Hi Terry,
You say:
> You are right that there is a shift in this case, Most of the analyses I do
> are of theory qua theory and hence a lot of it requires a high level view.
> Looking at evidence of the limits to competence of us as individual humans
> is different.
Are we not human beings when we do theory qua theory?
As theorists, are we not subject to the same limitations of competence?
Or, is there a special dispensation for theorists?
It strikes me that theory, anyway, is at its best when it is based on a collection of individual cases.
When it comes to predicting outcome, there are a few things that are worth teasing out. On the one hand there are things which are difficult to predict simply because we don't know all the factors that contribute to the outcome. In this case understanding multiple feedback loops may be important.
More interesting are those phenomena which are non-predictable because it's impossible to determine the outcomes from the starting conditions, and no amount of feedback loops will help us. There are lots of physical and social phenomena of that kind. A lot of design fits into this type of phenomenon. The best we can hope for is that we try out a prototype on a small scale, and discover the unintended consequences, before we inflict them on an unsuspecting world.
As to the limited forms of prediction open to us in areas like my own, the most we can really say with any confidence about the way people will interact with our designs is based on the testing we do on prototypes before implementation. There is no massive body of theory behind such prediction but rather a simple assumption that if people can use a design in a particular way during testing, they are likely to be able to use the design in this way in the world. Or, put simply, if people can do something today, they are likely to be able to do it again tomorrow. Equally, if they cannot do it today, they are unlikely to be able to do it tomorrow: it's called suck-it-and-see. Not much of a theory I admit, indeed not really a theory at all, but about the best we have.
If there is any theory it is the processes we use and the way we describe them based on multiple individual cases. But even there, all we are really saying is that using this process worked in the past, so lets use it again.
David
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blog: www.communication.org.au/dsblog
web: http://www.communication.org.au
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