User:Per nyfelt/Magoroh Maruyama

Magoroh Maruyama
Born 1929 in Japan. He graduated from the University of California Berkeley with honors in mathematics 1951 and undertook postgraduate studies in at the universities of Munich, Heidelberg, Copenhagen and Lund where he obtained a PhD in in cultural epistemology 1959. Among the Universities where he has taught are:

* University of California at Berkeley, Psychology and logic (1960-62) * Stanford University, Human problems (1962-64) * San Fransisco State University, Psychology (1968-1970) * Antioch College, philosophy (1971-1972) * Portland State University, Systems Science (1973-1976) * University of Illinois Urbana, Anthropology and architecture (1976-1977) * University of Oregon, Sociology (1980) * Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Business Administration (1979-1982) * Uppsala University of Sweden, Anthropology (1982) * University of California Los Angeles, Management (1983) * National University of Singapore, Business administration (1983-1984) * University of Hawaii, Business administration (1984-1986) * Univerité de Montpellier, International business (1986) * Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, International business (1987-1996)

He has authored more than 190 publications in a wide range of subjects including psychiatry, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, cybernetics, architectural design, urban planning, social change, business management, and neuroscience. He has been a consultant to Volvo, Michelin, Monsanto, OECD, NASA, MITI of Japan, USA Department of Commerce, USA Department of Interior, Federal Motors of Indonesia, Government of Ivory Coast, and the City of Baghdad.

In all the fields in which Professor Maruyama has worked, his central interest has been in the heterogeneity of individual perceptual, cognitive, cogitative and epistemological patterns. This was motivated by some practical problems: (a) While some individuals understood him immediately, many others did not, no matter how hard he tried to communicate. (b) Some individuals found foreign countries to be a better match to their epistemological patterns than their own home country.

A specific example for (a) is the following: When his article article "The second cybernetics" (American Scientist 1963) was published readers immediately understood its quantitative side, i.e. that changes can be amplified in causal loops. However, the more important qualitative side, i.e. that interactive heterogeneity is indispensable, desirable and increasing went unnoticed.

Before its publication in American Scientist, the manuscript was rejected by ten other journals because this qualitative side was not understood by the journal editors. After its publication, it was cited in more than 230 publications, according to Citation Classic but in most cases, the readers still did not even notice the qualitative side. Professor Maruyama realized that this must be due to epistemological rather than intellectual limitations of the readers because the "sub-understanders" included eminent scholars.

An example of (b) is the story referred to by Professor Maruyama in several of his articles where he, while living in Scandinavia between 1955 and 1959 and frequently commuted between Malmö in Sweden and Copenhagen in Denmark, discovered that some Danes found Sweden to be a better epistemological environment for them than Denmark, while at the same time some Swedes found Denmark to be a more compatible epistemological milieu for them.

In the 1950s, the differences between Sweden and Denmark in terms of epistemological environment was as follows: In the Danish culture, the mail purpose of daily conversation was maintainance of familiar atmosphere and affect relations. For example, a group of friends often sat together in the same coffee shop, eating the same pastry week after week, telling the same or similar gossip. Subtle variations were considered interesting. For example, everyone in the group knew that Mr. X tied his left shoe first, then his right shoe. One day he reversed the sequence. This became big news. Less subtle informations was avoided because it might disturb the familiar atmosphere. It was impolite to explain things, because such an act assumed that someone was ignorant. It was also impolite to ask questions on anything beyond immediate personal concern, because the respondent might not know the answer. It was often considered aggressive to introduce new ideas. One preferred to repeat the same old jokes. Discussion of politics or economics was taboo, except in marginal enclaves. Safe topics of intellectual conversation were art, literature and music, on which you could disagree without embarrassment, because people were expected to have different tastes. In contrast, in Sweden the purpose of daily conversation was transmission of new information or frank expression of feelings. One preferred to remain silent unless one had an important message, while in Denmark one had to keep talking. The two countries had almost opposite epistemological environments and Professor Maruama notices that some individual crossed the border to find their epistemological match, which proved the heterogeneity and transculturality of individual epistemological types (a.k.a. Mindscapes).

Some of Professor Maruyamas major contributions to science
1. The theory of increase of heterogeneity by causal loops. 2. The theory of heterogeneity and transculturality of epistemological types. 3. The theory of aestetic preferences as indicators of epistemological types and the development of the pictorial test "TOB test" to indicate ones epistemological type. 4. The methodology of Heterogram Analysis to discover transcultural or transsocial individual types (not limited to epistemological types). 5. The theory and methodology of criticality dissonance, relevance dissonance, endogenous research, and raw-experience visualization-enabling communications (REVEC). 6. Transition of neuroscience from perceptual/cognitive experiments (PCE) to cogative/epistemological experiments (CEE). 7. Design of wearable helmet-type fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) brain output transmitters, with which the tested individuals can move around and interact.