with the observed for it is they who are indeed responsible for
recognizing boundaries around entities as well as proposing the criteria for making
those distinctions. It is these ‘knowers cum decision makers’ who must make the
judgements about who is to be included within the system of concern, what sort
of knowledge will be needed and who can be relied upon to generate it, who it that
should be the main beneficiaries of any indicated change, and who will speak for
those unable to be present (Ulrich, 1983). In this view, systems are indeed in the
eye of the beholder, as Checkland (1981) has asserted: they are abstract construc-
tions of a concrete reality that cannot be directly accessed through the senses, or of
a coherent set of processes for collective learning within a community of interest
about what might be done to improve situations that they experience and appreci-
ate as problematic to them in one form or another (and perhaps also to others).
These perspectives, it is submitted here, are of profound significance to environ-
mental concerns, and represent crucial ways by which these concerns can become
known and can provide intelligible, trustworthy and collectively generated knowl-
edge about both what could be done in the search for environmental sustainability
and what ought to be done. In essence these demand different ways of knowing
and reasoning and thus different rationalities, as Habermas (1984) has long
insisted. Thus while his ‘instrumental rationality’ is entirely appropriate for explor-
ing the ‘external natural world’, it needs to be replaced by ‘communicative action’
whenever and wherever the purpose is ‘mutual understanding to realize common
goals and values’ (Yankelovich, 1991). These will demand access to epistemic cog-
nition for their clarification.
With its own three-dimensional capacities for cognitive processing, the ‘know-
ing system’ as now envisaged, brings a learning and critically reflexive capacity as a
subsystem to any system or systemically appreciated situation in which it embeds
itself. As mentioned earlier, it draws on elements of all three waves of systems of
thinking: it can consist of a tangible group of people (a ‘hard’ systems perspective)
who commit themselves to behaving as if they were a coherent ‘knowing system’.
They will have a clear idea of the matters to hand that they are addressing, an
unambiguous understanding of the systemic processes of knowing that they
employ (a ‘soft’ systems perspective), and an inherent appreciation of the need to
bring critical reflections (a ‘critical’ systems perspective) to all of these matters as