dear ken,

when you say "The first answer makes no sense," i believe you.  you entered
YOUR premise into my argument, which is that there IS a world independent of
anyone observing, experiencing, or describing it. i didn't say that and this
premise doesn't make any sense to me epistemologically.

your second argument that the world is co-constructed is unproblematic, so
is language and communication.

your third argument, relying on critical realism's claim that there is a
reality we can reasonably well approximate, proves my contention.  a claim
occurs in language.  what is "reasonably" is decided by argument, not by
observation.  critical realists talk.  they haven't seen the world without
seeing.  they cannot explain the world without using language.

klaus


     
-----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: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 3:50 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Is all writing fiction?

Dear Klaus,

Thanks for your reply. I'd argue that this is exactly where we start to
slide down that slippery metaphorical slope. There are three ways to answer
this.

In the post to which I replied, you wrote:

--snip--

If fiction is what is created by an act of invention -- as my dictionary
suggest,  i'd argue more generally

THE WORLD WE KNOW IS FICTION

--snip--

The first answer is a version of Medieval logic-chopping. The world we know
is effectively the world there "is" so you can see how I translated that
into the claim that "everything is fiction." If _all_ you can ever claim to
know is fictive, then the idea that everything is fiction isn't that far a
leap. If "every known thing is fiction" 
how could we _know_ whether any one thing is fiction or not? This is
logic-chopping, so I'll stop here. Except for an irresistible touch of
Aristotelian cosmology: perhaps the world we know is fiction while the
heavens are not.

The first answer makes no sense.

The second answer is pragmatic. I'll agree that we create the world through
our understanding and our use of language and other symbols. 
This is classic symbolic interactionism going back to the Mead-Blumer
tradition. But we do not create the world alone. We co-create it, and we
share it with others. We are not homunculi trapped within the fallible frame
of a nervous system watching the world by remote control through the eyes of
a giant whom we steer, a giant body whose sensory apparatus is separate from
ourselves, transmitting signals that we sense. I'll agree that it is
difficult to know the world, and that we are often mistaken in our
interpretations and understandings. 
This situation is exacerbated precisely because we share the world with
other human beings, building our symbolic universe with them. We understand
and experience the world through the nomos of common cultures. But this very
fact also means that however imperfectly, we create a world of common
understandings based on some kind of reality outside the private world of
self and personal speech. Much as we speak of intersubjectivity in
scientific analysis, there are forms of intersubjectivity that function in
understanding common, shared worlds.

No one is ever fully connected to a reality outside the interpretive
mechanism of our nervous system, but neither are we some sort of radical
creatures that a sixteenth-century philosopher might describe. Saying
reasonably that our experience of the world creates the world for us, and
saying reasonably enough that we have no true access to the world except
through our nervous system does not lead to the radical claim that no world
exists outside our nervous or the equally radical claim that any world we
can know is effectively fiction simply because there is no form of absolute,
knowable truth or objectivity. To say we can never really know the world
outside except through the workings of our nervous system verges on the
"brain in a vat" argument. In fact, if the claims you make are so, one might
well argue that you have no real way to know whether what you believe is so
or not. You could be entirely mistaken without knowing that you are
mistaken. The epistemological problem here is that your argument seems to
rest on a double standard: you seem to claim that the rest of us suffer from
an epistemological problem because we speak of things as if we believe that
they are so -- and then you argue as though what you believe is so.

I'll argue that even though there is a real world that we cannot genuinely
know in any comprehensive sense, we do know the real world reasonably well.
This is not a fictive world. Even though we co-create our interpretation,
experience, and understand of the world through mechanisms that fit
constructivist perspectives or symbolic interactionist perspectives or
pragmatist perspectives, these descriptions explain how we interpret the
world without any need to claim that the world is a fiction.

The second answer seems reasonable enough to me. But there is a third
answer.

The third answer is that we have evolved from earlier creatures selected by
the process of evolution. This process means that our ancestors got here and
stayed here because our nervous systems were suited to understanding and
interpreting the world in which they found survivable niches. Those who were
incapable of gaining effective access to reality went extinct. The
descendents of those ancestors -- us -- can access the world through
reasonably effective nervous systems. We often interpret that real world
badly, but the world as many of us know it is not fiction simply because
some of us do badly.

If evolution is merely a fairy tale or one plausible scientific account
among others, this may not be so. If George Bush and his creation science
friends say that men started out as dust and women started out as a rib. If
that's true, I suppose we may not have access to reality outside our nervous
systems after all. This would certainly explain a great deal about what has
happened in the world during the past eight years. Whatever the Lord has
been blowing into the president's nostrils, I'd argue that evolution
accounts for the rest of us.

If this is the case, it accounts for the properties of most designed
artifacts and the nature of the creatures we design them for. That, in turn,
rests on the real properties of the world and the fact that we can access
them reasonably through a nervous system that allows us to do so. The
properties of human being in human cultures shape our interpretations of the
world. In this sense, we create the world through culture and through
language. Our nervous systems give access to a real world. I'd hesitate to
say that our nervous systems "create" the world in the same way that
language "creates" the world. 
The process of evolution suggests quite the contrary: the world created the
nervous systems, and these systems link us effectively to the world except
for people suffering from the kinds of neurological or psychological
problems of the kind we meet in Oliver Sacks's books.

There is an exception. Evolution apparently fails to explain some
politicians and those fundamentalists who stand four-square on the literal
Bible. Other than the elect and the elected, however, evolution explains how
most of us got here, and it explains some aspects of how designers work.

Critical realism in several flavors, symbolic interactionism, pragmatism,
and constructivism in several flavors suggests that there is a real world
that we can access reasonably well without arguing that "every known thing
is fiction." Biology, evolutionary biology, and evolutionary psychology
would reach the same conclusion.

It seems to me that there is no epistemological problem here. In contrast, I
see serious epistemological problems in the radical claim that "the world we
know is fiction."

Yours,

Ken



>dear ken,
>
>your statement "(if) everyTHING is fiction ..." is not the same as 
>"every known thing is fiction." if you confuse the two you get into 
>epistemological troubles.
>
>how could you assume that the acknowledgement that the known world is 
>fiction prevents you from deciding which one is better, more 
>reasonable, or responsible?  sure, some fictions are better than 
>others.  the point is that you can't talk about a world without talking 
>about it.  you don't have access to a reality outside of your nervous
system that creates it.
>
>klaus


-- 

Ken Friedman
Professor

Dean, Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia