chuck,
ok, i am also glad to retire from the thread.  (though the issue of
affordance is something i wished we would take up as fundamental to design)
i feel that i am writing about something very different from what you seek
to agree or disagree with using an epistemological framework that i am all
too familiar with but that just has no place for what i am saying.  i can
send you a recent paper, to be published in 2005, on the issue of double
description, which is fundamental to product semantics and which i developed
from the introductory lecture that i gave on the subject at the university
of the arts where you taught for a long time (keith, you already have that
paper.  if someone else is interested reading it i am happy to send it).
klaus

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Burnette [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 5:27 PM
To: Klaus Krippendorff; [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: theory as a car -- distinguishing between theory and
theorist


Klaus:

Thanks for correcting me on the source of "Form Follows Function" The
assertion of Mies that I was looking for was probably"Less is more".

>On 5/18/05 2:50 AM, "Klaus Krippendorff" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> I did note that the theories that i know well have the linguistic
structure
> that avoids the kind of dual descriptions that would enable theorists to
be
> held accountable for their constructions.  the difference between the
> statement "it IS a black car," which can be true or false, and someone
> saying "I SEE a black car" to someone else who can see the same thing (not
> necessarily as a black car) is the "I" that can be held responsible for
> saying so.

It seems to me that an assertion "it is a black car" is an assertion by
someone who professes to know the correlation between the terms and the
meanings people attach to them however they do so, using scientific evidence
or otherwise. In my opinion, they are no less accountable for what they say
than someone who says "I see a black car"

> i said (in the first half of an originally complete statement):
>> what is required to understand the arguments i am making is to make a
>> gestalt switch from understanding what statements are ABOUT (treating
>> language as transparent)
>
> you disagreed by saying:
> This is an interpretation that goes way too far. Language is never wholly
> transparent. It depends on the interpreter as you have argued many times.
>
> and to the second half:
>> to understanding what we say or write (making
>> language the focus of our inquiry).
>
> you replied:
> If language is the focus of our inquiry rather than the circumstances of
an
> experienced situation what happened to the facts you described? Where is
the
> meat (as the ad so cogently says)?
>
> when you say that "Language IS never
> ..." , how could i argue with what you state as a fact that is independent
> of your speaking?

You can hold me accountable for my assertion in the context of the
communication and question or refute it. Besides. aren't you placing too
heavy a burden on the word IS which functions in metaphor as well as to
assert something potentially factual.

> you say that language is the focus of my inquiry when i
> just said that it is the use of language by someone with embodied
> experiences that is of interest to me.

I guess I missed that in the post I was replying to.

> already chomsky observed, we speak
> mostly in the absence of what we are speaking about -- but remember, fear,
> wish to construct, etc.   you seem to disagree based on your own
distinction
> between language and what it is about, which reproduces the distinction
> between theories and facts,

This is the wrong interpretation of whatever you think my "distinction
between language and what it is about" is. Language can be about anything.

> affordances are neither physical nor cognitive nor
> representational but reside in a recursive process of bodily reliance on
an
> environment.

How exactly could a body rely on an environment without physical, cognitve
or representational processes which afford the possibility of
interdependence? You are relying on a restricted definition by Gibson (who
coined the word) but others use it differently, for example:

"... the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of
the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how
the thing could possibly be used. A chair affords ("is for") support, and,
therefore, affords sitting." Don Norman in The Design of Everyday Things,
(p. 9):

I agree with you that an active interdependence is central to the concept,
but so are the capacities that enable it.

I'm bowing out of this thread because I don't think we're getting anywhere.

Cordially,

Chuck