Dear Ken,
Berstein's comments on differentiating sound ideas from loose-speculation reminded me of advice from a Prof at UWA on creating better design theory (he is now retired, and I can remember his face easily but his name escapes me). He suggested there were two essential and central criteria that differentiated good theories of design cognition and creativity from half-baked conceptual models. The first is how adequately a design cognition theory explained, included and predicted how humans have failures of thought such as illusions, delusions, forgetfulness, false consciousness(!) etc.. The second was how adequately design theories explained, included and predicted processes of human oddities of being; such as happiness, magnanimous behaviour, intution, anger, retaliation etc. Both are criteria for correspondence and predictiveness - though perhaps in a broader sense than Berstein proposed.
Cheers,
Terry
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Dr. Terence Love
Dept of Design
Curtin University
+61 (0)8 9266 4018
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<snip Ken Friedman>
In an essay titled "how can we be sure that Albert Einstein was not a
crank?" physicist Jeremy Bernstein (1993: 15-27) addresses precisely
this issue. Bernstein asks how we can distinguish between the idle
speculation of crank research and the fruitful speculation of the
innovator.
Bernstein proposes two criteria to separate the production of a crank
from the real thing. One criterion is "correspondence." The other is
"predictiveness."
<end snip>
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