This is the second volume dedicated to C. W. Churchman.The volumes of the Book Series entitled C. West Churchman's Legacy and Related Works are edited for the purpose of promoting the cross-pollination among fields, areas of study and disciplines and people from all walks of life in order to enrich the foundations of Management as well as to provide solutions to its own theoretical, political and practical quandaries.Each of the authors whose writing appears in this volume, make an original contribution to the Management discipline that needs infusions of novel ideas from several other disciplines if progress is ever to take place.C. West Churchman (1913Churchman ( -2004) was a prolific author whose texts The Systems Approach (1968), A Challenge to Reason (1968), The Design of Inquiring Systems, 1971), The Systems Approach and Its Enemies, (1979) among others, encouraged us to study the philosophy and the epistemology of the management disciplines which had been neglected heretofore. As his texts attests, CWC (for C. West Churchman) was a strong believer that Management could never become a credible scientific discipline unless it re-discovered the source of its moral authority, based on healthy questioning within context.
SkepticismSkepticism is the source of doubt. Skepticism (also spelled "scepticism), is the philosophical view that "we lack knowledge", (Dancy & Sosa, 1992), or in its more extreme formulation skepticism questions the premise that credible knowledge exists or that we can find justification(s) for it Hecht, 2003).
C. West Churchman's SkepticismC. West Churchman was a skepticlet us say a "mild" skeptic. Let us explain why. There are all kinds of skeptics.Descartes is the best known "modern" skeptic (as opposed to Ancient Skeptics) who in the seventeenth century laid the foundation for contemporary skepticism. In modern times to be a "skeptic" places you in good company, with the likes of Kuhn, Foucault, Derrida, Quine and Rorty (Audi, 1999:847). Modern Skepticism is applauded due to its articulated or may be non-articulated thrust in rejecting old forms of thinking and obsolete paradigms in favor of new approaches to the questions of coherence and truth.
