Then you have people from other fields that begin to question thinking. There’s a group of economists that say economic thinking is completely off; it is based in the early centuries of science. We need to reframe economic thinking. Economic thinking is not holistic. The new economics has not yet arrived in the mainstream. Our role is to learn from all of that, to articulate that, and to put it in the frame of learning that I believe is missing—in a context where the new epistemology is alive.
So, our Newfield students walk into a context where they experience a new epistemological possibility rather than referring to it. We don’t want people to talk about a new possible epistemology or cosmology. We want them to Live it. And I believe that for us the practice of coaching and the practice of our ways of teaching aim to create an experience of it because this is another issue that is traditionally missing. Context informs text. We tend to believe that the meaning is in the words. That is another aspect of our epistemological claim. If we don’t create context of a new epistemological life, a new cosmology, we refer to this phenomenon, but there is no transformation really.
Bill. It is interesting to observe that most languages of the world are context-based. I just spent the last week with colleagues from China. Their language (Mandarin) is one where the very same word can mean quite different things in differing contexts. The other theme that seems important concerns attention. If we think about what you and your students attend to, they don’t attend to a discipline; they attend to a problem or they attend to an experience. This means they’re attending to what you said in the last 20 minutes. They’re attending from multiple perspectives, multiple disciplines. So, it becomes very interesting for me to listen to you. Newfield is profoundly interdisciplinary. Apparently, you just refuse to get into a nice, little box. No one can call you a psychologist, a philosopher, or an economist.
It becomes very interesting to me that once you focus on an experience, then what you’ve just done is open it up for a wide set of disciplines. I was thinking of Kurt Lewin (1999) and John Dewey (1929).
Julio. The idea of discipline itself belongs to modernity. You specialize here; there’s a discipline; and you miss the connection with everything outside of it. That’s part of reductionism which is a core aspect of the way we know, the scientific way of knowing, at least in nineteenth-century science. But our claim is that we need to move into holistic learning and holistic thinking. And I want to take away any New Age connotation. I’m talking about the capacity to think in a connected manner instead of thinking by separating.
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