Hi Victor,
Thank you for your messages.
I enjoy reading biographies of thinkers in various fields and histories.
I’ve recently read a great bio of Denis Healey. I understood your initial
email, however to be about creating and improving design theory. Your
following response on 13 Aug to me, Ken and Don seems to cast things in
terms of ‘Art/Humanities’ versus ’Science/Engineering’? That was not the
basis or essence of my original reply to your initial post. You seem to have
misread my email, which primarily used classic Humanities approaches to
analysis: that of careful précis and analysis of the essential elements of
argument, checking for validity, fallacies, elision, and reviewing the
completeness of reasoning and logic in your premises etc.
In hindsight, reflecting on your initial post and my reply, what I was
noticing and raising about your post was a concern about the gaps in the
arguments in your email, and a feeling your reasoning seemed fallacious.
This appeared to be a result of subtle changes in your arguments via
omission, over stretching and inclusion of spurious information that give
the impression that your argument was continuous and justified. My reply
responded to the apparent argument in your post, rather than concerns about
your reasoning. This email points to some of those latter issues which were
my underlying concerns.
In your first paragraph of your initial email, your argument started by the
claim that new universal theories [of design] have no relation to work done
before. This is a reasonable concern. It is useful that later theories build
on previously validated theories. You can see that in your email, the focus
of your argument at this point is on theory building. Your claim and any
argument about it is in the realm of theory qua theory and by implication,
epistemology, argument, reasoning, and all the critical analytical tools of
theory building, testing and validation. Within the paragraph, you appear to
slide, however, extending meanings into different topics by stretching
concepts. Your next shift is from creation of ‘theories’ to ‘extended
writings’ (in contrast theory building only needs ‘theories of’ not extended
writing); understanding of theorists’ challenges ‘of theorizing their
field’; the idea of contending with those who came before, etc. In each
case, these are part-whole fallacies. Fort example in the last one, on one
hand, you appear to be presenting the purely theory building argument that
needs reference only to the detail of earlier theories. On the other hand,
you have now slide via part-whole shifts in meaning, omissions, spurious
inclusions (e.g. other scholarly activities of sociologists, and
anthropologists), and stretching and extending of phrases, to the point
where ‘building theory on earlier validated theory’ now becomes ‘creating
theory must involve studying the extended writings of previous theorists’.
Your second paragraph appears to use similar fallacies to elide meanings .
In the second paragraph, two further elisions happen via the same methods of
shifts in meaning, part-whole assumptions, omissions, spurious inclusions
and distractions and stretching and extending of phrases. In this second
paragraph, you slide without valid justification from “‘validated theories’
in the literature” to ‘extended writings’ to ‘works/work’, to ‘thinking’,
and ‘political beliefs’. At the same time, you slide from ‘the literature’
to ‘thinking’ to ‘thinkers’, and then to ‘writings about the thinkers’. This
overall results in the focus in your argument shifting from an argument
about theory objects in ‘justified theories described in the literature’ to
‘humans and their biographies’.
In your later response to me, Ken and Don, you conclude with two similar
fallacious prepositions. The first is that in some disciplines ‘history is
an integral part of theorising about a discipline’ – again a part-whole
fallacy. Many things are integral to other things, but this does not make
them ‘of the essence’ of those other things. For example, sweeping my office
floor and billing customers are integral to my design and research
activities. Does this mean we should include sweeping my office floor as an
essential element of design theory? Second, and similarly, you suggest that
designing buildings could not be done without knowledge of the history of
architecture. Again this seems to be a part-whole fallacious argument.
Designing of buildings is assisted by knowing about the details of earlier
buildings. ‘History of Architecture’, however, offers a much broader
boundary of knowledge, including information about architects’ individual
lives and their peccadilloes. Whilst the details of architects lives may be
interesting, the information that contributes to designing better buildings
is much more specific, and I suggest the information and knowledge for
making *theory* in the realm of architecture is even more specific in its
role as a codification and even less concerned with understanding the
personal historical lives of individual architects.
To summarise, although I responded to the apparent argument, my underlying
concern was about the quality of reasoning. In general, it seems that when
we subject almost any publicaiotn in the design literature to careful
critical analysis re its theory and concepts, the reasoning is often less
than complete or justified and fallacious reasoning is commonplace for all
of us. As Don wrote, in part this is seems to be because theorising about
design activity is unusually hard. From experience, theorising about design
is typically more difficult than much of the run of the mill theorising in
the Humanities. An example, one particular project in 2000 analysing
computer-based application design involving emotion, had to discriminate
between and utilise in its analyses around twenty applications of the word
‘affect’ often with several different meanings in the same sentence. At that
time, I used pairs of suffixes for each. A problem for the design field is
that most writers about design face the same problems and attempt to use a
single meaning and slide around it using partial and often fallacious
arguments. The consequence the past literature is not easy to build on in
terms of making new design theory.
Best wishes ,
Terry
---
Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI
Director,
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
[log in to unmask]
--
-----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 Victor
Margolin
Sent: Tuesday, 13 August 2013 1:44 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: design thinkers
Dear Terry, Ken, and Don:
I appreciate the arguments you are making for your respective interests but
they do not relate directly to my post. First; I was not calling for lit
reviews. My comment refers to thorough studies of major thinkers in the
field in order to understand how their thinking about design developed. The
purpose of such studies is to learn more about how they evolved their
understanding of design rather than to see whether or not their ideas
contributed to a theory of design. Second; I think the quest for a theory of
design that is related to scientific theory is a cul de sac. There are
methods of designing but they are different from a theory. A theory should
explain what design is. Design is changing all the time so there is no
single theory in my opinion that will explain it. I also think that social
scientists have stopped looking for universal theories of their disciplines.
I don’t believe that there is talk of a science-like theory of anthropology
or sociology. These disciplines have become collections of multiple theories
and methods about different issues. Much of the so called theorizing about
design seeks to explain it as if it were an unmediated phenomenon that
appeared like nature and presents itself for explanations. Design is humanly
constructed. Therefore we ought to understand the thought processes of those
who have contributed most to constructing it. This is different from trying
to explain design without connecting it to its intellectual origins.
Therefore, I will reiterate that I believe a mature discipline reflects on
its origins and premises by examining the thought of those responsible for
creating them. That is different from seeking a theory of society , for
example, without recognizing that such theories are constructed by
sociologists. Therefore, we might do well to call a moratorium on attempts
to create a universal design theory that is rigorous and fallacy proof and
reflect more on the ways in which design has been constructed and continues
to be constructed as a practice. Papanek, for example, wrote a number of
books and articles. We should learn more about the totality of his thought
rather than continue to concentrate on one book. One purpose of studying the
thought of someone such as Papanek, Maldonado, Bonsiepe, Fuller, or Mumford
is to better understand how they thought about design for an extended
period. Such understanding can help others to think about the field in a
reflective way rather than contribute like scientists to a theory that in
the end does not adequately explain what design is. Terry, in his quest, to
create a scientific theory of design (modeled on engineering rather than the
fuzzier practices) relegates anything that does not imitate science to the
soft field of design history which is only for those who are unable to join
the big leagues of scientific theorists. What Terry does not mention is that
in many fields history is an integral part of theorizing about a discipline.
Imagine trying to create a legal theory without the history of how laws have
been made or of designing buildings without a knowledge of the history of
architecture.
Victor
Victor Margolin
Professor Emeritus of Design History
Department of Art History
University of Illinois, Chicago
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