Demosophia

According to Christakis and Bausch (2006), our modern societies require a new paradigm and method to resolve the complexity of the problems that we encountered. They propose a democratic participation paradigm and a method that is consisted of new language, symbols to facilitate the meaning dialogue. In the chapter (20), the authors discuss how this new paradigm is consistent to the evolution of the scientific thoughts: According to the authors, scientific evolution is made of three phrases: (1) Observer-independent, (2) observation and action dependent and (3) constructive observation. The third phrase includes all the stakeholders. In addition, the authors support their theoretical discussion with the example how the Native American uses this method to reconstruct their meaningful democratic participation, once lost.
This democratic participation is consistent with the dialogue in group dynamic that Schein (1999) discusses in the process of consultation. While this mode of dialogue engagement appears prevalent, the main obstacle remains in that how are we going to train the stakeholders of the method. In fact, Christakis and Bausch (2006) acknowledge this difficulty when they talk about the demosophia.