Terry wrote: >> I feel it is going a bit far to base things on absoluteness. I was mainly
writing about simple problems of poor theory making such as internal
contradictions, erroneous information, fallacious reasoning and false
claims. <<
I agree that there is room to improve design theory, and also that we can improve it through epistemological critiques.
Terry wrote: >> But - a simple practical test, send me design theory documents and critique
my analysis of them rather than speculating on whether what I say is true or
possible. <<
My point was not merely about absolutism, but also the eccentricity of your proposed approach. If the problem is that design research is epistemologically confused far worse than the more ordinary epistemological confusion attendant to all knowledge disciplines, then a bunch of papers being sent to you for judging, who hands back down decisions, which judgments we are allowed to democratically debate, is an odd approach indeed.
Why not instead do what other communities have practiced for over a century? That is what I was proposing. In such communities, one finds projects that unfold something like this. A writer or small team of writers gets together and:
First identifies several major formulations of theory (in this case, maybe definitions of design). They accurately and sympathetically summarize these formulations. They articulate what is appealing about the theory/formulation; in other words, in a scholarly way, they demonstrate that they really "get it." Then, using a combination of logical analysis, reasoning by examples and counterexamples, and hypothetical questioning, they probe the theory to reveal its problems: its internal logical incoherences, its inclusion/exclusion of bad instances, its inability to be applied in such-and-such practical situations, and so forth.
Second, they propose their own formulation as a candidate to the community. They explain this formulation, argue for its novelty, argue that it works in XYZ ways, demonstrate why it is able to cope with the problems that the others were vulnerable to, and argue for its scope and applicability.
Third, they submit all of this into a peer review process, and here I don't mean narrowly the peer review of a given journal, but rather the post-publication peer review. In this larger process, your colleagues can try out and test your theory for themselves, see if it works, where they have problems, and report back.
Of course dozens of writers/teams are doing this work simultaneously.
Such a theory vetting process is collective, broadly democratic, and even if it doesn't yield Final Theories and Ultimate Definitions, it usually at least weeds out the worst ideas and foregrounds the most promising ones.
The "test" then is not about what you, Terry, as an individual judge on behalf of us (or Reason itself); it's what the community as a whole judges when candidate formulations are systematically presented to it and it has a chance to consider, compare, and debate them.
I am not trying to criticize you individually, Terry, because even though I disagree with you here (and, if I am honest, most of the time), I find many of your statements challenging in a constructive way; they push me, and I like and need that. My point rather is to advocate for a theory building and vetting process that is systematic, slow-moving, and deliberative. The unilateral declarations found on this list, while provocative and often laden with potential, are dead-ends unless, rather than individually asserting them, we communally and processually vet them. I have summarized in this post one way that could happen; presumably, there are others.
Jeffrey
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