ken,

you accuse me of rephrasing what you said and then disagree with the rephrase.

wasn't it you who invoked an etymological fallacy in conjunction with my arguing that facts originally meant being made and that i do prefer that meaning to one that you used when you said that "gravity is a fact"? i never said that the original meaning would have to be preserved. in this case this is my preference.

didn't you criticize me for my preferred interpretation of research as "re-search" = repeated search for patterns among data (in order to assure "findings" are correct and replicable) telling me that i had it all wrong based on the french origin of the word?  i have no problem with the original french meaning but relied on english syntactical conventions of the meaning of the prefix "re-" in my very useful clarification of what scientific research means. who is committing an etymological fallacy?

i publically admitted adding the adjective "incontrovertible" to your use of "fact," how else should i read your statement: "I describe gravitation as a fact, but there are several ways to describe this fact" ? your statement allows alternative "descriptions of facts," but takes "facts" as unquestioned givens.  apparently you ask us to accept the "fact of gravity" as independent of human experiences and of how we conceptualize, describe, or cope with these experiences.  i read carefully what you say.  elsewhere you continue this conception by speaking of what underlies these experiences as being separate from the facts as described. i don't want to draw on physicists who questioned the existence of gravity and have started to theorize gravity experience as a side effect of several other objective conditions, but i challenge you in the spirit of a dialogue to show me gravity without human experiences, including language to account for these experiences.

i don't think you can show me an observation without an observer and i suggest you are sucked into a representational theory of language that forces you to seek some observer-independent reality outside or prior to human experiences, perception, and language. don't get me wrong, i do accept that there is a reality outside of us but we cannot know it until our conceptions of it fails us.

you said you didn't write about objective and subjective knowledge. what about this your sentence: "With respect to subjective knowledge as contrasted with objective knowledge, however, intention and purpose make a massive difference."

i think it is not me but your language that casts you into a cartesian.  your appeal to layers of complexity is not enough to undo your distinction of objective and subjective worlds and the two kinds of knowledge of them. i read carefully what you say but i would like you to show me what you say underlies human perception, experiences, and linguistic constructions.

in the end, i would like us not to forget that the whole discussion started with terry's call for universal design as an alternative to human-centered design. personally, i like to leave the construction of the universe to physicists and i would urge you not to separate "laws of nature" with what physicists theorize.

klaus


From: Ken Friedman [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2014 8:49 PM
To: Klaus Krippendorff
Subject: Off-List Re: Knowledge

Dear Klaus,

Thanks for your reply, below, from a few weeks back. As I've written several times, a discussion list makes a poor forum for detailed discussions that require careful epistemological distinctions. This has been an interesting conversation. Despite our differences in perspective, your comments pushed me toward greater clarity on issues of mutual interest and evident disagreement, as well as on issues where you don't seem willing to allow me to agree.

It is not helpful to discuss epistemology or philosophy of knowledge with you on the list. I've spent too much time trying to respond to your last note. Much of my response had to do with explaining that you've misinterpreted or reframed what I wrote.

I do not use such terms as "incontrovertible fact" or "undisputable truth." These kinds of words transform my position, changing the meaning of what I wrote.

To attribute words such as "incontrovertible fact" or "undisputable truth" to me makes my views appear to be inflexible, rigid, and narrow. The effort is not promising. Every time I attempt to make things clear, you have re-voiced my words in blunt, harsh terms that I did not use. The words you attribute to me reflect a Cartesian viewpoint, but I do not use those words.

The short answer on epistemology is that I do not suggest that there are two kinds of knowledge. There is only one kind of knowledge: knowledge is what a knowing agent knows, but this does not mean that what a knowing agent knows is necessarily correct, and agents may know in many kinds of ways. There are different objects of knowledge. It is this position that you have apparently taken as a "Cartesian binary."

But I did not write about "objective knowledge" and "subjective knowledge." As with the phrases "incontrovertible fact" and "undisputable truth," this is your restatement of what I wrote.

I used bracketed phrases to indicate that I was struggling with tentative and unsatisfactory terms. I explicitly stated that these terms are problematic but that they point toward a direction.

What I attempted to describe involves [tentative phrase] [subjective knowledge of things to be known that can and must be known through subjectivity] or [tentative phrase] [subjective knowledge of things to be known that may and should be known through information and data about objective matters].

I attempted to state that both *kinds* of knowledge are the same, but the *objects* of knowledge are different.

The PhD-Design List is clearly not a helpful forum for this kind of clarification. When you rephrase my views using words I do not use, my position seems to be narrow, rigid, and inflexible. This is not helpful to either of us or to the conversation.

Rather than quibble or appear to critique your position in ways I do not intend, I prefer not to respond on the list, but rather to think and work at this quiely until it reflects my views adequately.

I am not asking you to agree with me. Rather, I am asking you to disagree with my views and my language rather than transforming my views into something else with which you disagree.

I have not used the four terms you attribute to me: "objective knowledge," "subjective knowledge," "incontrovertible fact," and "undisputable truth." I don't want to answer for the epistemology in these terms.

This conversation has been disappointing to me in one regard. You usually insist that we musty respect and attend to the language and the words that people use. You seem to argue that it is vital to allow people to speak in their own language from their own perspective. You argue that we should respect the views and perspective that others bring to each dialogue.

You have not treated me or my words this way.

Instead, you reframed my words. The four terms you attributed to me - "objective knowledge," "subjective knowledge," "incontrovertible fact," "undisputable truth" - do more than make me sound like an epistemological Cartesian. They cast me in the role of a methodological positivist in the tradition of Comte, and a determinist in the tradition of LaPlace.

It's hard to carry on a good conversation when one is triangulated by this particular trinity.

I appreciate and value your work, I will think on what you've written. But I prefer to work quietly on my own views rather than be made into a Cartesian, Comptean, LaPlacean and then have you critique the views of that poor fellow.

I'm closer to the insomniac, agnostic dyslexic who sat up all night wondering if there is a dog. My dog Freddy usual sits up with me waiting for an answer.

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | University email [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Private email [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman

Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Adjunct Professor | School of Creative Arts | James Cook University | Townsville, Australia

--

Klaus Krippendorff wrote:

-snip-

i am glad the paper alfredo introduced in our discussion and my post gave you pause and i am pleased you affirmed many things i stated from the origin of the word fact to copernicus finding simpler descriptions of the movements of planets not facts.

you quote the "economist" for defining an etymological fallacy which consists of believing that one has to continue the original meaning of a word in the present. i have never heard anyone insisting on that and i never dreamed of that suggestion. i merely take the liberty to define how i like to use a word and going back to the root of "fact" is a preference that opens ways of seeing what is otherwise closed. to me it makes sense to say that facts are made when i read ludwik fleck's famous book titled "genesis and development of a scientific fact" or bruno latour and steve woolgar's "laboratory life; the construction of scientific facts." it makes also sense to say that facts are made when wittgenstein writes of "tatsachen," loosely translated as "things done by deeds" even when it translated as "facts" in the english text.  i grant that your use of the word fact an undisputable truth is not unusual, but it is what we call a conversation stopper: someone who claims that something is a fact (in your sense) is not willing to question its validity. this is unfortunate, also in view of the paper that alfredo introduced in our discussion.

quoting the "economist" you also say that nobody thinks of persons as wearing a mask although this is the original meaning of the word person. in much of social scientific writing the distinction between a person and its self is precisely one of playing a role, hiding one's self behind a mask worn for others, being not one's true one's self. etc. similarly, the japanese are very much concerned with their face, doing face work, attending to the image one wants the public to sees, not who someone really is, metaphorically wearing a mask.  maybe one should not ask the "economist" but the "ethnographer" or "social scientist" what it means to be a person.

my whole point of objecting to the universalist view that terry advocated was to bring the conversation back to what humans experience, talk of, and design, making terry and you aware that we can't observe the universe without being an observer, that there is not content in a text without reading, that claiming the ability to see the universe from the perspective of a god who has no body, now standpoint, and no perspective is delusional and certainly not helpful for human-centered designers.

i don't see how you can agree with me that there is external reality that escapes our observations and simultaneously claim to know that gravity exists regardless of how we describe it.

what i find unfortunate is that you are not willing to resolve these contradictions and instead shifty gear to an abstract concept, knowledge, that entails the same contradictions but perhaps makes them less transparent.

let's face it, knowledge is a noun that externalizes the process of human knowing. nounification enables you to talk of knowledge in the abstract and as separate from human beings and actions. in one of your posts, you realized that this isn't quite kosher and so you introduced the distinction between objective knowledge and subjective knowledge inviting the cartesian binary back into the picture. with that you have arrived where we disagreed with a supposedly superior universalist conception and a somewhat inferior human-centered conception.

ken, you haven't escaped from your strange epistemology challenged by alfredo's paper.

-snip-





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