i am sympathetic to questioning whether thinking and acting are
"really" different things.
descart's notion of thinking as a representational practice clearly is
and this is where i think the problem starts. moving away from his,
i prefer to conceptualize thinking in two ways: reflectively as the
experience of observing oneself engaging in certain practices and
observationally as an explanation of certain practices in terms of
others' presumed reflexivity.
drawing is observable, thinking is not. we explain a manner of
drawing in terms of presumed mental activities, largely on account of our
projections on what we observe.
on the one hand, you are right in saying that there is not much of a
difference between thinking and acting. i do not think one can
think about anything without having acted or observing the actions of
others. developmentally, the practice of thinking may well be
conceptualized as a mental shortcut of previously observed or potential
practices. on the other hand, we do draw a distinction between
thinking and acting in language and have to respect that the distinction
has some reality to those who use it.
we came to the question of the distinction between thinking and acting
from the issue of intention and design. does the snail that leaves
behind a figure on the surface it is moving on think? has
intentions? we may explain this behavior (practice) in these terms,
but it does not really add much to what we observe and we would never
know whether it makes sense or is farfetched. the key is that we
cannot ask a snail as we can ask people (i) whether they have thought
about something in advance, (ii) whether their thoughts came about while
doing something (much like we speak without preparation), or (iii)
whether there was no thinking involved until being asked whether it
was.
klaus
At 10:12 AM 11/7/00 +0100, Tim Smithers wrote:
In his message [Sun, 5 Nov 2000 12:08:34, Subject: design
knowledge & phd] Alain Findeli wrote:
"I believe our current Western, i.e. dualistic, agnostic,
materialistic, thinking patterns are not "creative" enough
to figure out, indeed to design, what I and others
consider to be one of the key issue in this matter: the
exact nature and quality of the relationship between
thinking and acting ..."
Doesn't this suffer from the dualism that it complains of?
For there to be a relationship between thinking and acting
they must be different things. Are they? Are thinking and
acting really of different categories, as you seem to
suggest? I think they are not.
Descart would, of course, want us to believe thinking and
acting are different things. Acting and actions change
the (physical) world, the 'world out there', whereas
thinking is what minds do, and whatever minds do they
don't change the world out there, though thoughts can lead
to actions that do, by some means that Descart neglected to
make clear for us.
Sketching, for example, is commonly thought of, and quite
widely accepted as, an important kind of thinking in
various kinds of designing. Separating out what is
supposed to be the thinking from the acting in sketching,
as is done in many protocol studies of sketching in
designing, misses the fact that it is the motions of the
hand and arm that draws the thinking along. Literally!
This thinking, and the perceptions of the drawn marks, in
turn, form the further sketching motions. The thinking
would not happen here without the actions, or, at least,
would not happen in the same way. And nor would the
actions happen, or, again, at least not in the same way.
Even walking along the street is a kind of thinking for
me. I only think about certain things and only think in
certain ways when I am walking. This is probably only a
matter of habit, and not something necessary, but it's
true all the same.
So, trying to understand designing in terms of what
designers think, where think here means what minds do,
makes little or no sense to me. Just as trying to
understand designing only in terms of the movements of the
hand over the drawing board would not make any sense
either.
Best regards,
Tim Smithers
CEIT, Donostia / San Sebastián