Warfield attended the World Forum conference in 2007 for the purpose of publicizing his new book among scholars from other countries and other disciplines. Given only 15 minutes during a morning session with many speakers, he was the only one among them who actually limited his talk to exactly 15 minutes. He managed to get the gist of his ideas into that 15 minutes, and he was roundly applauded, since some of the scholars were incredibly long winded. The World Forum had an exhibit room where members could display their wares, which ranged from sculpture to poetry and books and art. Warfield got opportunity to display his book on a table, and I think that the brochure for the book was there too. I remember asking him why he was bothering to go to a conference so plainly separated from the technical meetings he usually attended. He said he was having poor luck getting academics and technical types in the U.S. to pay much attention to his work and maybe the thing to do was branch out, to try reaching people with widely different backgrounds and experiences who might see the value in what he was trying to do, and actually put it to some good use.
For this talk, Warfield had prepared a 6 page manuscript holding 1 page of text and 5 pages of transparency. Here is annotation of the manuscript written by Rose: "The relative complexity of a modern day problem situation can be measured by using computer-assisted group input to construct a diagram of knowledge about the situation displayed as a massive flow chart, then counting the number of Aristotelian syllogisms on the flow chart. To demonstrate his method, Warfield showed an engineering flow chart developed for a manufacturing process at Ford Motor Company and used it to explain the concepts of transitivity and complexity measurement. Warfield had previously written a much more technical paper on the same subject, titled "A New Index of Complexity". However, this talk prepared for an audience from other countries and other disciplines, was in layman's terms, much shorter and a little bit simpler."
Titles for each of the 6 pages in the manuscript: The Aristotle Index: Measuring Complexity in the 21st Century ( one page text document, Feb 5, 2007); Summary Table of Historical Background; Tabulated Values of Aristotle Index Ranked for Various Situations; The Aristotle Index is a Property of A Structure; A Problematique from the Analytical Powertrain Ford Workshop; Example of One Graphical Syllogism on a Problematique. Other pages prepared for the talk but not sent to GMU: World Forum Presentation, July 2007; Aristotle's Syllogism: Four Ways to represent it; List of Published Problematiques; Washington Talk (talk outline, 2 versions). Also presented, a homemade brochure for Warfield's new book.
HISTORY OF "ARISTOTLE INDEX" PAPERS: My records show that Warfield's first printed information about his "Aristotle Index" was in 1996, in a manual titled "Contrasts" a handout for the audience at the 19 Nov.1996 session of NASA Systems Requirements 4 (REQ4), a Short Course held at Holiday Inn Executive Center, Greenwich Road, Virginia Beach, VA 17-22 Nov. 1996. In June 1997 Warfield printed a lengthy article titled “A New Index of Complexity: The Aristotle Index.”in his "Essays on Complexity" and he frequently discussed the Index in classes and lectures in 1998 and 1999, and later years as well. The Aristotle index appears in Warfield's 2002 book Understanding Complexity in his 2006 book An Introduction to Systems Science, and in his unpublished book manuscript "Generic Systems Science." There was never a complete separately published paper just on the Aristotle index. However, transparencies from the above presentations were saved in Warfield's "WORK IN PROGRESS" note-binder, to be used as part of a new book he was thinking about writing, to be called "The Evolution of Systems Science" with Aristotle's teachings featured as the start-up point.
r.w. circa 2009.
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