In the 1970s, five ways of knowing were established by C. West Churchman in The Design of Inquiring Systtems. In the 1990s, his student Ian Mitroff carried on the tradition and extended that work in The Unbounded Mind. Now in the 2020s, the technology of Generative AI opens up opportunties to query or request responses through chatbot interfaces, drawing from bodies of codified knowledge in a style expressed implicitly or explicitly. Just as there are multiple ways of knowing, there are multiple ways in which underlying language models can be implemented and/or mixed.
The January 2025 Systems Thinking Ontario session, included:
- the progression of patterning of information, in a simile of a recipe collection, from the days of cookbooks on library shelves, through the now familiar technologies of search engines and data science, to the new transformer and retrieval augmented generation techniques;
- some Q+A chat challenges, feeding the same question and observing the differences in responses across (i) OpenAI ChatGPT, (ii) Microsoft Copilot, (iii) Mistral LeChat, (iv) Anthropic Claude, (v) Google NotebookLM, and (vi) Preplexity.ai;
- five inquiring systems described in a mini-lecture, followed by summarized descrptions by each of the six generative AI products; and
- a hypothetical scenario requesting the how the five inquiring systems might guide ways of deciding about Small Modular Reactors for Canada.
The discussion closed with an outline of Type 1 errors, Type 2 errors, Type 3 errors, and Type 4 errors, as structured by Ian Mitroff.
The slides ae posted on the Coevolving Commons.
The recording of the slide presentation and live demonstration is available on Youtube, with an alternate retention on the Internet Archive .
| Video | H.264 MP4 |
| Jan. 8 (1h57m) |
[20250108_ST-ON/20250108_ST-ON_Ing GenAIInquiringSystems_1920x900.m4v (1920×900 630kbps 648MB) [on the Internet Archive] |
The standalone audio may be less enlightening through the demonstrations, but are also available.
| Audio | |
| Jan. 8 (1h57m) |
[20250108_ST-ON_Ing GenAIInquiringSystems.m4a] (126kbps, 109 MB) [on the Internet Archive] |
Pre-reading appeared on the original abstract. An excerpt of the session description follows.
— begin excerpt —
Generative AI works by analyzing language (or other digital input), and synthesizing outputs. In what ways might system theories help us augment intelligence?
Five ways of knowing were philosophically grounded as inquiring systems.
- “Inquiry is an activity which produces knowledge”. C. West Churchman (1971), p. 8
- “An Inquiry System, or IS for short, is a system of interrelated components for producing knowledge on a problem or issue of importance.”. Ian Mitroff (1995), p. 29
These ways of knowing not only explain how people can come to understand some ideas as “true”, but also can aid in grounding logic(s) towards structuring the validity of findings and conclusions.
This session will:
- trace the development of information processing (i.e. from web search to generative AI);
- outline five ways of knowing, as inquiring systems; and
- review diversity in the way that generative AI is appraoched by a variety of (free, without charge) providers of chat.
— end excerpt —
The pace of the dialogue was leisurely, making sense of the new AI technologies. During the live demonstrations, I noticed that some features of the products had changed even over the past few days. As we’re preparing for a new school term at the university, the group discussioned how the technology might (or might not) augment intelligence.