Trial, error and knowledge in Rittel and Webber’s “Wicked Problems” and Latour’s Promethean monism

Abstract

In the essay “‘Wicked Problems’ and ‘Tame Problems’: deconstructing an aporetic dualism in dialogue with Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn” (2024), we proceeded with a critical and deconstructive analysis of the dualist foundation of Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, established in the article “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning” (1973). The aim was to escape the aporia created by the two authors, when they ontologically distinguished scientific and engineering fields from planning and public policy fields. In the current essay, we synthesize our already established monist thesis for “tame problems” and “wicked problems” and confront it with Bruno Latour’s thesis, also monist, on “matters of fact” and “matters of concern”. Starting from the myth of Prometheus in Plato, we proceeded with a critical analysis of the lecture “A Cautious Prometheus?” (2009), by Latour, exploring the “symbolic forms” of language and myth, by Ernst Cassirer, the concepts of trial and error in Karl Popper and scientific anomalies in Thomas Kuhn. The objective is to make Latourian monism explicit and ratify our own, putting into perspective the nature of knowledge and error in different fields, with special attention to design and science.