David,
Your recent note to John Broadbent was more constructive than your
past comments. If you are serious about wishing to work in a less
fragmented field, I hope you continue to address positions without
attacking people.
I withdrew from the earlier thread for three reasons. The first
involved the accusation of sophistry in my comment on Johnıs earlier
note. Mautner (1996: 402) defines sophistry as ³reasoning which is
plausible, fallacious, and dishonest.² my comment was metaphor, not
sophistry.
The second reason I withdrew was the injection of politics. The
Marxist critical studies perspective can tend toward propaganda. This
has a history that goes back to Marx himself. Comparing Marxıs
published writings with his original sources demonstrates that he
deliberately fudged his carefully compiled statistics and purposely
misquoted his sources. He advocated lying to win arguments when other
methods failed to work and he despised the working class whose
interests he claimed to serve. Your Marxist critique left me
wondering what interests you serve when you question other list
members on political and economic grounds.
The third reason I withdrew involved the way you misrepresented what
I wrote. Your response to my notes on Occamıs Razor and complexity
theory exemplify this.
Your comments positioned my notes as detached scholarship that was
value-free in several senses. In Marxist critical studies, the notion
of scholarly detachment has several meanings. One of these suggests
that all values are implicitly political. In this sense, what you
termed my ³scholarly detachment² suggested hidden special interests.
Another interpretation is scholarly detachment involves the
abdication of moral and ethical values.
All human beings conduct inquiry from a position. Each position
entails a complex range of issues. This includes values of many
kinds. As best possible, I seek to allow others to examine issues
fully to reach their own conclusions. Setting out issues and evidence
is one part of allowing others to make up their own minds. Beyond
this, I make my own position clear. In this case, it was clear that I
favor simplicity. I described the history of Occamıs Razor in a
disinterested way before stating my position.
Anyone who has read my work understands my position on ethics and
values. I state these in plain terms, and I apply them as best I may
in private and public life as well as in my scholarship. To describe
something in a disinterested fashion without regard to my personal
interests is an attempt to allow others to consider the relevant
issues in the light of competing interests, including their own.
After offering a broad, general description, I apply my values.
It is possible to describe a gun, a medical treatment, or an economic
system as distinct from my personal interests in them. I can then
state my views and values on how (or whether) to use the gun,
prescribe or accept treatment, or participate in the system
In another instance, I distinguished two meanings of the word
complexity. One involves complicatedness. The other involves complex
phenomena arising from systems with two or more inter-related parts.
Complexity theory addresses the second meaning. By repeatedly
stressing the first meaning of a word that can be ambiguous in
ordinary language, you recast my position entirely.
By taking these stances in conjunction with your claim to ³love
simplicity² while asserting that I love complexity in the second
sense of the term, you positioned yourself as the ³simple man² (the
honest man? the working man?) against the rest of us. This seemed to
me to be a subtle form of demagoguery. I took it to be so
particularly after you accused me of sophistry.
The value of distinctions is the power they give us to understand
concepts and use them well. When a word has two meanings in ordinary
language, as complexity does, establishing distinctions helps us to
use the word better. I use ordinary language to establish
distinctions, and I communicate distinctions and ideas in ordinary
language. This, too, is a traditional rhetorical skill, and it goes
back to Socrates who posed his inquiries in ordinary language while
raising as many distinctions as needed to understand the issues at
hand.
The issue of autonomic computing makes clear exactly why I find
complexity theory important. If you are genuinely interested in
autonomic computing, your attitude toward complexity theory and your
complaint against distinctions becomes difficult to understand.
Autonomic computing is a descendent of complexity theory.
Autonomic computing is based on developments in genetic algorithms,
neural networks, self-evolving systems, and policy-based management.
These rest on fundamental work in catastrophe theory, chaos theory,
and complexity theory. Anyone who understands autonomic computing
knows this. I will offer a deeper explanation if you wish. You can
also read Paul Hornıs (2001) own account of autonomic computing, or
the recent article of Hornıs colleague Evaristus Mainsah (2002).
Complexity theory is a search for simplicity that enables us to work
more effectively with the systems around us.
Many of us love simplicity. Complexity theory is one attempt to
achieve systems that are simple and robust for the people who use
them. Autonomic computing is a case in point.
If you wish to see less fragmentation in the field, you must
encourage free and open discourse. Accusing people of hidden
interests and sophistry is not the way to do this.
Your note to John raised two issues. The first is shortening the lag
time between research and application. The second involves sources of
funding to publish research results. I will address these another
time. Here, I want to explain my views on the process of list
dialogue.
Everyone who takes the time to participate here contributes to the
community. It is inappropriate -- and hardly collegial -- to accuse
some of us of hidden motives, covert partisan concerns, or purposeful
dishonesty. There is an important difference between earlier debates
and your note. People have been angry at each other as people and
irritated over positions. Your post was the first time on this list
that anyone has suggested political and economic motives for a
viewpoint.
In a context where we all contribute, polemic accusations suggesting
special interests will not bring people together to build research
communities.
I hope in the future that you will distinguish between persons and
position. When you suggested that my position could be explained by
hidden political and economic motives, I lost interest in further
discussion. Sometimes the best explanation and the simplest
involves reading carefully enough to respond to what people write
without assuming hidden factors.
Ken
References
Horn, P. 2001. Autonomic Computing: IBM perspective on the state of
information technology. IBM T. J. Watson Laboratories, N.Y., 15
October 2001. Presented at the AGENDA 2001 Conference, Scottsdale,
Arizona. URL: http://www.research.ibm.com/autonomic/
Mainsah, Evaristus. 2002. ³Autonomic computing: the next era of
computing.² Electronics and Communication Engineering Journal.
February 2002, 2-3.
Mautner, Thomas. 1996. A Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management
Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University
|
