June 07, 2006: The Road to Lexis and Praxis

I figure I probably ought to offer some justification as to why I invoked Greek terminology from Plato and the general plan of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in yesterday's entry. Accounting for Kant is definitely the taller order, particularly since I feel I am just getting beyond the Cliff Notes stage in my ability to read him. So I may end up postponing that question until I have given the Critique a second reading (which will definitely be more thorough than my first reading, meaning that this postponement is likely to take some time). On the other hand I feel I can address the justification of my invoking the lexis-praxis terminology at the present.

I suppose I can begin that justification by repeating yesterday's citation to the paper by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid ("Organizational learning and communities-of-practice"). I first read this paper when John was running Xerox PARC and I was involved with knowledge research at the Palo Alto laboratory that Fuji Xerox had established (which was on the same campus as PARC). The most influential passage in this paper for me was in its second paragraph:

Formal descriptions of work (e.g., "office procedures") and of learning (e.g., "subject matter") are abstracted from actual practice. They inevitably and intentionally omit the details. In a society that attaches particular value to "abstract knowledge," the details of practice have come to be seen as nonessential, unimportant, and easily developed once the relevant abstractions have been grasped. Thus education, training, and technology design generally focus on abstract representations to the detriment, if not exclusion of actual practice. We, by contrast, suggest that practice is central to understanding work. Abstractions detached from practice distort or obscure intricacies of that practice. Without a clear understanding of those intricacies and the role they play, the practice itself cannot be well understood, engendered (through training), or enhanced (through innovation).

This was a pretty radical position for a representative of "The Document Company," since the primary medium for those formal descriptions was the document! So I saw in this paper the invocation of a fundamental opposition between the document-based and the practice-based. In my own research (which, at that time, was focused primarily on the frustrating problem of organizational memory) I tried to generalize this to an opposition between the noun-based and the verb-based, because, while documents certainly used verbs, the document itself was an artifact; so both the documents themselves and the formal descriptions that were often the content of documents resided firmly in the world of nouns. They were, indeed, "abstractions detached from practice." (For a while I was even using the phrase "communication artifact" instead of "document.")

I was quite happy with pursuing the opposition between nouns and verbs until I got involved with reading Kenneth Burke's Grammar of Motives. There I discovered that Spinoza had also been interested in such oppositions. Burke cited three variations, all of which I felt could be relevant: passive-active, object-subject, and product-producing (which resonated nicely with my interest in the term "communication artifact"). With this as background, along with a natural desire to seek out generalizing categories, I was primed for the opposition of lexis and praxis that Jurgen Habermas invoked in the first chapter of his Theory and Practice. This led me to explore the specific definitions of both of these words in the Perseus online dictionary of classic Greek. The nice thing about the entries is that they invoke citations from classical sources; and that is how I discovered the citation of lexis and practice in Plato's "Republic" (along with a context-based translation of those words)!

Now Plato's context is concerned with giving faithful accounts. More specifically, he is addressing relating "some word or act of a good man" to others; and this is where the words lexis and praxis appear in the original Greek. However, this takes us back to the original theme of the Brown-Duguid paper. At the end of the day, work is all about both words and acts. Our training in information technology has served us well with formal descriptions in the domain of words; so, like the drunk under the lamp-post who looks for his keys because the light is better there, we try to assume that only the words that matter, because they are what we know how to describe. In so doing we invoke abstractions that distort our understanding of acts.

What is to be done? Clearly, we need a better handle for describing and talking about acts that can stand up to the formal descriptions we invoke for words. The first volume of Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action proposes such a framework for talking about acts. However, an account of this framework is very much another story; and I shall postpone it to another entry (which I can probably write before I get around to Kant)!