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Dear Tim, Terry, and All,

Tim asked that Terry, “…please, show us, with citations to published work, how you have found Popper’s Three Incommensurate Worlds view to be useful in testing some theory of designing. Just asserting that you have found it useful does nothing for the discussion. And please note, I say theory of designing, not any kind of theory. So, let’s keep the discussion relevant to the topic, please.”

In response to Tim’s query, Terry wrote: “You asked for citations to published work. This is an area in which reasoning directly currently works better than references because the material is limited and much of it is as flawed as design theories themselves and appears to be so for the same reasons. I’ve referenced the literature identifying the flaws in design theory in an earlier paper.”

Terry’s paper – “Philosophy of Design: a Meta-theoretical Structure for Design Theory” – does not provide specific examples of problems in the literature or Terry’s use of Popper’s Three Worlds in addressing these problems. Terry’s article refers to examples in the literature as examples of approaches and genres. At no point does he specifically give examples of “design theories [that] are contradicted by well-established theories in other disciplines.”

Neither does this article do what Tim asks. This is an abstract, meta-theoretical article that sets out meta-theoretical issues, as the title states. It does not provide the examples that Tim requested.

Reasoning directly does not solve all problems. Some issues require situated evidence. Terry’s arguments here are beginning to sound very much like the strange, abstract use of the term “theory” among post-modern literature scholars.

In his response to Tim, Terry asserts that “design theories are contradicted by well-established theories in other disciplines.”

I would like to see specific examples of “design theories [that] are contradicted by well-established theories in other disciplines.”

To make sense of this statement, we need to see the design theories in situ. This requires that Terry identify several specific theories, each with a proper reference to the source document so that I can find it for myself to see whether it has beenrepresented adequately.

Then, we need to see proof of contradiction “by well-established theories in other disciplines.” This requires identifying the contradictory theories from other, well-establish disciplines, identifying contradictory theory each with a proper reference to the source document so that I can find it for myself to see whether it has been represented adequately.

Without this information, Terry’s claims remain abstract. In the absence of evidence that allows us to examine and possibly to falsify Terry’s claims, there is no way to determine whether Terry’s statements are even meaningful in Popper’s terms.

The notion Terry raised in an earlier post about the PhD-Design list as a forum for “agile rapid testing of ideas and theory building and testing by contradiction” seems quite problematic to me. Reading Terry’s reply to Tim, I understand the earlier note better. Terry writes, “PhD-Design is a publication and the main way that I publish.” It doesn’t make this list a reasonable forum for “agile rapid testing of ideas and theory building and testing by contradiction,” but it does explain why Terry might believe it to be.

The world’s best and most famous forum for ““agile rapid testing of ideas and theory building” with contradiction and scientific or scholarly debate is arXiv. This open access resource was formerly the Los Alamos National Laboratory server for papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics. (If you want to know more, Google arXiv. Wikipedia has a reasonable article about the project, including a review ofcriticism and controversies.)

The reason arXiv works so well, with more than 800,000 e-prints to date over the past two decades, is that people upload serious work. People read, work through, anddebate these papers because these are pre-prints or e-prints of the real papers that scientists in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics write and present at peer-reviewed conferences and journals. Each paper uploaded to the arXiv server is moderated to ensure seriousness. Papers published on the arXiv server are generally full papers, presented with full argumentation. All necessary evidence is included in each paper, together with full references.

That permits agile repaid idea testing and theory building.

Terry is essentially saying that he’s decided to make PhD-Design his journal of choice. This relies on the fact that everyone has the right to post to this list whatever he or she wishes to post. While that is correct, making this one’s main form of publication is a solipsistic approach to research. I imagine that one might quote the list from time to time for an example of a well-formed idea, but one would not want to use it as a source of ideas or theories that ought properly to be built on peer-reviewed literature. One can use the New York Times or The Economist as a source of ideas, or even Scrooge McDuck or Majesty – the Quality Royal Magazine. One can use reputable news magazines for statistics, facts, and reporting. One can use Uncle Scrooge or the latest Pippa story as examples of – well, of something. One can’t build an acceptable peer-reviewed article using these for theory or validated empirical research findings, and one can’t make use of the PhD-Design list that way, either.

As far as “agile rapid testing of ideas and theory building and testing by contradiction,” the only contradiction to Terry’s ideas that appears here comes up when serious scholars such as Tim take the time to contradict Terry. Terry’s pseudo-scientific language and stacks of links make this too great a challenge for younger scholars. They may sense that something is wrong with Terry’s claims, but the amount of material is too large to permit anyone to wade through it without solid research experience and a large stock of background knowledge. Without that kind of foundation, it’s hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. This is why most of the people willing to debate Terry are folkslike Tim, Klaus, or myself.

But Terry also makes this a forbidding enterprise for experienced scholars by using unreferencedclaims. You’ve got to know the literature well enough to identify problematic issues, conceptual flaws, and irresponsible truth claims. When pushed for examples, Terry provides stacks of links to literature that is often irrelevant or incorrect, and reviewing these often takes too much time to permit a robust argument.

The most astonishing example of an irrelevant and incorrect document was an 80-page working paper on Byzantine economic history over a millennium that Terry provided to show us his idea of what design history ought to be. Only Tim had deep enough mastery of the mathematical models in that paper to explain why it was seriously flawed. Terry refers to the value of abstract mathematics to render issues from many disciplines into an abstract, numerical language. There are two problems with this approach. First, some fields cannot be rendered mathematical. The qualitative human sciences, along with thick description approaches to anthropology, much history, and most literature resist quantization. The second problem is that Terry often puts sources forward where he himself does not seem to understand the mathematics well enough to make an appropriate statement. In some cases, one must know that a document is incorrect to know why it is irrelevant.

In a recent response to me, Terry stated that my “scholarly approach is and has been valuable to this list. It adds value and detail and provides a conservativeeffect...”

I had to laugh a bit at the somehow political tone of that comment. The word I’d have used is rigorous, and I’d argue that I use logic as well as Terry does. Despite Terry’s frequent pejorative references to rhetoric, my argumentation relies on logic and analysis as much as it relies on rhetoric.

These issues escape attention when Terry avoids answering analytical questions as he so often does with me, and as he does here with Tim.

Tim asked Terry to, “show us, with citations to published work, how you have found Popper’s Three Incommensurate Worlds view to be useful in testing some theory of designing.”

I would like to see specific examples of “design theories [that] are contradicted by well-established theories in other disciplines.”

Terry says these exist. If they do, I’d like to see them – and see them in a specific form, not links to several thousand pages of material that do not actually contain what Terry claims we will find.

Yours,

Ken

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