ken, keith, chuck, and others.
in preparation of a talk on dialogue i have been rereading rom harre and
some wittgenstein. maybe i can state the problem we are having somewhat
clearer.
when i say "i see a black car" i am placing my body in relation to
something that i experience as a black car. in saying this, i also commit
myself to the truth of this report of my experiences, which are part of the
circumstances that i am reporting.
by contrast, the statement "the car is black" does not place anyone on a
scene and does not report on anyone's experiences. it states a fact that
can either be true or not by some criterion that does not seem to require
anyone: the color black can be measured as the total absorption of light
and engineers may apply a decision criterion to determine whether the object
in question can perform as a car. you may notice that the latter requires
the conception of a car, human involvement, but engineers have a way to
objectify their conceptions by spelling out measurable performance criteria,
also called specifications.
theories, the way they are used in scientific explorations, just as ken
friedman's reproduced definitions show, are stating relationships between
objects, measurable quantities or qualities, including generalizations and
speculations as if these relationships had nothing to do with how a theorist
chooses to see them. of course there are theorists who must put their
observation into words, but theorists are discouraged from putting
themselves into the picture, especially since what they theorize must be
true for others as well, and in the natural sciences for everyone, including
god. this is why laws of nature are attributed to nature not to a culture
or ingenious inventor, why scientist say they have "found" evidence for
their theory, that a hypothesis is decided by the facts in hand -- as if
they were independent of the practices of human beings.
it is a trade mark of the natural sciences to not let the body of its
practicing scientists, objectivist scientists to be more specific, enter
their accounts of observation. this is encoded in the grammatical
constructions that acceptable theories require. it amounts to the denial of
the role of the theorist in the theory that is claimed to be true or
questioned as such, regardless of who set the statement into the scientific
discourse. scientific discourse is not about its scientists but about the
truth or falsity of propositions, theories, and laws.
"i see a black car" is an account of experiences and it does not need to
agree with someone else asserting "i see an old clunker" when seeing the
same thing. neither statement objectifies. to understand what something
(as i see it) means to others, i might collect the con-sensual (seeing the
same thing) accounts of many others' experiences, and if there are good
reasons for taking them not as deceptive, ironies, or otherwise
deliberatively misleading, conclude that they account for how we
collectively see.
an account of the meaning of something is not a theory of something, which,
as i suggested, denies, discards, excludes the observer or theorist
describing his or her observations. there are of course cases we can all
agree to, by common sense or by indoctrination, for example, that the sun
turns around the earth (true until galileo posited another truth, both
objectivist) is true by common sense. that iraq had weapons of mass
destruction, was true for quite a number of people before the iraq war but
not by experiences but by believing certain leaders who shamefully exploited
citizens' fears of others.
all theories by virtue of their grammatical construction hide their creators
and thus prevent readers or listeners of such statements from holding the
theorist accountable for their creations. this is the essence of the five
part movement, described in my previous post, which describes customary
practices in the natural sciences. i would hope that human-centered
designers would avoid these traps.
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) to understanding what we say or write (making
language the focus of our inquiry). i cannot cause anyone to make this
gestalt switch but i invite you to try. it opens a larger scope of
understanding.
i don't know why so many are concerned with theory, which is not what design
is all about. to bring this discussion closer to what designers should be
concerned with, i would rather like to turn to the concept of an affordance,
which presents a dual conception, neither psychologizing perception, nor
objectifying what is seen. it has many of the qualities of the embodied
understanding that i am advocating above and too has the danger of slipping
into cognitivism or objectivism respectively.
klaus
klaus krippendorff
gregory bateson term professor for cybernetics, language, and culture
the annenberg school for communication
university of pennsylvania
philadelphia, pa. 19104.6220
ken,
i am not sure what you are arguing. earlier you reproduced two lengthy
definitions of theory that confirm my understanding of theory as concerning
facts and not the theoreticians, not the creators of theory, which is my
point. by stating a theory one hides the cognition of the theorist, the
politics of stating this as opposed to another theory, even the aesthetics
of a theory.
you say that nobody says that laws of nature are found. i beg to disagree.
finding a theory, a law that underlies a phenomenon is common parlance among
scientist. to find something entails the belief that it must have been
there to begin with. the contribution of the theorist is merely to search
hard for what nature reveals, for the truth. or saying that the brain
follows certain rules (that a cognitive scientist promptly finds) assumes
that there are rules to be found. all of these quite common phrases buy
into the idea that truth, theories, and laws exist in the phenomena to be
explained.
i am siding with wittgenstein and rorty here who convincingly argue that
truths are not in nature but are properties of expressions in language.
there are no facts without stating them, naming them, re-cognizing them.
they reside in how we language, what we do to make arguments compelling.
theory, quite like in your definitions, deny the observer. i am far from
liking the way the concept is used. but believe me, i am a social
scientist. my colleagues develop and argue with theories. i am on several
journal's editorial board where scholars submit their empirical studies. a
great effort is made to detach the theorist from the theory s/he creates. i
already mentioned the claim to have found something, a pattern, a theory, a
law. there is active editorial discouragement if using the I of the
observer, for example not saying i have found, but it has been found, hiding
one's accomplishments behind a god's eye. there is a concerted effort to
control with the aim of avoiding observer biases, fearing that observer
involvement would ruin the facts of nature. you mentioned in passing that
if A had not discovered theory X, someone else would have. this belief is
further evidence for my claim that the language we use in connection to
theories suggests that the discovering scientist, the observer, is
accidental or almost irrelevant in the face of the observed.
garfinkle analyzed the tapes of the discussions and conversations that lead
to the "discovery" of the pulsar. he could show that the whole effort was
directed by certain beliefs in the validity of a theory. it was a theory
which drove the discoverers of the pulsar to designing instruments to bring
it forth and lo and behold they managed to generate the hypothesized
phenomenon. woolgar analyzed garfinkle's account plus several other
examples and stated the process of developing scientific theories and
propositions in four steps:
(1) one starts with some kinds of documents in the form of theories,
preconceptions, speculations, even prejudices, if you like
(2) these documents generate the objects of interest. they would not come
about otherwise
(3) after the objects have thus been brought forth, one needs to separate
the object from what generated it
(4) now one turns the causality around and makes the objects responsible for
how they are described (enter documents), applying truth functions to the
propositions describing these object (letting the supposed nature of the
objects decide which propositions are true and which are false)
(5) one conveniently forgets or must deny stages (1) through (3). what
matters is the truth of proposition, theories, and laws or other kinds of
linguistic constructions.
this process can be observed in the hard sciences. conveniently forgetting
(1) makes the cultural origin of scientific inquiry no longer recognizable.
conveniently forgetting (2) hides the procedural/conceptual construction of
the object scientist are inquiring into no longer recognizable, in effect
exorcising the observer. conveniently ignoring the effort of (3) invites
the epistemology of objectivism into the picture, making object out of
product, ending with scientific knowledge whose sole criteria is
representational kind of truth -- incidentally, to which the definitions of
theory that you quote are now applicable.
the statement that aristotle's physics was wrong is evidence of the
presumption that truth lies outside us, to be discovered, to be found. i
would say that aristotle was not wrong at his time. in our culture we
merely hope to do things that the greek could not dream of [see (2) above].
the same is likely to be said about our strange belief in laws of nature and
other kinds of objectivisms, say, a hundred years from now.
i am sorry that this post has become so long, but celebrating theory entails
a huge amount of epistemological baggage, that i prefer not to carry along.
talking about theories in design carries the same baggage into design, which
i hope to avoid at least in my own work
klaus
of investigation
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and
related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf
Of Ken Friedman
Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 2:09 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: theory as a car -- distinguishing among theory and theory
construction, authorship and process
Dear Klaus and Keith,
Your (Klaus's) note to Chuck, below, suggests to me a problem in the way
you are describing theory.
It is true that people construct theories. Theories arise for many reasons.
Some have to do with time and place, others with individual genius.
It is likely that someone would have developed the special theory of
relativity had Einstein not done so. (Poincare nearly did). It is not
as likely that someone would have had the physical insight to develop the
general theory of relativity.
The fact -- position? understanding? -- that people construct theories does
not make responsible theories or laws of nature less true.
The theories of relativity are as close to laws of nature as anything human
beings have developed -- discovered? created? designed? -- in the long
history
of scientific creation. To the degree that they represent a case or
situation
in a universe or world of events and facts outside their author, they are
a discovery or a finding. It seems to me BOTH true to say that Einstein
created a statement of these laws AND true to say that he won his way
through to series of understandings that represent a world outside his
individual mind and person.
Many physicists and historians of science would claim that these
representations describe "laws of nature." No one acquainted with the
history of science -- and certainly no physicist -- would claim that
Einstein "merely found" these laws.
The two theories of relativity are physical theories or laws that accurately
representing physical phenomena at a higher and more deeply integrated
level than any law developed previously. The integrative and
representational
power of Einstein's creation is such that scientists are still mining
these laws
for surprising entailments. They still turn up occasional surprises. Keith's
comment on "left-over speculations by Einstein" indicate just how easy it is
to misunderstand or get the nature and difficulty of this work wrong.
The debates on some of Einstein's ideas are part of a reasonable and
responsible scientific conversation that continues in the absence of its
author precisely because the author's construction was powerful. This has
as much to do with the fact that Einstein's work represented an external
world well as it has to do with the fact that scientists are human beings
who construct theory and assign value and social status to other scientists.
Consider this case:
Scientists debated Aristotelian-Ptolemaic physics for nearly two millennia
before Copernican-Keplerian-Newtonian physics replaced the earlier ideas.
At the same time that Aristotle was wrong about physics, he was far more
right about social science and ethics than our contemporary theorists in
some
fields understood during much of the twentieth century. The rediscovery
of Aristotle's work seems to me a reasonable outcome of the development
of such fields as organizational learning and knowledge management. Would
you (Keith) call this new work a debate on "left-over speculations by
Aristotle"?
Aristotle's physics was unworkable because the counterintuitive nature of
physics does not readily yield to the kinds of direct observation on which
Aristotle based his work. Greek science in general had a problem
because it had only two of three necessary elements. While the Greeks used
observation and theory construction, they lacked experiment as a way to
choose among competing theories. And one would have to acknowledge
that even if the Greeks had used experiments, these experiments would have
necessarily been limited by technology and instrumentation. (Why the
Greeks never developed the idea of experiment is a complex issue. While
I have my speculative thoughts on why the idea never occurred to the
otherwise inventive world of Greek science, this is irrelevant here. One
might even posit possible outcomes of what a world of Greek experimental
science would have been like, but that is "what if" history.)
In contrast, Aristotle could observe and act in the world of human affairs.
These observations entailed a world that he could understand on a
different basis than the counterintuitive physical world. The
representations that we can now label social science remain useful and
profound today. The fact that social scientists ignored this work and
the fact that they have rediscovered it does not make Aristtotle's social
science a "left-over speculation." It demonstrates that human beings
struggle to understand profound problems. These struggles can
take millennia. What we learn in the intervening centuries creates a new
background and context against which we can understand other issues
more deeply. We discard some ideas and return to reconsider others.
We design and create cities, buildings, software, and products. Everyone
acknowledges that human beings are the creators, inventors, authors, or
designers of these entities. Once we create them and set them into the
world, these entities have an ontological status as existing artifacts apart
and separate from the authors that create them. Whatever happens to the
individual designers or groups of designers that build our cities,
buildings,
software, and products, the rest of us may reasonably treat these entities
as things that exist apart from the human beings who created them.
We may reasonably say, "this software program has a user interface with
these qualities" without speaking about the designer. We may say,
"the traffic flow through the city is poor at this point" without worrying
about who designed the specific network of streets, and without at each
moment worrying about how the specific network goes back through a
series of complex evolutionary iterations to an eight-century cattle ford
or a footbridge first established in the 1200s.
In some regards, adequate physical or social theories are like this. If they
represent the world outside their authors reasonably, we may reasonably
use them as tools without at each moment thinking about the lives and
persons of those who created them, and without placing them against the
context of their times.
Theories are tools. Like all tools, we may study their history. The history
of our tools teaches us a great deal, and at some point, it is important to
study and understand the history of our tools. Like all tools, however, we
may also use them without at every moment studying their history.
I would be willing to argue that the special theory of relativity states a
law of nature in concise form. I would also argue that this law represents
a state of affairs apart from the person and personal history of its author.
I would simultaneously argue that Albert Einstein -- the author of special
theory of relativity -- created this representation. (I do not claim that
Einstein created the underlying physical facts that he represents in the
theory, but I don't think you claim this, either.)
I simultaneously argue that the Einstein's personal qualities and personal
history -- set against the background of human history and science and
embedded in a social and technical context -- formed the basis of his
creation.
None of these statements contradicts the other.
One of the problems I see in the comment below is a failure to distinguish
between theories, what theories represent, the authors of the theories,
and the process and context of theory construction.
While keeping these issues in mind makes the discussion more challenging,
Einstein used to say that we should make our ideas as simple as possible
but not more so.
Warm wishes,
Ken
On Sun, 15 May 2005 18:34:09 -0400, Klaus Krippendorff
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>charles,
>
>the proposition "E=mc square" says nothing about einstein, the fact that he
>invented it at a certain age against the background of competing
theories --
>that it has much to do with the vocabulary of that time, etc. proposition
>are simply true or not (with such qualifications as not yet, probably,
under
>certain circumstances, etc. permitted).
>
>people who claim this to be a law of nature that einstein merely found
>cannot simultaneously accept that it has been constructed for various
>personal and institutional reasons. believing E=mc2 is a law of nature
>denies its social constructedness. ontological beliefs are beliefs,
>convictions, commitments, and they are followed not as testable theories.
>
>klaus
--
Ken Friedman
Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management
Design Research Center
Denmark's Design School
email: [log in to unmask]
|
