Dear Jean,
Thanks for some clear air.
One of the primary skills of designers is to be able to think of superficial
(or 'creative') ways of connecting anything to anything else whist avoiding
the hard work of describing the connection in epistemologically complete
detail. For example, think of a connection between a fish and a bicycle.
Watching myself and others I feel this designerly skill is however, fairly
unhelpful in PhD study involving philosophy and research. Philosophy and
research require the opposite skill of being incredibly precise about the
exact details of connections and relationships because it is the activity
that differentiates one position and chunk of knowledge from another.
I find the designerly approach to philosophical thinking can easily lead to
absolute relativism and subjectivism and is limited in its usefulness as
yourself, David and others have inferred.
When discourse involves design and philosophy, I've found it useful to look
at philosophical 'isms' - the different positions that underpin how people
talk about things.
The 'Book of isms' seems to have disappeared from the web but instead there
is now the incredibly useful
'Glossary_of_philosophical_isms' at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_philosophical_isms
Recent debates on PhD-design have demonstrated many different and
contradictory 'ism' positions - sometimes in the same posting!
Some clarity by authors of the exact 'ism' they are using would be helpful
to other readers.
For PhD students dealing with basic (though complex) issues in philosophy
relating to design activity, the following sources also seem to be useful
(at least to avoid naive mistakes):
http://www.iep.utm.edu/
http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html
http://www.ditext.com/encyc/frame.html
http://www.iscid.org/encyclopedia/
http://www.epistemelinks.com/Main/MainEncy.aspx
http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/
Best wishes,
Terry
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Dr Terence Love
Curtin University
Lancaster University
IADE/UNIDCOM
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