Kent D Palmer
Kent D. Palmer | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | September 26, 1951 |
| Residence | Orange, CA, United States |
| Nationality | USA |
| Alma mater | University of Kansas, London School of Economics, University of South Australia |
| Known for | Special Systems Theory |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Systems engineering, systems science, philosophy |
Kent Duane Palmer (born September 26, 1951) is an American systems engineer, software engineer, and philosopher known for developing Special Systems Theory, an extension of General Systems Theory that he also refers to as Reflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special Systems Theory.
Biography
Palmer earned a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and East Asian Studies from the University of Kansas in 1974. He received a Ph.D. in Sociology and the Philosophy of Science from the London School of Economics, University of London, in 1982, with a dissertation titled The Structure of Theoretical Systems in Relation to Emergence. In 2009 he was awarded a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of South Australia for a dissertation titled Emergent Design.
Palmer worked as a real-time software engineer and systems engineer in the aerospace industry for some three decades before moving into agile-at-scale consulting for commercial firms. He resides in Orange, California.
Work
Palmer's philosophical work centers on ontology and the question of how new things come into existence. He developed Special Systems Theory beginning in the early 1990s as a meta-theory positing emergent discontinuities between distinct levels of organization: a Dissipative Ordering level drawing on the negative-entropy work of Ilya Prigogine, a Living or Autopoietic Symbiotic level drawing on the autopoiesis theory of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and a Social or Reflexive level drawing on the work of John O'Malley and Barry Sandywell. He grounds the theory mathematically in hypercomplex algebra and non-orientable surfaces in topology.
His related research encompasses General Schemas Theory, Worlds Theory, and Emergent Design, the last of which reframes systems engineering as "emergent engineering." His curriculum vitae and numerous monographs on these topics are available online.
See works at http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer especially Reflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special Systems Theory. Also works at http://archonic.net and http://about.me/emergentdesign