Luke and Terry especially,
As I tried to suggest previously, in agreement with Terry, a conceptual boundary is not fixed like the edges in a figure ground image such as those Luke cited . It is permeable to allow access to information needed to interpret the bounded entity, and to permit operations to edit or transform information that it encompasses.The identity of a bounded concept and its elements are nominal and established in language.
According to A Theory of Design Thinking, Formative thinking is the mode of thought which blends concepts into something that can be apprehended, named, given meaning, and applied. Its nominal identifications, (which includes things like shape, category, attributes and name) are recognized through Referential thought in which indexing, retrieval, selection, matching, and editing of nominal information is facilitated. Formative thought is organized by the "center-periphery schema" qualified by the "container (boundary) schema", while Referential thought is organized by the "object schema" which suppresses peripheral information beyond the boundary in order to select nominally tagged information interpretingf the bounded entity.
I will be posting a paper on cognitive operations under the theory soon at independent.academia.edu/charlesburnette.
Seasons greeting to all,
Chuck
On Dec 16, 2013, at 4:22 AM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi Luke,
>
> I'm puzzled by what you wrote on a number of counts.
>
> First, I suggested as single sided bound ('unit of analysis' doesn't define case study boundary') and then expanding on it with the illustration that the scope of a case should at least include all the influencing factors and the contextual issues. The argument logic is simply to show A is not identical to B because B contains more than A. Your last post suggests you have reinterpreted what I wrote into some presumption about defining the case study bound. No, there are many reasons why the boundary of the case study itself remains a matter of choice. Please could you explain how what you wrote connects with the point I was making?
>
> Second, you claim that you ' do not think that including "causal and outcome milieus" can ever go far enough to exhaustively establish identity.'. As far as I was aware, in the discussion to date there was no mention of establishing 'identity'. Please can you explain?
>
> Third, the focus of my comment about 'straight thinking' versus 'ambiguous' or lateral, associative thinking was a suggestion that addressing these theory issues is better done by carefully going through the different aspects of them rather than by throwing up an example ((duck/rabbit or Rubin vase) without explaining which argument you are making and why or how exactly the example proved the point that you haven't described, and this links with your sign off to support this being 'Ambiguously'. My apologies if this wasn't as clear as it might have been. Do you see things differently?
>
> Four, I'm puzzled by what you raise as theory issues around the 'boarder'. As far as I can see, neither the 'boarder' themselves, nor the picture of them, has any theory-ladeness in and of themselves. Rather, it is you using the information that you choose to draw from them that enables you to make speculations, and potentially theories. The theory creation process is undertaken by you and if you identify multiple theories, then it is you that does so rather that the boarder or their picture being 'theory-laden'? And, after you have made theories, they exist independently of both your psychology and the picture of the boarder. Isn't this fact that humans make theories a point you were making. Are not the separateness of theories from human thinking and their explicitness key aspects of theories?
>
> Finally, you refer to the 'boarder' (in the picture I presume) undertaking a process such that they '"decenter" the boundary between the inside and the outside of the wave'. Can you explain what you mean? As I understand it, a wave in water consists of water molecules travelling in ever decreasing circles from the surface downwards. The molecules moving in the wave's circles are those 'within the wave' and those not are outside. Please could you explicitly (and unambiguously) define what you mean by ' the boundary between the inside and the outside of the wave'; and what you mean by the verb to 'decenter'? Or is it that you do a process rather than the boarder??
>
> Finally, its somewhat easier to sort the issues out perhaps if you simply express the arguments rather than referring to the work of others?
>
> Warm regards,
> Terry
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Luke Feast
> Sent: Monday, 16 December 2013 3:50 PM
> To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
> Subject: Re: Cases
>
> Dear Terry,
>
> You wrote:
>
>> To be able to properly analyse the causes and behaviours relative to
>> the
> subjects that are seen as the 'unit of analysis' requires a scope of the study, i.e. the boundary of the instance, that includes the subjects of study and the causal and outcome milieus. Otherwise, the case study is unable to address all the relevant issues.
>
>
> I see your point but I do not think that including "causal and outcome milieus" can ever go far enough to exhaustively establish identity.
>
>
>
> Choosing the boundary around what is relevant to a study is not simply a process of “straight thinking”. Presumably, according to the straight perspective, if I prepare my mind with the proper training then my senses will have the ‘right’, ‘normal’, ‘healthy’, or ‘unbiased’ state required to observe truth as it is (Lakatos, 1970, pp. 98-99). But, as Lakatos (1970) states, “there are and can be no sensations unimpregnated by expectations and therefore there is no natural (i.e. psychological) demarcation between observational and theoretical propositions” (p. 99). Choosing what is inside and what outside the boundary is not a simple, disinterested, operation but a theoretical move underpinned by all manner of conceptual assumptions. Even a basic statement such as “the secondary school student is over here” assumes that what is means to be “here” rather than “there”
> is clear and distinct. (But perhaps it’s forced perspective?). Furthermore, the process of identifying someone as a ‘secondary school student’ is not exhausted by capturing the “wide set of factors that influence them”; establishing identity involves a whole regime of conceptual machinery (cf.
> ‘subjectification’ in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish). The ambiguous images of the duckrabbit and Rubin vase show that observation cannot ensure certainty, and so it follows that a theory constructed by simply capturing influencing factors is not certain either.
>
>
>
> If we take the concept of the theory-ladenness of the boarder further, we can see that it implies that case study research should not proceed by mechanically applying a given theoretical approach to some particular empirical material. As Laclau (Wrangel, 2006, para 2) suggests, if this was all there was to it, then the theoretical chapters in all theses in a particular field would be the same, the only difference would be the material to which it is applied. I argue that such a situation is an indicator of a degenerating research programme. For example, it is not enough to superficially summarise Fraying’s infamous paper and then apply a ‘research through design’ process to few cases.
>
>
>
> When the surfer rides the barrel he ‘decenters’ the boundary between the inside and the outside of the wave. Similarly, good case study research should make a theoretical as well as analytical contribution.
>
>
>
>
> Best wishes,
>
>
>
> Luke
>
>
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