To all

Again, I could not resist, so here goes, my penny's worth:


Steven Toulmin Return, in *Return to Reason* (2001:111) wrote: “The key
features of practical reasoning … lies in their focus of attention.” He was
speaking of the clinical arts, but we may as well substitute “the design
arts” in its place. By “clinical” he meant the training a young medical
student had to (should) go through, and specifically “the key task of
clinical practice: *taking a patient’s history*. To what extent is a
patient’s condition [present design situation] a result of earlier
diseases, accidents, or other misadventures? To what extent must we explain
it, rather, by the patient’s family background, upbringing, and experience
in life? And what pointers do we need to attend to, if we are to see just
what the patient’s problem is, and how it can best be remedied?” [changed
to a preferred design situation]. Reasoning in design, then, can be said to
lie in its focus of attention, and that focus is as much on the people
being designed for as it is on “technical” aspects of what can be designed
or not (material science).


It should be made clear that Toulmin means by “clinical” a mixture of the
technical and non-technical, science and “non-science”, a mixture, in
design’s case, of inductive and deductive logic. “These questions serve to
define what I will here be calling ‘clinical’ knowledge, and the contrast
between a practitioner’s reasonable judgments and a theoretician’s rational
computations will throw more light on the general differences between
Rationality and Reasonableness.” Can we agree that design has everything to
do with the constant switching between rationality and reasonableness?
Between ‘science’ and ‘belief’? If, in the modern world of service design,
interactive design, Rationality takes the lead to the exclusion of “belief’
/ tradition / culture / Reasonableness, it can be argued that this turns
into social engineering, for the sake of selling products and services, and
it is but a short step away from selling ideas, aka political propaganda.


Toulmin (2001:112-113) then states “Life as we live it, in its daily
concreteness, has a complexity that prevents experiences from being listed
as neat, ready-made ‘cases’.” Toulmin then quotes the author Robertson
Davies, who defined wisdom as “that breadth of the spirit which makes the
difference between the first-rate healer and the capable technician”. The
difference between a first-rate designer (who knows he or she is not a lone
superstar) who can deal with the complexity of modern life, and a capable
designer who comes up with solutions that suit the rational design
profession. Richard Boland and Fred Collopy, in *Managing as Designing*
(2004:6), speak of the difference between the decision attitude and the
design attitude; the former “solves problems by making rational choices
among alternatives … [but they have a weakness] … in that they take as
given the alternative courses of action from which the manager is to
choose.” The manager, the doctor, the designer, they are all the same –
choosing from among rational alternatives as if life were that simple and
ordered. And disciplined. “The design attitude, in contrast, is concerned
with finding the best answer possible … and takes for granted that it will
require the invention of new alternatives.” I maintain that this is the
switching between rationality and reasonableness, and new alternatives can
only be found via the constant switching between inductive and deductive
logic and reason.


I am a believer in undiscipline, I believe in the in-between, in those
spaces of becoming where these new alternatives will reveal themselves,
i.e., in the constant interaction between induction and deduction, and that
creates a field of force (Pierre Bourdieu) that can be called abduction.



Kees Dorst, in *The core of ‘design thinking’ and its Application *(2011:524)
has this to say about what he calls Abduction-1: “This is often what
designers and engineers do - create a design that operates with a known
working principle, and within a set scenario of value creation. This is a
form of ‘closed’ problem solving that organisations in many fields do on a
daily basis (see Dorst, 2006). The other form of productive reasoning,
Abduction-2, is more complex because at the start of the problem solving
process we ONLY know the end value we want to achieve. This ‘open’ form of
reasoning is more closely associated with (conceptual) design.


So the challenge in Abduction-2 is to figure out ‘what’ to create, while
there is no known or chosen ‘working principle’ that we can trust to lead
to the aspired value. That means we have to create a ‘working principle’
and a ‘thing’ (object, service, system) in parallel. The need to establish
the identity of two ‘unknowns’ in the equation, leads to design practices
that are quite different from conventional problem solving.”


Quite different, and in fact much closer to Boland & Collopy’s idea of a
design attitude, which neccesitates the invention of new alternatives. Peirce’s
three abductive solutions have to do with 1] Instinct, 2] Inference, and 3]
Distributed Cognition.


I dealt with abduction in my thesis in this way (A Gramma/topology of
Design Knowledge (:310-11) https://www.academia.edu/3088806/Gramma_topology
):

*A likely story concealed in a portmanteau *

Life itself is both simplified and complex, as Jakobson‟s Ladder shows, and
it is quite feasible that the outcome we seek should resemble an ongoing
story more than it does an established fact, especially when that outcome
is the identity of our enduring self and the identity of our discipline.
The only reality is in the telling of the story, in the experience we have
of being alive, in the flow, in the bubble. Not the photograph, not the
designed object, not the painting, but the experience of these objects and
events, *this *is where we can find ourselves, and if we are lucky we
experience the migration of the aura of whatever we are interacting with
from out there to in here, which only, really, happens when the other
crosses the border between out there and in here, and seeing that we are
the border, our changed consciousness reacts to the flowing story that
tells itself. As human beings that thrive on communication, we are not
simple conduits for information flows, because “We ourselves are
portmanteau Signs of a complex order. We are packing cases of multiple
meaning large enough to make a human being a Sign of itself” (Kauffman,
2001:109). When [A] implies [B], meaning when [A] implies [not-A], that
becomes a “convenient sign for implication”, and it is “significant to see
the sign of implication as a complex sign composed of other logical signs”,
according to Louis Kauffman (2001:84), and since this complex sign has an
underpinning of simplicity, we arrive at inference as a portmanteau sign
that “glues” the disparate “meanings into a coherent whole” (:84).

The self + implication + inference, these are portmanteau signs, therefore
it seems reasonable to compare this view to von Foerster’s (1972) idea that
the information that can be extracted from a description depends on our
“ability to draw inferences from this description”, and I would add, to
make inferences to the best explanation, also known as abductive reasoning.
There are deductive and inductive inferences, both complex signs derived
from necessity and chance, respectively, and these concepts cannot be made
applicable to the world except as our efforts to describe that world (von
Foerster, 1972), while Peirce (1998:233) spoke of deductive necessity, of
inductive probability, of abductive expectability, and wondered where these
came from? How does inference work, and what is its form? I interpret that
to ask, how does abduction work, and what is its form? Well, according to
Kaufman (above), abduction has a portmanteau form, and this portmanteau
sign is used to glue all other meanings into a coherent whole; inference
travels across borders between inner probability and outer necessity, and
it does so as abductive expectability.

However, Peirce (:233) also states that inference cannot be conceived by us
if by inference (and here the term includes inductive, deductive and
abductive inference) we mean something that has already been settled, and
so can be adopted as part of the system of knowing. When asking, *where
does inference come from*?, we must remember that *we *are the portmanteau
sign of complexity, but we also The continuing argument to the self have
the character of self-control, “which distinguishes reasoning from the
processes by which perceptual judgments are formed, and self-control of any
kind is purely *inhibitory*”. Our portmanteau form, in order to work as it
should, is also a *holding-oneself-back *form (above), i.e., inhibitory,
and as such originates nothing, and yet *holding-oneself-back is but part
of the portmanteau*, which can only be a portmanteau if it straddles both
sides of the *sive *(Richard Jung’s term for both and/or at the same time)
border and functions within the fields of force, within a full abductive
argument. “What can our first acquaintance with an inference, when it is
not yet adopted, be but a perception – a perception of the world of ideas?”
(:233), i.e., the fluctuating fields of force we take as social universes,
and where reason is generated, and also where “you must make arguments,
demonstrations, refutations triumph in them” (Bourdieu, 1998:138).

Bourdieu, P. (1998). *Practical Reason*. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.

Kauffman, L. H. (2001). The Mathematics of Charles Sanders Peirce.
Cybernetics and Human Knowing 8(1-2):79-110.

Peirce, C.S. (1998). The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings
Vol.2. N. Houser, J.R. Eller, A.C. Lewis, A. De Tienne, C.L. Clark and D.B.
Davis (eds.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Von Foerster, H. (1972). Notes On An Epistemology For Living Things.
http://grace.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/cybernetics/heinz/epistemology/epistemology.pdf





Without any disrespect to Charles Burnett …

Or, so I believe.

Regards

Johann

On 18 March 2016 at 02:17, Keith Russell <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Dear Chuck,
>
> I don¹t mind questioning the use of things (utility) but I grow concerned
> about the ³purpose of a theory².
> For me, the essential aspect of a theory is that it shows something that
> couldn¹t otherwise been seen.
> At this level of just showing, the ³purpose² would seem to be a rather
> lightweight thing like ³because humans like to show stuff²
>
> The question of purpose is important, for me, when it comes to other
> conceptual things like models and guides.
>
> Hence: the purpose of this guide to design thinking is to Š
> And
> The purpose of this model of design thinking is to  . . .
>
> What do you think?
>
> keith
>
>
>
>
>
> On 18/03/2016, 9:00 AM, "PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD
> studies and related research in Design on behalf of CHARLES BURNETTE"
> <[log in to unmask] on behalf of [log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> >"To be effective the purpose of a theory must be clear,
>
>
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>



-- 
Dr. Johann van der Merwe
Independent Design Researcher


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