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Dear Keith, Thank you for your thoughts. Your two short paragraphs involve a great deal of background thinking, and they require serious background knowledge. This means not only Martin Heidegger, but hermeneutics. And this is not just Heidegger’s hermeneutics, but the question of unfolding and understanding the world. To comment seriously in the way I would wish to do would require a discussion beginning with Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Wilhelm Dilthey. In my view, this leads to an explanation of why the symbolic interactionist tradition provides a reasonable way forward for understanding the relationship between thinking and the world that we apprehend and represent in thought. That gets into George Herbert Mead’s work, and John Dewey’s and — more recently — Jurgen Habermas. Hermeneutics comes forward through Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Riceour. To address the issues you raise properly requires unpacking the background conversations. Placing them in a contemporary perspective in the context of design takes more work still. You raise an interesting question, but it is not a deeper question. It is a different question. The question you raise involves how living individuals understand the world — and how (or whether) the world reaches out toward human beings. You address this question in philosophical terms. This is also a question for sociology and social psychology. It is significant that Mead’s work had greater impact in psychology and social psychology for much of the twentieth century. The hermeneutics of communication involves more issues than “duction.” The question of how human beings came to be abductive is a question for natural science. This is a question for such fields as biology, physical anthropology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, or neuroscience. Bob Estes’s question is deep and serious. How did human beings evolve to be abductive? Your question is deep and serious. How do living individuals understand the world — and how does the world reach out toward human beings? Both questions require more time and care than I can give them at this time. Yours, Ken Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University Press | Launching in 2015 Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn — Keith Russell wrote: —snip— “When the mind is bent towards an object of its attention, this thinking is said to be intentional. That is, such thoughts illustrate that the mind can be bent to such a relationship. If our minds could not be bent towards things, and if things did not bend our attention, then we would be disconnected and locked in mere self-thinking. We are bent towards the world as the world is bent towards us. In Heidegger’s terms, we outstand and the world approaches us. “Things are ductible if they can be drawn or extruded; some materials are ductile and others are not. The same applies to thoughts. Some can be drawn from observations, some from speculations and some from the ether of the imagination. Such drawings have, over time, acquired argumentative, and, in some cases, logical authority. We readily embrace de-duction, we tentatively accept in-duction, we dismiss re-duction and we scramble to compensate for our wayward thinking by claiming the complexity of ab-duction.” —snip— ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------