A Postmodern Metatheory of Knowledge As A System is about the age-old question, "what do we know and how do we know it is the truth"? The original intention of the text was to be a summary of the position of Western philosophy on the question, but it soon became clear that postmodern knowledge is a much more complicated subject than philosophy by itself can answer.

To form even a superficial and provisional theory of knowledge, in addition to philosophical concepts one has to consider neurophysiological realities including, vision, language and how the brain manipulates data. In addition, sociological, anthropological and psychological issues that impact on the ways we manipulate knowledge needs to be considered. The outcome is a multifaceted and multidimensional model consisting of the sense data that we experience as well as the ways that we construct and interpret the world we live in symbolically. And such a metatheory shows that ultimately it becomes impossible to pass judgement on the truth without knowledge of the context within which it exists and objective truth is merely imagination. This position is decidedly postmodern, but the dilemma of postmodernity is that if anything goes and there is no objective truth, the rich fabric of life becomes dull and pessimistic.

One possible escape from this double bind is to include knowledge of the spiritual dimension, which traditionally is excluded from the discourse and that transcends many existing notions of how and what we know. If the legitimacy of this argument is granted, one ends up not only with a much richer canvas, but also a situation where the traditional phenomenal and symbolic begins to touch and intermingle.

Gerrit van Wyk's interest in what we know and how we use what we know to make decisions started after a Masters dissertation in Systems Management at the university of Cape Town titled Medicine And Medical Process As A Learning System, which was examined externally at the University of California Berkeley. During a career in healthcare spanning twenty-five years, he saw countless examples of decisions going wrong both on the clinical and planning sides. the search for answers to the question "why do we make so many mistakes in our decisions" took him through many disciplines including sociology, psychology, anthropology, spirituality, and so on and culminated in this text, which is the outcome of many years of personal research. he made numerous presentations to lay and professional audiences about the subject and is currently practicing medicine in Moose Jaw. He also has an MBA.