The problem of knowing

“SEVERAL years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful,” writes René Descartes in the opening of First Philosophy/Meditation [11]. As Galileo Galilei lay in his deathbed, Descartes would meditate a phi-losophy that added important elements to the scientific tradition. And while Descartes in Meditations goes on to present doubtful evidence of God’s existence, using only logic, he teaches us an invaluable lesson: to question established truths, to think for ourselves, and most importantly, to be careful and sceptical towards an illusive reality, towards our senses, towards what we may think that we know.

“What’s responsible for the lock-step correlation between these two curves for the last 650,000 years of Earth’s his-tory”? This was for many years the research question for Professor Robert Giegengack of Department of Earth and Environmental Science at University of Pennsylvania, and when interviewed on the Dennis Prager radio show on his findings in the wake of “An Inconvenient Truth”, Giegengack argues that Gore’s point-of-no-return builds on a misinterpre-tation of data [12]. According to Giegengack’s research, the temperature of the Earth is influenced mainly by variations in the geometry of the Earth-Sun system, and the driving mechanism is exactly the opposite of what Gore claims: It is the temperature that controls the CO2, not CO2 that controls the temperature. Giegengack does not question the likely fact that human activity is resulting in global warming, but he argues that the scientific evidence as presented by Gore to support this hypothesis is fundamentally flawed. What appears so evidently truthful in “An Inconvenient Truth”, being the

“point-of-no-return” for Gore’s claim that the climate crisis is a direct effect of increase levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, may in fact rest upon a misinterpretation.

In Meditations, Descartes realizes that understanding is always incomplete, that only will is complete. This schism – incom-plete understanding, comincom-plete will - is a cornerstone in planning research, in decision-making, in science, in life. What would be an appropriate approach to planning and decision-making, if we should accept that understanding is never

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complete? And that wilful decisions and actions, however necessary, may have doubtful or even contradictory conse-quences to the intentions that lay behind? How could we appropriately deal with uncertainty and risks?

Descartes imagined building for himself a “scientific super-structure” that would allow for a firm and true understanding of phenomenons in nature and philosophy. While such ambi-tion has fuelled the naturalist tradiambi-tion in science, Descartes teaches us to doubt conclusions presented from reasoning on the basis of sense perception. Kant, inspired by Descartes, brings the synthesis of science and philosophy further, daring humans to reach an understanding by themselves, judging for themselves, while Hegel, inspired by both Descartes and Kant, returned to Descartes in his attempt to creating a philosophical super-structure based on dialectics, and realized that our understanding should include matters of an envisioned past and future.

Descartes, Kant, and Hegel share a similar belonging to a systematic assessment of the problem of knowing that may result in scientific superstructures and general frameworks for reaching understanding. Popper may have shared such vision, while Habermas, Foucault, and Kierkegaard would certainly find such effort arrogant and contradictory to the nature of knowledge. But even if knowledge by nature is evasive, and never becomes better than “as good as it gets”, as Popper would be likely to think, is it arrogant to suggest a super-structure for reaching understanding and acting upon it, if it recognizes the tentative nature of knowledge, the deliberative basis for reason, while bringing light to the interests upon which various rationalities are based?

One of the basic theoretical problems that stir the debate between the great minds of modernity and reason relates to dealing with language, meaning, and concepts of reality.

Naturalists, empiricists, realists, pragmatists, and constructiv-ists will certainly contest each other on basics, but what may possibly constitute a common ground for these courses of thought? It seems to me that naturalists and constructivist share at least two common notions upon which to meet: the comparative approach and the rational choice objective [13].

On the basis of these common notions, I have outlined a framework for my research, a super-structure, for dealing with

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the problems, the objectives, the past, the future, the options, the agents, the interaction, and intentional change. The framework is directed at wilful experiments on the basis of incomplete understanding. I call it the wisdom-generating framework, with inspiration from methodologies in PBL, integrated energy planning, and phronetic planning research [14], having presented elements of the framework in three articles published in 2006-2007: Interactivity in Planning:

Frameworking Tools [15], Interactive energy planning [16], and Interactive energy planning: Towards a sound and effec-tive planning praxis [17].

Fig. 3 attempts to capture this suggested planning research process in a single illustration. The wisdom-generating frame-work is basically very simple, some would say obvious.

However, I would like to advocate the understanding that the framework captures what should be, but rarely is, a preferred standard in planning research. The framework is intended to support planning processes in a reality of uncertainty and risks by reminding planners that interventions are intentional experiments that need to be carefully prepared with respect to context, problem, objective, history, baseline, options, conse-quences, and intentions.

Every intervention is an experiment of intent. Chances for interventions and intentions to be wise improve when they are outputs of research activities that answer these questions:

1. What is the problem, and for whom?

2. Where to go (what should be the objective)?

3. Where are we now, and where did we come from?

4. Where are going?

5. What are options for change?

6. Who wins, and who loses – what are the consequences - with respect to these options?

7. What kind of experiment should we do, if anything?

8. What is the intention of this experiment, and how does it influence our objectives?

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The thesis as a whole, with which this essay is published, attempts to complete the planning cycle above, in its main part focusing on assessing the consequences of particular intentional experiments. This essay establishes a contextual

Fig. 3: Intentional experimentation: The wisdom-generating planning process.

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basis with respect to questions 1 – 5. Chapter 1 has estab-lished the planning dynamo, proposing that global warming is the problem, supposedly to civilization as we know it, and that the objective is to stabilize and ultimately reduce the carbon content in the atmosphere. Also, findings in Chapter 1 suggest that an effective effort would target the energy sector. Chapter 2 takes a look at where we are now, and particularly where we are coming from in the context of the Danish energy sector.

Chapter 3 discusses where we are seemingly going with respect to sustainable energy, and what our fundamental options are.

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