Once again Warfield presents as a last-minute substitute (this time for Sadofsky, a Russian speaker who could not make it) at the Washington Evolutionary Systems Society Meeting at George Washington University, on the topic “Second Order Thought." This material is in paper copy only, in Box 21 Folder 36 of Warfield Collection C0016, Fenwick Library. The document consists of excerpts from the book manuscript A STRUCTURE-BASED SCIENCE OF COMPLEXITY.* It was used as a handout at the meeting, which was held at the conference room in Stuart Umpleby's Research Program on Social and Organizational Learning at George Washington University, 2033 K St. NW, in D.C. Warfield had prepared about 30 overhead transparencies in order to have plenty to fall back on, but we got there late because of not being able to find a place to park at the Metro station, and the talk got started late; and he didn't do as complete a job as hoped. Below is the list of the 12 transparencies shown during the lecture. Prof. Umpleby had a small tape recorder and he taped the talk, but I don't know if we will ever get a copy. Umpleby also took photo of Rose and John Warfield seated at the conference room table, which he said would be on the WESS website, but I didn't write down the URL. He wanted to put the talk on his website too, but Warfield asked him not to do that because the material was part of his book recently submitted for publication.
*Please note that the title of this book manuscript was changed before publication. When finally issued by AJAR Publishing in the year 2002 the book had the title UNDERSTANDING COMPLEXITY THOUGHT AND BEHAVIOR.
List of transparencies shown for the Washington Evolutionary Society meeting: The Augean Stables, Photo of many oxen, Von Foerster's First Law, The Fate of an Innovation (Schopenhauer), The Central Message, Second Order Thought, Complexity is that sensation…(Peirce quote), Seven Milestones in the History of Thought on 2 pages, Friedman's analysis Defective models (Friedman), First Appearance of Mathematical Symbols in Print, parts 1,2,3, and The Aristotle Index. Also found and displayed a page from the handout, a Problematique on p. 28. NOTE: In the Warfield Digital Collection, this October 1999 slide presentation and talk has been confused with a slide presentation which Warfield gave six years later, for the American Society for Cybernetics meeting in Washington D.C, at George Washington University on October 29, 2005. The two presentations had similar titles, but different content. In the 1999 presentation the idea of "Second Order Thought" was discussed by Warfield, possibly one of the earliest presentations of the idea. In the 2005 presentation the same concept of second order thought was again presented but the slides were not transparencies, but photographs of systems thinkers in a historical line.
(R.W. circa 2007)
