TWO EPISTEMOLOGIES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

FOR ADMINISTRATIVE RESEARCH

Stuart Umpleby

Department of Management

The George Washington University

10 a.m. to noon, Wednesday April 26, 2006

Funger 320, 22^nd and G Streets NW

     This presentation or tutorial is intended as background for George Soros’s talk on May 2, 2006.  For several years I used Soros's book, The Alchemy of Finance, as one text for Mgt 390, Philosophical Foundations of Administrative Research.  That experience persuaded me that Soros's theories are difficult for Americans to understand.  Soros writes very clearly, but he uses a different epistemology.  There is a large difference between the epistemology used in the US and UK and the epistemology that is common in Continental Europe.  The difference can be traced back as far as Plato (Continental Europe) and Aristotle (US and UK).  The difference in epistemology means that the same words have different meanings.  The result is that one can think one understands but in fact not fully understand.          

     To help bridge the gap between the epistemologies of the US and Europe, I shall explain them and their implications on April 26.  As background reading for the tutorial, I suggest these two articles. The background reading for Soros's talk is the draft of his new book. Copies are available in Funger 315 and Funger 501.  

"Should knowledge of Management be Organized as Theories or as Methods?" (paper)    
Figure 1 in this article provides a "map" of the epistemologies in use in the GW School of Business.       

"What I Learned from Heinz von Foerster about the Construction of Science"  (Be sure to look at both the paper and the figures.)