Dear Tim and Klaus
>"so, we can talk about design without knowing
>whether we can
do it. but what is it that
>one is then describing?"
A couple of quick points on this:
>This second-order first-person engagement (watching),
>as you say
Sid, gets us a kind of understanding
>(a kind of knowing), but, as you ask
Klaus, an
>understanding (a kind of knowing) of what?
Well, I suggest it provides a useful engagement in several ways:
>So, Sid, I think I understand, and accept, what
>an sofp-based
understanding of the workings of
>cogs (and similar things) is about, but
what
>is an sofp-based understanding of designing about?
I dispute your classification of first-person understanding as being soft, if this suggests that first-person understanding is somehow secondary to (not as good as) the explicit knowledge I presume you would class as hard understanding. I subscribe to the view that our primary form of understanding is the first-person, embodied understanding gained through doing. To represent that understanding in some explicit knowledge form (to talk or write about it) is a mere representation of what it is we understand by doing. I accept that embodied understanding in a certain sense could be described as being less robust (I would say more dynamic) than explicit descriptions, but all representations of understanding are simply that – representations. We may need representations (knowledge) for other reasons (communication, a corpus on which to build), but these remain a secondary form of understanding to the doing.
>If you respond by saying it's an understanding about
>designing,
then how is this understanding different
>from the first-order
first-person engagement (doing)
>based understanding the designer or
designers have
>about designing?
This is going to be a mouthful. It is different because it is a representation of how those designers represent their doing to others. It is a more direct representation because it is first-person, and can be directly related to your personal understanding of how the doing of others might be represented.
In summary:
First-order first person is doing, and the primary form of understanding (embodied experience)
Second-order first person is watching (physically or through the mind's eye), and is a representation of doing derived from personal experience (the representation is drawn from your own perspective and can be personally interrogated accordingly)
Second-order second person is talking and reading, and is a representation of some other persons’ representation of doing (the other person’s representation you are interrogating is less accessible than a representation derived from your own understanding)
The difficulty in extracting the understanding that lies behind and motivates some other person’s representation of a thing is precisely where the power of science comes from. Science provides a framework that governs how a person might form a representation of some thing, and makes this framework more explicit to the subsequent reader of that representation. Explicit representations are incredibly powerful devices in rendering how you represent your understanding to others (and your self) more robust, but they are not the primary source of your understanding.