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On 04/10/2014, at 03:37, Klaus Krippendorff wrote: > when you say that some models are more accurate than others you make the assumption that you know what exists independent of how it is modelled. i would not go that route. ... > but the reality you say exists has may not have a designer -- unless you believe god did it -- and you have no clue what it is independent of your conceptions. all you have is models by which you act. you might want to say that some models are better than others but then you compare models and what they enable you to do, but not how accurate they are. Dear Klaus, I do not make any assumptions about what exists. You are right about the use of the word "accurate" though. It was probably a mistake. What I meant was that some models account for more clues than others. Allow me to disagree with the "you have no clue what it is independent of your conceptions" statement. Clues are exactly made out of perceptions and conceptions, so that statement seems to me as incoherent. > history shows numerous cases that the models we believed to be about what exists were shattered whenever we used our them slightly differently and exceeded the limits of what they afforded calling for changes to cope with that new behavior of ours. it suggests that there always are numerous models we can construct of the same reality. there is none that can be shown to be conclusively perfect. I should have explicitly stated that I don't have the presumption of knowing "the truth," but I wrongly assumed that people wouldn't think otherwise. And nobody said anything about "conclusively perfect". In this day and age, I thought it would be reasonable to expect that people subscribing to a PhD mailing list would know a bit about science, history of science and scientific discovery... and so I was expecting that you expected me to at least know: 1) that science develops models of reality, 2) that these models are always being revised, and 3) that there is no such thing as a "perfect conclusion." Let me explicitly assure you that I was already aware of all that. I also wrongly assumed that any discussion of these matters would take into account some sort of context. I now see that in this environment some arguments about stones require us to debate how much pressure and heat was required billions of years ago for their making, and if stones have souls, or if they move by telekinesis, if they come from Krypton, if they speak some obscure Malay dialect, etc. As for your example, I will add that not even the computer engineers know what's happening inside a computer, as you surely know better than me. Not even the electrical engineers, nor the materials engineers that invented FETs and all that. If they did, they wouldn't be facing problems related to quantum side-effects in Gallium arsenide compounds and the like. And as a matter of fact (sorry for using the word "fact"), not even programmers know what is going on: you can be a programmer dealing with an abstraction layer and communicating with lower level libraries via an API... so, at any given time, you only have a model of what is going on. Actually, given the ubiquitous usage of OOP, the vast majority of computer software is a huge matryoshka of black boxes. You can only discuss what is happening if you establish the context of the "happening" you want to talk about. It is useless to try to see the whole picture, simply because "the whole picture" is unfathomable. Like I said earlier, you will end up talking about the Big Bang, or in this particular example about computers, you will end up debating quantum field theory and string theory or whatever is the ultimate state-of-the-art theoretical construct that has a bearing in what you are dealing with. I ask again: how is that useful? It can only be useful for rhetorical purposes. Solipsistic arguments and statements of the "everything is connected with everything" ilk are such transparent diversionary tactics that in the end they only kill the debate. And if this debate is still alive, I will now put it out of its misery. RIP, debate. Best regards, ================================== Carlos Pires [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask] ------------------------------------------------------------- Design & New Media MFA // Communication Design PhD Student @ FBA-UL Check the project blog: http://thegolemproject.com ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------