Table Of ContentPRAXIOLOGY
An Introduction to the
Sciences of Efficient Action
by
TADEUSZ KOTARBltfSKI
Translated from the Polish by
OLGIERD WOJTASIEWICZ
PERGAMON PRESS
OXFORD . LONDON . EDINBURGH · NEW YORK
PARIS . FRANKFURT
PWN—POLISH SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHERS
WARSZAWA
Pergamon Press Ltd., Headington Hill Hall, Oxford
4&5 Fitzroy Square, London W.l
Pergamon Press (Scotland) Ltd., 2 & 3 Teviot Place, Edinburgh 1
Pergamon Press Inc., 122 East 55th St., New York 22, N.Y.
Gauthier-Villars, 55 Quai des Grands-Augustins, Paris 6
Pergamon Press GmbH, Kaiserstrasse 75, Frankfurt am Main
Copyright 1965
by PAtfSTWOWE WYDAWNICTWO NAUKOWE
PWN—Polish Scientific Publishers
Warszawa
First English edition 1965
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 63-22600
Original title:
Traktat o dobrej robocie
Printed in Poland (DUJ)
CHAPTER I
THE CONCERNS OF PRAXIOLOGY
CONSIDERATIONS included in the present work come within the scope of
praxiology — the general theory of efficient action. Both the need for,
and the possibility of, such a discipline are obvious. Recipes for good work
possess varying degrees of generality. "Write so distinctly that at least you
will be able to read your own notes without difficulty" is a very detailed
instruction; festina Unte, on the contrary, has a very wide range of applica
tion. The praxiologist concerns himself with finding the broadest possible
generalizations of a technical nature. His objective is the technique of
good, efficient work as such, indications and warnings important for all
work which is intended to achieve maximum effectiveness. On his way
to so ambitious a goal he may also derive satisfaction from partial achieve
ments, and he takes pleasure in formulating in a more general way the
recommendations of the various experts, each in his own sphere. This may
lead to a rationally ordered set of recommendations, both positive and
negative, such as would hold good in all fields and all branches of human
work. But generalizations may take another road. For instance, it is possible
to start from the differentiation between individual and collective action,
and thus come to study not only both the specific and the general char
acteristics of efficient work done individually, and not only both the
specific and the general traits of efficient work done collectively, but also
(and, from the praxiologists's point of view, above all) whatever is typical
of all efficient work, irrespective of whether it is performed single-handed
or by a group. Further examples of a trend of generalization : the purely
intellectual solving of a problem as an instance of mental work, contrasted
with digging as an instance of manual work — these, beyond question,
are quite distinct kinds of active behaviour. But for all the distinction
between them — which after all is not absolute, since all manual work
includes elements of mental work — both the one and the other have
common standards of efficiency. For instance, in one and the other it is
desirable to plan in advance the stages of action; in one and the other
it is advantageous to achieve, so to speak, "at one blow" what a less
efficient worker achieves only as a result of a greater number of impulses.
2 Praxiology
It is clear, therefore, that in my opinion the principal concern of praxiolo
gy consists in the formulation and justification of standards appropriate
to efficiency. That principal concern, however, requires support in the
form of practical experience, the result of the toil and struggle of innumer
able agents. The theorist of efficient work will build his generalizations mainly
on such practical experience: he will with the utmost care investigate the
progress of all human knowledge, and also the history of practical blunders
and of endeavours that ended in failure; will seek that which is the essence
of the mastery achieved by -those who excel in their work; will focus his
attention on the ways of acquiring ability, ways which lead from clumsiness
to complete mastery of a given art; will inquire penetratingly into the
difference between average and record-breaking techniques. Much has
already been achieved when it comes to improving forms of action and
developing effective methods. The accumulation of observations made in
that respect is quite considerable. Many maxims embodying recommenda
tions, and many critical remarks which not infrequently ridicule the com
mon forms of bungling have been formulated. These are, to the praxiolo-
gist, immensely instructive, and of unique value.
Practical experience can be utilized in at least two ways: either by
drawing general conclusions directly from facts observed, or by taking over
and including in one's own system generalizations made by others. In
both cases it is not only the general relationships and regularities in the
world of action, general in that world, but perhaps specific to it, which are
important. Such generalizations are perhaps nowhere to be found. Mostly,
we have to be satisfied with partial generalizations, within the scope,
as a logician would say, of the existential quantifier. We cannot always
arrive at "always" in our conclusions; usually, we have to content
ourselves with "persistent frequency" — so persistent, and combined with
such circumstances, that mature consideration permits us to see a factual
connection between a given modification of behaviour and a definite change
in the product. Let us not be miserly with examples. A child beginning to
learn the art of writing usually grasps the pen or the pencil wrongly, press
ing it too hard, with his forefinger not bent into an arc but fixed wedge-like,
the lowest joint pushed downward. A horse-rider who is a beginner usually
thrusts his feet deep into the stirrups, instead of resting his toes lightly
on them. Very few people, when they first try to swim, immediately
adopt the correct horizontal position; most double up somehow, and
sink. So it usually is with beginners in every field — the first motion,
apparently "natural", turns out to be wrong. Should such a motion become
habitual, the individual concerned would do his work inefficiently; either
just wrongly, or in a manner causing excessive fatigue, or simply worse
than it might be done. Thus, it becomes essential first to unlearn a clumsy
gesture performed more or less automatically, and learning from the
The Concerns of Praxiology 3
bottom up usually starts not from the zero point but from some minus level,
below the zero point of ability. Here is a quotation from a letter written
by a blind worker: "For the last fortnight I have been somewhat less
tired by brush-making; I have unlearned two unnecessary motions, so
that my daily norms can be reached in less time. What a relief!"
Similar generalizations of practical experience take on the residual form
of praxiological maxims: "Strike while the iron is hot", "You have made
your bed — now lie on it", "Qui trop embrasse, mal étreint"; the form of
current maxims of practical wisdom: "No more, no less", "If you have
to fight it, fight it from its very beginnings", "The better is the enemy
of the good"; the form of aphorisms pertaining to effective action and
formulated by various thinkers, for instance the saying of Aristotle — so
splendid in the original, so awkward in translation: "What we should be
able to do after prior learning, we learn to do only by doing it", or the
famous sentence of Bacon's, to the effect that "Matura non vincitur nisi pa
rendo". Let us also recall Lemanski's pithy saying from his fable The Dike:
"To build is hard; to destroy — easy". All such golden words call for
careful study, to find out what is the general idea behind the maxim —
often clad in metaphor — and to express it adequately. It is obvious that
the saying "Strike while the iron is hot" implies that a transmutable
substance should be worked on while it is in a condition for processing.
It would be difficult not to recognize the truth of such a saying. But it is
often otherwise with what is called the wisdom of nations embodied in
proverbs. How unfortunate in our folklore are maxims justifying negligence,
slovenliness and laziness; for instance, the well-known consolations: "A job
isn't a hare, it won't run away", "What is postponed is not yet lost". On
brief critical reflection, we reject them immediately. In other, intermediate,
cases a maxim may prove correct as applied to certain instances, yet be
invalid as a generalizing statement — for instance, the well-known saying
that all beginning is difficult. That is simply not so. There are beginnings
which are easy, e.g., the first steps uphill when the path is not yet steep,
in which case difficulties begin only when it comes to climbing proper.
But it also often happens that beginnings are difficult, more difficult than
later stages; as when we have to accustom ourselves to an unaccustomed
form of strenuous effort, for instance forced marches with full equipment.
In a word, it is self-evident that maxims which sum up practical experience
should be treated critically by the praxiologist : there is usually something
to reject, something to accept, and something to qualify by reflection and
comparison with one's own and other people's scope of knowledge.
The reader may well feel irritated: is the practical experience of mankind,
as realized by men, confined invariably to proverbs, maxims, and sayings?
Is there no literature on the subject, concerned with the issues of effective
work, literature originating from thinkers and scientists and their kind
r
4 Praxiology
from which we can acquire a general knowledge of effective work as we
learn special techniques from handbooks for engineers, physicians, lawyers?
It would be difficult to give a straightforward reply to that question. Prob
ably, the best answer is that, as far as I know, there is no strictly praxiolo-
gical literature, although praxiological motifs are scattered throughout
works dealing with other issues as their main subject matter. Before review
ing such publications in a summary way, I think I ought to draw the
reader's attention to that veritable mine of concepts and ideas tinged with
a praxiological approach — Section 1, Chapter V, Part III in Volume I
of Marx's Capital, which is concerned with the labour process and other
intimately related matters.
Marx's works in general are full of such ideas. They have been collected
in an article by S. M. Shabalov, "O soderzhaniyi politekhnicheskogo obrazo-
vaniya" (The Meaning of Poly technical Training), published in Sovetskaya
Pedagogika, 1945, No. 8. And in Capital appear words which are encouraging
for the praxiologist interested in the theory of efficient action considered
in its widest scope. Marx says that labour "is the necessary condition for
effecting exchange of matter between Man and Nature; it is the everlast
ing Nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is inde
pendent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to
every such phase" *.
Moralists, when instructing others how to live so as to avoid disaster
and keep a clear conscience, discuss such matters, in so far as is necessary
to shed light on the path of virtue and the wilderness of vice and down
fall — in conjunction with the issues of effective behaviour. Such a mixed
character can be seen in the fables of Babrios, Phaedrus, La Fontaine,
Krasicki, Mickiewicz, Krylov, and others. If we take, for instance, the
metaphor of a bull in a china shop, the point is not to stigmatize any
ill-will or aggressive intent; it lies in a general, emphasized criticism of
reckless or at least clumsy behaviour. Or take the moral of a well-
known fable: "Don't try to run before you can walk". This involves no
ethical values, but rather rationality in the sequence of actions, a gradual
acquisition of mastery. There are a great many such warnings and instruc
tions in the rich corpus of fable writings, in which the virtues of goodness,
honesty, and honour are constantly intertwined with recommendations
to be clear and to look to one's own well-conceived interest, and with
abstract statements entirely free from emotional propaganda, statements
which deal in a detached way with such issues as purposefulness and anti-
purposefulness or efficiency and non-efficiency of this or that way of setting
about things. Thus, not a few praxiological threads can be traced in the
fabric of fable-writing, although fables as such are neither principally nor
1 Vol. I, pp. 183-184, Moscow, 1954, Foreign Languages Publishing House.
The Concerns of Praxiology D
even to any extent treatises on good work. They belong to literature in
the narrower sense of the term, to fiction as opposed to theoretical
works or writings on technical subjects. It can generally be said about
literature in that narrower sense that it often includes a wealth of valuable
thoughts on good and on unsatisfactory work, although it is not principally
concerned with that issue. We can instance Robinson Crusoe — a veritable
dissertation on how to make use of substitutes when commonly used tools
and materials are lacking, and in particular on how to perform single-
handed, or with an unskilled assistant, jobs which are usually performed
by a team.
An intermediate place is occupied by political essays, such as Machiavel-
li's 77 Principe, socio-technical Utopias (Thomas More), and dissertations
on practical wisdom (Plato's Gorgias). They owe their intermediate place
not to a questionable prevalence in them of praxiological over ethical
elements, but because they are insufficiently theoretical in nature. It is
only ethical treatises, such as John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, that are
marked by predominance of theoretical elements. Among such treatises,
some known to the present author include a considerable bulk of praxiolo
gical investigations, pride of place probably going to Aristotle's Nko-
machaean Ethics, a work one of the principal ideas of which is that in the
field of efficiency of action it is not desirable to identify the optimum measure
of a factor which may vary in degree of concentration with its maximum
concentration — that optimum should be sought in some medium between
the two extreme possibilities.
Why do we engage at this stage in some perhaps premature review
of the possible sources of praxiology? The initial intention was to outline
the tasks of that discipline. And with precisely that end in view, we asked
ourselves, having stated that the main concern is to formulate the most
general standards possible of maximum efficiency we asked ourselves how
such standards might be justified. The answer was that justification should
be principally on the strength of practical experience; hence our readiness
to review the sources of knowledge of that experience understood either
as a set of efficient (or, on the contrary, strikingly inefficient) actions or
as a set of generalizations concerning the secrets of efficiency (or the causes
of inefficiency). Yet cognition of practical experience is equally useful in
performing another task appropriate to a treatise on efficient work —
realizing the dynamics of progress (confronted, of course, with the dynamics
of retrogressive trends), and that both on the scale of historical processes
and processes involving individuals and groups advancing towards or
regressing from mastery. What are meant here are tendencies towards
a certain specific sequence of phases, together with factors determining
certain specific changes. The Marxist dialectic outlines the execution of
that programme of investigations by stating, for instance, the persistent
6 Praxiology
repetition of transitions from "thesis" through "antithesis" to "synthesis",
the persistent eruptive re-emergence of new forms from gradually accumu
lating changes — at first only quantitative in nature — in coefficients of
earlier forms, the persistent repetition of transition from earlier to later
systems through intermediary phases which can equally well be included
in the one system or the other. The achievements of dialectics should serve
as a canvas on which to embroider the rich and intricate pattern represent
ing the forms and factors contributing to the dynamics of progress in the
mastery of action. In so doing let us not despise the efforts of thinkers
preoccupied with issues of universal evolution, the Hegels, the Spencers,
the Le Bons, and the Spenglers, even if the hank should prove to contain
more fibre to reject than thread to use. For we are concerned with the
thread and not with the fibre waste.
Finally, it is worth while devoting a moment of concentrated reflection
to those written sources from which we can learn most either by trying to
bring out and justify general practical warnings and recommendations,
or by striving to understand the dynamics of progress. In my opinion, that
literature predominantly embraces works demonstrating the history of
the development of the various practical disciplines, together with hand
books of the various arts, and finally researches on the contemporary
science of business management. The history of medicine, for example,
which represents progress as mutation on a very large scale, in the form
of the physician's interventions from reparative (therapy proper) to pre
ventive (prophylaxis), is very helpful to praxiology. The same trend of
development is observed in the art of teaching, in public administration,
and in other fields. Further, the history of medicine abounds in instructions
concerning excellent results obtained from exercises on substitutes
(animals, corpses, models) ; concerning the importance of adopting, as
standard measures, the various efficient manipulations incidentally devel
oped ; concerning the replacement — often salutary — of intensive active
interference by minimized interference which involves watching self-
regulating processes. All these developments are in fact very general in
nature, and very important and significant for general technical progress,
far beyond the field of medicine proper.
This is always so when we study carefully either the history of some
discipline or any penetrating handbook of this or that human technique.
Praxiological generalizations which emerge from such study not in
frequently overflow, so to speak, the limits of a given art and prove to be
rules of much more general validity. A wealth of such instructions is con
tained, for instance, in handbooks for those who want to acquire per
fection in some game, such as chess. What advice is given by a chess
player's guide? Examples of that advice are that victory is often determined
by a move which involves attacking two of the opponent's pieces simulta-
The Concerns of Praxiology 7
neously (more generally: endeavour to kill two birds with one stone);
that instead of effecting a check it often suffices to threaten the opponent
with a check and thus to force him to a move favourable to us (more gener
ally: intended action can often be successfully — and less expensively —
replaced by proving the possibility of such action) ; that the domination
of a square depends on concentrating on it the action of a number of pieces
(more generally: the same that is recommended by the traditional story
of the old man who on his death-bed instructed his sons in the art of de
fence: "See this single stick. How easily it can be broken! But see this
bunch of such sticks. Who can break it as a whole?").
The more we study the various sources, the more strongly do two re
flections force themselves upon us. The first is that mankind, treated as
a set of agents, as a hydra-headed homo faber, has already made all possible
observations concerning the effectiveness of the various arcana of active
behaviour, and that at the present time the theorist has only to clear up,
adjust, make adequate, systematize, and add quantitative precision to,
certain general qualitative directives. The second, always accompanying
the former, is an issue which causes embarrassment. How can we explain
the fact that so far no distinct discipline has developed devoted to realizing
the former postulate? Is it not an extraordinary paradox that homo faber
has not succeeded in formulating a grammar of action, if only after the
pattern of man as a being who speaks. For man has constructed, and in
many variations, the science of the forms of speaking. It is only of late,
perhaps only in the last seventy years, that something like a general praxiolo
gy has emerged. I refer to certain works by individuals working on the
theory of business management. They include numerous very general
observations, so general that in many instances the idea of a rationalizing
engineer coincides with a philosopher's methodological idea. Taylor, in
calling for a most far-reaching division of a complex problem into its
component parts, merely repeats — with reference to the processing of
metals, etc. — what Descartes recommended with reference to the spec
ulative tasks of a thinker. Fayol, in summing up the merits of a good plan
in terms of unity, continuity, flexibility and precision, enters the sphere
of the most general analysis of methods of all planned behaviour, and thus
goes far beyond the sphere of specialized issues of business management.
Adamiecki, in toiling on the principles of constructing timetables of work,
studies an issue important for all collective work, and even for all integrated
parallel active processes. This is by no means a problem specific to business
management. Moreover, the works of all those co-authors of the theory
of business organization and management, as also the works of other
pioneers of that discipline (or perhaps disciplines) — for example, Le Cha-
telier — are not lacking in programmatic statements which show that
their authors are consciously striving for a general theory of effective
8 Praxiology
action. And yet such works are still not praxiology. Why? Because such
general reflections on practice only appear sporadically and incidentally
in those works. The binding agent is concern for the profits of an industrial
enterprise. A step further must be made towards the emergence of a general
theory — a general theory of good, effective work. Let it become "conscious
of its own nature", let its embryonic forms develop into mature forms.
The last of the great responsibilities of praxiology (following on the
formulation of a system of recommendations and warnings of a general
technical validity, and the study of the dynamics of progress of human
abilities) I believe to be an analytic description of the elements of action
and of the most varied forms of action. By the elements of action I mean
here the agents, the material, the means and methods, the goals, the
products, etc. Examples of the various forms of action appear in the various
forms of co-operation, for example, on the one hand, a relay race, consist
ing of a linear sequence of consecutive actions of individual runners, and
on the other, the collective behaviour of an orchestra. The task now under
discussion is ancillary to the preceding two, of which the second, the study
of the dynamics of progress, is fully justified only as a preparation for the
first, namely that of formulating standards of effective action.
There is a certain number of works — very small, to the best of my know
ledge — which analyse the variety of forms of action from the most general
point of view. These are extremely ingenious works, little utilized so far.
Let me mention, by way of example, Bogdanov's Tectology (in Russian),
1922, and Petrovitch's work, Mécanismes communs aux phénomènes disparâtes,
1921 — each unique of its kind — on the structure of events. Both works,
which in all probability are quite independent one of the other, reveal
the dependence of praxiology on a more general discipline which, to
simplify matters, might be called a theory of events; that dependence is
also manifest from the guiding ideas of dialectics. This is quite comprehen
sible, since actions are processes, so that the morphology and typology
of actions must be a special case of the morphology and typology of proc
esses. And the latter, being kinetic events, consist in various changes
in things — things which in the case of actions are always highly complex
and include the agents themselves. That discipline on which praxiology
depends might equally well be called, and is sometimes called, the
theory of complex wholes. An example will not be out of place. Complex
wholes have various constructions and differ, among other ways, in the
diversity and complexity of the relationships connecting their component
parts: there are loose conglomerates, natural inanimate wholes like the
solar system, crystals, organisms, machineries, flocks, swarms, groups,
institutions. In more highly organized complex wholes we can distinguish
leading elements such as, broadly speaking, engines in certain vehicles,
heads in human beings, boards in corporations. The study of the degree
