To answer in part Bruce Moon's last posting - yes, Ken Friedman's putting his views so "forcefully" and at such length does help me to 1] enter the discussion 2] think in detail about the subject - his posting has provoked more ideas and strengthened others, and 3] helped me "come to a conclusion" in the sense of showing me that what I'm thinking about is not so wild and woolly after all, but that such far-flung and varied thoughts may be gathered together and made sense of, and, of course, the real worth of discussion, it has opened up more possibilities to think about and explore.
I would also tend to put my argument as forcefully as Ken does his, and I hope for the same reason, which I take to be a passion for your subject and a belief in your argument (one that does not slam doors but opens more of them). I find Bruce's train of thought troubling, because discussion of course involves replying to someone about something; would this be regarded as negating anyone else's viewpoint because you believe too strongly in your own? One can surely only be accused of that if you attempt, through argument, to get closer to the real state of things - the why did it happen exactly as it did question. Debate and argumentative logic is after all the only tools we really have, and a good argument can be really refreshing. I feel that Bruce's posting illustrates Ken's point about vocabulary and distinctions.
Ken wrote "The value of science lies in the emancipatory power of knowledge", and we may add the value of discussion, of research, of design, of conversation lies in ....
So this knowledge is a social construction: does that invalidate anything to do with the logic of trying to understand? I have found that there are poststructuralist views of knowledge (at least some of them, and I'm thinking particularly of Lyotard and Foucault) that do question "whether there is any point to the matter of rationality", which could mean that this type of argument would not see any value in the emancipatory value of knowledge, and what are we to think except to say with popper that such seems to be the thoughts of the irrational, and this tends to destroy any possibility of creating a common understanding - the basis of, and reason for, all acts of communication.
Instead we are presented with the "postmodern knowledge" of, for instance, the South African Truth Commission, and august body that, while doing sterling work, also allows itself to drift away from factual and legal evidence/knowledge, and embrace the poststructuralist or postmodern materialism of subjective storytelling. According to Anthea Jeffery, the Truth Commission allowed the ideal of factual truth to be discredited in favour of three new types of "truths" - dialogue, healing, and telling.
This is not to say that dialogue and storytelling cannot form part of a theory of design, on the contrary, especially the theories of rhetoric can be very illuminating. But to allow dialogue and telling primacy is to negate the very process of research and structuration. Again referring to Popper, we would not be able to verify the "truth"/workability/effect of any theory if it cannot be tested against some form of criteria, if it cannot be put to the test of falsifiability. Not only do many poststructuralist or postmodernist views rely on the descriptive function of performance (rhetorical force of telling instead of showing), but in questioning the rationality of the language system (how else do we communicate, how else are we rational towards each other?) the social referential ability of language and argument is removed, and the power of language and hence argument to designate and show is diminished or destroyed.
The purely narrative aspect of dialogue or storytelling cannot take over the search for meaning and truth, because this performative narrative, which poststructuralists call the moment of exchange in the free area of the marketplace of ideas, ignores the wider social context. Not least of its fallacies is that this marketplace of ideas is a concept that links the freedom of the sign to an ideal concept of a free market economy - it becomes a materialist virtual reality that is only a metaphor that cannot be related to social structuration or even social "truth".
An epistemological shift in the basis of knowledge has been favoured by the poststructuralists, and this leads to a type of critical reasoning that makes it impossible to ask if statements are either true or false. The emancipatory power of the competent use of language and knowledge must surely depend on being able to distinguish between the two. I believe that the answer to what could constitute a theory of design lies with our being human, in every sense of the term, and this would of necessity include social structuration - not a new, virtual and untested reality.
Johann van der Merwe !
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