Category Archives: Philosophy

The long and lonely tail

Philosophy

Sometimes I think the Long Tail is more of a curse than a blessing. It puts so many forks in every possible road that nobody is likely to follow the same route for long. Instead the freeways of common interest that existed prior to internet “communities”, there is a dense mesh of criss-crossing footpaths (so dense it might as well be a solid sheet of pavement) scattered with isolated obsessive nerds.

Do I want to go back to the constricted choices of the pre-internet days? Probably not. There are costs, though, and I feel them most acutely when I finish reading something difficult and fascinating and start flipping through my mental rolodex in search of someone to hash through it with me.

Laura’s cat

Philosophy

From Milan Kundera ‘s Immortality:

One day when he came to see her, he was once again plunged in dark thoughts. She went to the next room to change, and he remained in the living room alone with the Siamese cat. He wasn’t especially fond of the cat, but he knew it meant a great deal to Laura. He sat down in an armchair, pondered his dark thoughts, and mechanically stretched out his hand to the animal in the belief that it was his duty to stroke it. But the cat spat and bit his hand. The bite immediately became linked to the chain of misfortunes that had been following him; he leaped out of the armchair and took a swipe at the cat. The cat streaked into a corner and arched its back, hissing horribly.

He turned around and saw Laura. She was standing in the doorway, and it was obvious that she had been watching the whole scene. She said, “No, no, you mustn’t punish her. She was completely in the right.”

He looked at her surprised. The cat’s bite hurt, and he expected his lover, if not to take his part against the animal, at the very least to show an elementary sense of justice. He had a strong desire to walk over to the cat and give it such an enormous kick that it would splatter against the living room ceiling. It was only with the greatest effort that he managed to control himself.

Laura added, emphasizing each word, “She demands that whoever strokes her really concentrates on it. I, too, resent it when someone is with me but his mind is somewhere else.” When she had watched Bernard stroke the cat and seen the cat’s hostile reaction to his detached absentmindedness, she had felt a strong sense of solidarity with the animal. For the past several weeks Bernard had been treating her the same way: he would stroke her and think about something else; he would pretend he was with her but she knew very well he wasn’t listening to what she was saying.

The cat’s biting Bernard made her feel as if her other, symbolic, mystical self, which is how she thought of the animal, was trying to encourage her, to show her what to do, to serve as an example.

Radical Republic

Philosophy

In any deliberation, there are participants — people involved in the arguments, ideation, demonstrations, etc. — and entities who are represented by the participants — not only people but also things whose reactions to the deliberation are anticipated by the participants based on the participants understandings — who I will call “anticipants”.

To invite more of these anticipants to the table as participants (by including more human voices in the deliberation, and more non-human voices, speaking in the transontic lingua franca of experimental data) is to radicalize our republic by making it as universally democratic as practically possible.

Of course, all participants represent anticipants, but the more anticipants are empowered to elect their own representative participants, and the more anticipants are able to reject inadequate representation (especially important for non-humans: help them water the tree of liberty with the blood of bad science. ), the more perfect the republic.

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People who will not respect science are scary, not because they are wrong about truth or resistant to yielding to reality — but because they are literally sociopaths: violent toward social truth-finding, and disrespectful to the existence of others.

The Republic of Reality

ANT, Design, Politics

represent |repri-zent|
verb [with obj.]

  1.  be entitled or appointed to act or speak for (someone), especially in an official capacity.
  2. constitute; amount to.
  3. depict (a particular subject) in a picture or other work of art
  4. formal state or point out (something) clearly

“Now that we are no longer fooled by these maneuvers, we see spokesmen, whoever they may be, speaking on behalf of other actors, whatever they may be. We see them throwing their ranks of allies, some reluctant, some bellicose, into battle one after the other.” – Bruno Latour

If knowledge is representative, this sense of representation (4) should not be too closely equated with (3) depicting or (2) constituting. It is better to emphasize its affinity with (1) acting or speaking on behalf of a reality.

Knowledge represents reality by being its spokesman in deliberation, conveying the considerations relevant to that reality, and negotiating for where that reality will figure into whatever is being discussed. If a representative speaks well for a reality, the reality will cooperate and reinforce his claim of representing his constituency. If he misrepresents a reality, the reality will undermine and discredit his representation by refusing to cooperate as the representative promised it would.

Again: our knowledge does not depict reality or make little idea-models that correspond to a reality — with our knowledge we politically represent a reality and conveys what it does and will do with respect to a problem. We are standing in for a reality and representing it in its absence.

Of course, it pays to confer with any reality we are seeking to represent, and be good students of that reality so we can represent it ever more faithfully. When we are representing people we may have conversations with them. Or we may immerse in their lives, interact and participate so we can get first-hand first-person knowledge of what is going on. If we are representing non-human things we might have to watch, form hypotheses, interact, experiment, revise — again, so we can be taught by the reality how to represent it.

And, as Latour never tires of pointing out, every social situation is a heterogeneous collection of human and non-human actors.

Since design is nearly always intervening in some social situation in order to change it, what design researchers really do in the field is confer with the full social reality in order to understand it and fully represent it. And once hypothetical solutions are found, design researchers return to the social situation to confer with it about how it might react to them. Good designers are like good politicians — always shaking hands, knocking on doors, staying in touch, winning support.

 

Assertoric vortices

Philosophy

A pragmatic conception of truth views an assertion as the eye of a vortex of testable hypothetical consequences.

Tracing out these consequences and conceiving experiments capable of supporting or weakening belief in these assertions — that is what rational thought should dedicate itself to. And making persuasive arguments for investing in the most consequential experiments. And for conceiving new assertions with new vortices of hypothetical consequence.

Here is what my life of people-centered design has taught me: Never argue when you can experiment.

Again, Le Carre famously said: “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” It is important to remember that a conference table is just a big desk for a committee to sit behind. A philosopher’s armchair is another kind of desk. An academic journal is pretty much just a virtual conference table.

The natural sciences learned this lesson centuries ago. What divided modern science from ancient science was not drawing logical consequences from empirical observation! This is a common misunderstanding with catastrophic consequences. What brought science into the modern age (and us with it) was experiment: using observation to form hypotheses, using hypotheses to design experiments, conducting experiments to support or weaken hypotheses for a community of scientists, and to produce networks of confirmed theoretical assertions, each with a vortex of testable hypothetical consequences.

All questions can be treated scientifically, including social and existential ones, local and particular ones. We just have to pragmatically clarify exactly what our questions are about which helps us grasp our scientific object and the suitable experimental methods, which might not be predominantly physical, outwardly observable or quantifiable. Science, too, should observe “truth to materials.”

Neo-existentialism?

Philosophy

Is it time for an existentialist revival, yet? I hope it comes back in a pragmatist mode, one that pushes pragmatism to its Latourian limits. That is, a pragmatism that extends democratic procedure to things as well as people. Things have rights, too, and they assert those rights the way people do: resistance. Scientific experiment invites things to the table and allows them to negotiate with us. I enjoy wondering what an existentialism freed of idealist reductionism (both metaphysical & methodological) might look, sound, behave and feel like.

Beyond fundamentalism and mysticism

Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Fundamentalism is not religious extremism. It is not religion gone too far.

Fundamentalism is religion failing to happen. It is relationship to transcendent reality reduced to a set of defined things: facts, techniques, emblems, objects and social groups.

Of course, different denominations of Fundamentalism adhere to different things, but they all believe that religious “faith” consists of adherence to things, and they can’t see of what else a religion could possibly consist.

Religion begins when the limit of this vision is overcome, and then the limit of the consequent mystical vision is also overcome, and one plainly sees why love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable. And maybe it starts beyond that, too, and if that is true, neighbor, your vision penetrates further than mine, and we need to talk.

Predicament, perplexity

Philosophy

I am adopting Putnam’s term predicament for a problematic situation.

We could say a predicament is a situation that stimulates perplexity. Perplexity is failure of understanding due to nonavailability of adequate concepts. Because concepts produce both questions and answers, perplexity is inarticulate intellectual distress: one cannot say what the problem is, and this inability to state the problem compounds the distress.

The name of the feeling of distress (and even the intuitive anticipation of this distress) is anxiety.

The depth of a perplexity is a function of how many other concepts must be disrupted by the revision of concepts required to resolve the present perplexity. We can experience a shallow perplexity, which requires only the acquisition of a single concept where one is lacking. The deepest perplexities require unlearning and relearning our oldest and most basic concepts, from which others are derived.

Religious conversions are the outcome of deep perplexities, often stimulated by predicaments.

Understanding Peirce’s triad

Philosophy, Pragmatism

Let me see if I can paraphrase Peirce’s triad. 

The elements of the triad are distinguishable, but inseparable. They cannot be grasped in isolation, but articulated against the whole to which they belong. Peirce said they are to be prescinded, not isolated. 

Firstness is the immediate qualities of experience, including the entities experienced. It is monadic. It is experience experienced. 

Secondness is the brute reality of experience, most conspicuous in surprise. It is dyadic, composed of effort (of doing, or understanding) and resistance (to doing or to being understood). Secondness is encountered existence. 

Thirdness is — not sure about this — the concept — which is understood in terms of its full pragmatic consequence (a bundle of experienced beliefs each of which manifests with experience as firstness) of a meaningful entity. It posits, predicts, expects, establishes norms against which secondness will accord or discord. Thirdness is understanding that seeks to intelligibly integrate existence (universality) with encountered existence (pluralities).

Firstness is experience.

Secondness is encounter.

Thirdness is meaning.

Without firstness, secondness and thirdness have no material by which encounter or understanding can occur. No monads = nil.

Without secondness, firstness lacks resistant entities to stand out against the experiential flux, and without such entities thirdness is deprived of anything to understand. (No “intentional object” can emerge for thought.)

Without thirdness, firstness and secondness are indistinguishable. Thirdness supplies meaning; meaning animates effort, which invites resistance, and constitutes secondness. The distinction between what is experienced and what is encountered cannot be made.

What I am missing, and what makes me question the completeness of my understanding is this: isn’t firstness possible without secondness and thirdness? Second and thirdness seem interdependent in a way firstness does not. It might be a psychological fact that firstness is always accompanied by the other two elements, but it strikes me as philosophically unnecessary unless we impose a tautological definition that says that experience is only such in the context of the full triad.

So the thirdness that is my understanding of Peirce’s triad is encountering some resistance (thwarting some of what I would expect him to say) that leads me to wonder if Peirce’s idea (its stubbornly real secondness) is other than what I have made of it (thirdness), and in the context of this secondness and its disruption of my own expectations (firstness produced by thirdness?) it is leading me to experience the firstness of his words and his philosophy as a whole (also firstness) with some anxiety.

Some design research aphorisms

Philosophy
  • A designer’s best muse is reality.
  • The purpose of generative design research is to produce precision inspiration.
  • Le Carre famously said: “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” It is important to remember that a conference table is just a big desk for a committee to sit behind. (A philosopher’s armchair is another kind of desk, and an academic journal is pretty much just a virtual conference table.)
  • Design thrives on concreteness and specificity.

 

Idea dump: intimacy, design/engineering/philosophy, social science-technologies

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

The following is more of a diary entry than an article. I have put too little effort into editing, and it might make sense only to me. I just wanted to get a snapshot of these ideas as they exist today, before they change or disappear.

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The start of an idea: it seems that many “linguistic turn” philosophers become anxious encountering any concept that fails to promise eventual public accessibility and acceptance. I have a hunch I cannot yet support but this all seems rooted in a binary either-or of private and public: EITHER we speak precisely, logically and empirically in the least ambiguous language possible, OR we speak a muddledly, and self-sentence ourselves to imprisonment within our own private language cells.

I do love the private-public distinction and find it useful, but I think the most fascinating varieties of philosophy are between these extremes, in a region that could be called intimate, or what Martin Buber called the interhuman. This is where Nietzsche works, and I may read him with this theme in mind on my next tour of his corpus.

The intimate is where poetry happens. When poetry goes public it is lost to prosaicism. When poetry goes private it is lost to insanity. Poetry is intimacy suspended between insanity and prosaicism.

It is not true (or at least not right) that all language aims to be explicit. Sorting out the purpose of a particular vocabulary and determining its degree of explicit monosemic and pregnant polysemic content is an interesting problem — and less a philosophical problem than a design problem.

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Speaking of various kinds of problems, I’ve done much reflection in the last couple of years on what distinguishes engineering problems and design problems (my most recent formulation: an engineering problem concerns systemization of rule-bound entities, where a design problem concerns hybrid rule-bound and choice-making entities), but I have also been thinking quite a bit about the relationship between design and philosophy. It might be my most radical idea that philosophy is best understood as a species of design, and how it is designed determines what it can do. (I see a philosophy as a mind-reality interface analogous to a computer user interface to support intelligibility of unmanageable truths and semi-obscure phenomena. Philosophy-as-design strikes me as the furthest consequence of Jamesian Pragmatism.)

It might be interesting to converge these two themes, philosophy-as-design and design-vs-engineering. It might go like this: maybe we have been accidentally designing philosophies optimized for solving engineering problems, and further, when we think about philosophy in these engineering terms we successively engineer the possibility of design out of of our philosophies. We trust only logical rules that compel reason to accept a single conclusion, or the problem does not compute and returns a syntax error. We engineer philosophies good only for engineering, and this has distorted our understanding of what a science is and can be, including the social sciences. This is why 20th Century social sciences and social engineering are linked: social engineering was all that could be done with the philosophy that thought the social sciences.

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I’ve been groping with a vague new thought. Generally we define sciences ontologically, by their object of study. What if we defined sciences pragmatically, by the types of technologies they produce? The pragmatic definition of Actor-Network Theory then might be: the science that produces design. 20th Century sociology might be: the science that produces social engineering.

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For the past few years I’ve been enamored with (or maybe dominated by) Bruno Latour’s account of science and technology, and particularly his refusal to separate the domains of science and technology. Sciences use technologies at least as much as technologies use science. There is no pure scientific learning followed by pure technological application.

My intuition harasses me with the question of whether there is (or ought to be!) a similar dynamic at work in the social sciences. Currently the social sciences seem (I am not as well-informed as I would like to be) to place enormous emphasis on the front-end observational hypothesis-formation segment of the scientific method. Where is the interactive experimental moment of the scientific method, where technologies are employed to generate more knowledge? And what exactly is a social science technology, anyway? Have we asked that question enough? I am leaning toward a belief that a social science technology is a design, and in an experimental setting it is a design prototype introduced into a social situation. The social sciences merge with human-centered design practices. Not as the pure understanding that precedes a pure application, but as a profoundly mingled reciprocity.

Individuality

Ethics, Politics

My liberalism insists (that is, posits passionately) that every human being ought to be taken as an individual, as opposed to an example of a category of person.

With respect to policy I consider this ideal a binding law worthy of coercive action. Publicly, all individuals are obligated to observe the legal right of individuality — at the least within one’s own spheres of citizenship.

With respect to individual attitudes I consider this ideal something worth advocating persuasively, but always respecting the individual’s right to decide. Privately, individuals may regard other individuals as mere examples of categories of person, and liberals must never resort to coercion to change this.

Quotes and notes

Philosophy

Truth is even more about potential actualities than it is about realities.

“Truthfulness. — I favor any skepticism to which I may reply: “Let us try it!” But I no longer wish to hear anything of all those things and questions that do not permit any experiment. This is the limit of my “truthfulness”: for there courage has lost its right.”

“The thing itself” does not only refer to a present thing, but more, its reservoir of possible surprises for the future.

“We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt… Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.“

Anticipation is always present.