C West Churchman - Collected Quotes

"The individuation process, as the way of development and maturation of the psyche, does not follow a straight line, nor does it always lead onwards and upwards. The course it follows is rather 'stadial', consisting of progress and regress, flux and stagnation in alternating sequence. Only when we glance back over a long stretch of the way can we notice the development. If we wish to mark out the way somehow or other, it can equally well be considered a' spiral', the same problems and motifs occurring again and again on different levels." (C West Churchman, "Theory of Experimental Inference", 1948) 

"The concepts and methods of cybernetics are by no means restricted to the problems of servo-mechanisms, or even neural physiology, though the impetus came from these areas. […] Cybernetics analyzes all purposive behavior and provides an exact notion of communication and the transmital of information." (C West Churchman & Russel L Ackoff, "Purposive Behavior and Cybernetics", Social Forces Vol. 29 (1), 1950)

"Scientists whose work has no clear, practical implications would want to make their decisions considering such things as: the relative worth of (1) more observations, (2) greater scope of his conceptual model, (3) simplicity, (4) precision of language, (5) accuracy of the probability assignment." (C West Churchman, "Costs, Utilities, and Values", 1956)

"We have overwhelming evidence that available information plus analysis does not lead to knowledge. The management science team can properly analyse a situation and present recommendations to the manager, but no change occurs. The situation is so familiar to those of us who try to practice management science that I hardly need to describe the cases." (C West Churchman, "Managerial acceptance of scientific recommendations", California Management Review Vol 7, 1964) 

"A systems approach begins when first you see the world through the eyes of another." (C West Churchman, "The Systems Approach", 1968)

"It is sheer nonsense to expect that any human being has yet been able to attain such insight into the problems of society that he can really identify the central problems and determine how they should be solved. The systems in which we live are far too complicated as yet for our intellectual powers and technology to understand." (C West Churchman, 1968) 

"The systems approach goes on to discovering that every world-view is terribly restricted." (C West Churchman, 1970)

"To know that we are measuring real change we need to have a strong theoretical base." (C West Churchman, 1970)

"A system may actually exist as a natural aggregation of component parts found in Nature, or it may be a man-contrived aggregation – a way of looking at a problem which results from a deliberate decision to assume that a set of elements are related and constitute such a thing called 'a system'." (C West Churchman et al, "Thinking for Decisions Deduction Quantitative Methods", 1975)

"The theory of the nature of mathematics is extremely reactionary. We do not subscribe to the fairly recent notion that mathematics is an abstract language based, say, on set theory. In many ways, it is unfortunate that philosophers and mathematicians like Russell and Hilbert were able to tell such a convincing story about the meaning-free formalism of mathematics. [...] Mathematics is a way of preparing for decisions through thinking. Sets and classes provide one way to subdivide a problem for decision preparation; a set derives its meaning from decision making, and not vice versa." (C West Churchman et al, "Thinking for Decisions Deduction Quantitative Methods", 1975)

"Holism traditionally says that a collection of beings may have a collective property that cannot be inferred from the properties of its members." (C West Churchman, "The Systems Approach and Its Enemies" , 1979)

"The measure of our intellectual capacity is the capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better and better problems." (C West Churchman)