There are two main ways of civilization, commonly known as “eastern” and “western”.
“Eastern” acknowledges the complexity of the world and inability to formalize and transfer human experience. “Western” on the other hand is built on top of rationality.
Rationality comes from the Latin ratio, meaning “cause”, “explanation”, but also “relation”,—division into parts, analysis. Of course, the rational (reasoning, non-intuitive, non “Eastern”) type of thinking equally helps synthesis, the composition of parts to whole. Historically Western culture gave more importance to logic-based “analytics”, formalization and modeling. One can observe the results of this “Western” way of civilization development, which gave us modern science, engineering, management, and the securities market as an infrastructure for entrepreneurship.[1]
Unfortunately, rational, logical thinking or any other applicable types of thinking as well as their limitations in practice are not explicitly taught in schools and universities.
Today the dominant opinion among teachers is that “good” thinking can be acquired by teaching STEM: science, technology, engineering, mathematics. Unfortunately, the assumption that teaching STEM will indirectly teach thinking is not justified.[2] Each kind of thinking should be “taught” directly.
For example, if we want to teach logic, then we should teach it directly, not through computer science and geometry, like in school courses where logic is only used to write logical expressions during programming classes or when writing proofs for theorems during geometry classes. This book is written to fulfil this gap, but not fully—it teaches systems thinking directly, but does not touch other common kinds of thinking.
[1] More about the advantages of rationality over Eastern reliance on intuition and for “direct knowledge”, see A. Levenchuk’s texts “On Articulate and Holography in Sociology”, Об членораздельное и голографическое в социологии: ailev — LiveJournal and "On Intuition and Flair, http://ailev.livejournal.com/1295595.htm
[2] Lei Bao et al. have shown that reasoning and training in thinking based on a set of concepts are not the same, [0807.2061] Learning of Content Knowledge and Development of Scientific Reasoning Ability: A Cross Culture Comparison. Studying physics turns out to be not so “brain-straightening”—A historically held belief among educators and researchers is that training in physics, which has a beautiful structure of logical and mathematical relations, would in general improve students’ abilities in conducting reasoning that is intellectually challenging. However, the result from this study suggests that training in physics content knowledge in the traditional format alone is not enough to improve students’ general reasoning abilities).
*An excerpt from Systems Thinking course