November 27, 2006: Why Call it "Science?"

Over a quiet Thanksgiving meal I had the chance to vent some of my discontent with the terminology of "service science" with a friend who teaches philosophy at San Jose State. With his background in philosophy, he asked a fundamental question that I realized I had ignored: Why do its proponents insist on calling it a "science?" Giving the matter some thought, I realized that this was probably a reflection of an obsession with science that went back (at least) as far as Frederick Winslow Taylor's effort to approach management "scientifically." Taylor's intense quantitative analysis of manufacturing processes cast a dark shadow over the nature of work for most of the twentieth century, but we never seem to be able to get out from under that shadow. What was comedy in Cheaper by the Dozen has become dark farce as die-hard Taylorists reflect the behavior of the small boy with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. Since Taylorism already exacted a devastating blow on the management of public education, there should be no surprise that there are those who now wish to apply its "scientific" approach to a broader range of services. Unfortunately, this is a nightmare from which we are unlikely to awaken as long as we remain under the spell of what Isaiah Berlin has called the "three unquestioned dogmas" of Western civilization. Taylorism is as much a faith as any other religious fundamentalism and can impose just as much distortion upon our view of the "real world."

October 27, 2006 (2): Jenkins' List

As a result of my regular reading of Confused of Calcutta, I found myself looking at the Executive Summary of the Macarthur Report, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," written by Henry Jenkins and his colleagues at the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. The basic thrust seems to be a shift of "the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement." In other words it is all about "social skills developed through collaboration and networking;" but what are those skills? Here is the list that the Jenkins group compiled:

Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes

Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

What fascinates me about this list, however, is how asocial, if not antisocial, it is. I do not see anything in the list that explicitly addresses the ability to engage in intersubjective communicative actions. Put another way, everything on the list (including Negotiation) is basically content-based. (Yes, that also includes the reduction of Play to problem-solving.) After all, if we are going to be talking about "media literacy," we have to remember that the "media" are just that: the channels through which communication, in all of its intersubjective glory, may be allowed to take place. Somehow or another, we need something on the list that honors Isaiah Berlin: Differing opinions should lead to dialog, but dialog does not have to lead to convergence of opinion. The intersubjectivity is a matter of each side reaching enough understanding to acknowledge, if not honor, the other’s point of view. This is the ultimate social skill for which we must all strive in an age of too many trigger-happy people with the power to end it all with a bang (not a whimper)!

September 23, 2006: Postmodern Thought in the "Real World"

This was an interesting week of confluences. On the one hand this was the week in which I finally decided to come up to speed on my understanding of postmodernist thinking. At the same time Confused of Calcutta decided to launch an interesting discussion on the future of markets and intellectual property rights. I decided that this would be a perfect opportunity for me to try to exercise what I had been learning about postmodernism, and I shall now try to distill what emerged and demonstrate that postmodern thinking may be as relevant to our understanding of markets and intellectual property as it has been to philosophy and literary theory.

My bottom line is that postmodernism has emerged as a result of a general need to cope with uncertainty. (Think about it: what better sources of uncertainty can we find in today's business world than marketing and intellectual property?). I would argue that we cannot talk about uncertainty without recognizing that there are actually two independent concepts, both of which are instances of uncertainty:

I like to characterize the first with my favorite Henry Miller quote: Uncertainty is the “order which is not understood.” We deal with it through what I would call provisional understanding. We do this by constructing models (usually probabilistic) based on empirical data (which, hopefully, we collect through sound and disciplined techniques).

The second concept, however, is the order that cannot be understood. The best example comes from Heisenberg’s Principle about the uncertainty of measurement. This has the status of a physical law. However, I would also argue that there are social laws about uncertainty that cannot be understood, my favorite example coming from Isaiah Berlin: conflicts of value are inevitable and irresolvable because they are part of “human nature.”

Now, when we are dealing with the first concept, we can strive to reduce uncertainty through formal techniques applied to building and refining models; and, when we do this, we live by putting the theories of modernism into practice.

When confronted with the second concept, we have no such luck; and postmodernism emerged as a school of thought to comfort us in our helplessness. It all goes back to Nietzsche’s commitment to “dissolving the presumption that there can be objective knowledge” (as Simon Blackburn put it in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy). Nietzsche then set the stage for Isaiah Berlin being able to argue that Enlightenment thinking was as much grounded in dogma as was Catholicism, and Enlightenment dogma committed us to the belief that every uncertainty was an instance of the first concept. Once Heisenberg blew that dogma out of the water, we had to develop strategies for living with the realty of the second concept; and this is the mission of postmodernism.

Whatever may have come from twentieth-century postmodernism, my personal feeling is that the best strategy can still be traced back to Nietzsche and his conviction that fictions are indispensable for life and the actions we take in the course of our lives. So, in his meticulous and rational analysis of markets, Peter Drucker could never explain why suppliers would hang their strategies on a fiction, no matter how good he was at expounding on fundamental hard-core facts of marketing. Sometimes logic just does not cut the mustard. Perhaps, at the end of the day, marketing is one of those uncertainties that really cannot be understood; and the strategies that so aggravated Drucker just emerged as a strategy for coping with such a “second-concept” uncertainty.

Similarly, the value of a patent may also be a “second-concept” uncertainty. Here, however, I would like to propose a postmodernist take on Wittgenstein’s language games. We are all familiar with playing games in which we “make moves” as a means of “buying information.” (I guess both poker and bridge are the classic examples.) I would argue that we can do the same thing with our language games; and, in some settings, that may be the only strategy we have for dealing with “second-concept” uncertainties like the value of a patent. That is why the typology of patents now includes language that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago: offensive patents, defensive patents, frivolous patents, spam patents, and shyster patents. These are nothing more than “language game moves” for dealing with “second-concept value uncertainty!”

This takes me to my favorite topic (not to mention my advocacy of blogging): the virtues of conversation. However, if conversations are to be effective, we have to confront a fundamental question: How do we ground the concepts behind the terminology that grounds our conversations? (Habermas never got beyond postulating that conversations must be grounded on a shared terminology, but I would argue that this is only half of the problem.) Confused of Calcutta, for example, likes to have conversations about concepts like “freedom,” “the market,” and “risk;” but the answer to the question should generalize to just about any other concept, be it “love,” “art,” “community,” or what have you.

I would argue that the postmodernist answer to this question involves a synthesis of the above contributions of Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. From Wittgenstein we get the thesis that, at the end of the day, concepts are never “grounded.” They assume their semantic interpretations on the basis of the moves we make in the language games of our conversations; and, as I tried to indicate with the example of intellectual property, we actually do a lot of things with those language games. As a matter of fact, to borrow a page from Anthony Giddens, I would say that we use those games (at least) to signify, to dominate, and to legitimate. This takes us over to the Nietzsche contribution to the formula, which involves the necessity for fiction. If our conversations are motivated by our observations and our experiences, they are not limited to rendering those observations and experiences through language; they also involve fabrications, because those are “language game moves,” too.

I suppose I first started going down this path when I first encountered John Kenneth Galbraith’s treatise on money (long before I ever encountered names like Derrida and Foucault). My take-away from that treatise was that money is what it is as a product of the conversations we have over it and the exchanges resulting from those conversations. (Galbraith did not put it that way, but I do not think I have violated the basic thrust of his reasoning. Instead, I have resorted to a fabrication of my own to illustrate how that reasoning relates to the points of the previous paragraph. See how the game works?) Of course what Galbraith said about money can also be said about the underlying concept of “value” (not to mention concepts of “market” and “risk”).

Given the current state of the world these days, I think it is particularly important to explore the concept of "freedom" though such a postmodern lens. In that respect let me be bold enough to posit that Rousseau was invoking fictions in his language games about freedom long before it made sense to have a conversation about “the postmodern condition!” Thus, it is not that “second-concept” uncertainties challenge the existence of freedom in our environment but that, within that environment, both our freedoms and our chains are emergent properties of the moves we make in our language games (as they have always been?). More importantly, those language games are the primary (only?) instrument we have that can check threats to rationality, such as groupthink (and its “cousins,” such as fundamentalism).

I used to work for a company that, for a while, had adopted the slogan: Keep the conversation going! I subsequently found this slogan (in the same wording) in Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. For all the virtues of rationality, we have to face up to the ways in which postmodern thinking are now confronting us. Keeping the conversation going may be the only way in which we can rise to such confrontation.

September 13, 2006: One More Loss

I have to confess that, since I received all of my "serious" education at MIT, I never learned anything about Max Weber before I received my Ph.D. As a matter of fact, I remained in a state of naive ignorance until, late in my life, I finally decided to tackle Jürgen Habermas' monumental Theory of Communicative Action. What seems to have influenced me the most was a section Habermas wrote on "Weber's Diagnosis of the Times." Here is how Habermas introduced the diagnosis:

In his diagnosis of the times Weber keeps closer than usual to the theoretical perspective in which modernization is represented as a continuation of the world-historical process of disenchantment. The differentiation of independent cultural value spheres that is important for the phase of capitalism's emergence, and the growing autonomy of subsystems of purposive-rational action that is characteristic of the development of capitalist society since the late eighteenth century, are the two trends that Weber combines into an existential-individualistic critique of the present age. The first component is represented in the thesis of a loss of meaning, the second in the thesis of a loss of freedom.

This is pretty heavy stuff, even heavier when you think about how things have changed since Weber developed those theses: Under the impact of new technologies, we can hardly say they have changed for the better.

As a matter of fact, having just read Daniel Mendelsohn's review of the new recent 9/11 films, I would say that we can now add a third "thesis of loss" to the list: loss of reality. This cuts deeper than the assault on meaning brought about by the Enlightenment ideals of a world united around universal truth, ideal that Isaiah Berlin attacked so eloquently. Rather, it has to do with the extent to which media have now impacted what we want reality to be. Here are two paragraphs in which Mendelsohn takes on the United 93 film:

The problem with all this realness is that the film itself—like reality—has no structure and without structure, without shaping, the events can have no large meaning [reflecting, probably unintentionally, back on the Weber thesis]. When United 93 first came out, I was struck by one enthusiastic critic's glowing comment, in a review entitled "Brilliant, Brutal and Utterly Real," that Greengrass's movie was "gripping from first to last, partly because, like a Greek tragedy, we are only too aware of where everything is heading …." But what makes Greek tragedy significant as art is precisely the way in which the foreordained trajectory of the events that take place on stage is made to seem part of a larger moral scheme; when (for instance) we see the horrible spectacle of the humbled kind at the end of Persians, we know why he has been humbled (his greedy overreaching) and who has humbled him (the gods, the moral order that obtains in the cosmos).

All that United 93 can tell us, by contrast, is that many people are brave and some people are dastardly. (Well, many American people are brave: we're treated to a scene in which one of the passengers, who has a Central European accent of some kind, urges the others to cooperate with the hijackers.) If United 93 brings to mind any genre, it's not Greek tragedy, with its artfully wrought moral conundrums, but something much tinier: the innumerable made-for-television programs available on cable TV that are dedicated to reenactments of real-life crimes, complete with phony "realism." The stylistic hallmark of these shows is the same jittery hand-held camerawork that Greengrass uses to represent the violence in the cabin of Flight 93.

Unfortunately, phony realism sells soap (and cars and cereal and drugs for everything from allergies to sexual enhancement, not to mention political candidates); so reality has now been consigned to the same ash-heap as freedom and meaning (which, without reality, is even more lost than in Weber's time). So Isaiah Berlin, towards the end of his life, declared the twentieth century to be "the most terrible century in Western history." Perhaps it is just as well that he never had the opportunity to observe its successor.

August 25, 2006: Another Lesson from Isaiah Berlin

It looks like it is again necessary to revisit what Isaiah Berlin had tried to say in his study of the history of ideas. This time the occasion is a comment about the current situation in the Middle East that appeared on The Blotter, a Web site maintained by ABC News. The comment was posted by Adrian Reyes. Here are the first three sentences:

It's a good thing that Gaza, Iraq, Iran, the West Bank, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and Hezbollah have nothing to do with each other. Once again, terrorists are bad people. They can not be reasoned with and want nothing more than the destruction of Israel and the collapse of the West.

Now I have found the comments on this site to be a bit more reasoned than those I have encountered elsewhere (which may be either damning with faint praise or feinting with damned praise); but, given my interests in text analysis, I was fascinated with the way in which the third of these sentences appears to refute the first! Perhaps that is why so many (all?) attempts at discourse about the Middle East seem to come to an impasse. What Gaza, Iraq, Iran, the West Bank, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and Hezbollah have to do with each other is a shared animosity towards the state of Israel, which they perceive as a colonial imposition of Western values on Islamic cultures. If we do not recognize that this is, at the very least, a point of view that needs to be tested by validity claims (in the spirit of Jürgen Habermas' noble, if idealistic, attempts to characterize the processes by which differing parties can arrive at a mutual understanding), then the bloodshed will continue and, in the language of another comment on The Blotter, enough will never be enough! More than ever we need to honor the teachings of Isaiah Berlin, who passionately (if verbosely) argued that the "Western intellectual tradition" was not the only source of ideas or values. As John Gray put it in a recent review, "In opposition to this view Berlin maintained that conflicts of values are real and inescapable, with some of them having no satisfactory solution. He advanced this view not as a form of skepticism but as a universal truth: conflicts of value go with being human." If Berlin never prescribed how, as humans, we could live with these conflicts of value, then Habermas has tried to pick up that gauntlet; and we should all put our best efforts towards translating his idealistic theories into practices for a better world.

August 08, 2006: Embracing Chaos

I would like to continue my reflections on Isaiah Berlin's Crooked Timber of Humanity, briefly alluded to yesterday. This time I would like to explore his idea that the conception of knowledge that came out of the Romantic Sturm und Drang movement in Germany is grounded in chaos, rather than order. Here is a relevant passage from Berlin (not as terse and therefore rather more typical than the one cited yesterday):

For Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, for Wackenroder and Tieck and Chamisso, above all for E. T. A. Hoffmann, the tidy regularities of daily life are but a curtain to conceal the terrifying spectacle of true reality, which has no structure, but is a wild whirlpool, a perpetual tourbillon of the creative spirit which no system can capture: life and motion cannot be represented by immobile, lifeless concepts, nor the infinite and unbounded by the finite and the fixed. A finished work of art, a systematic treatise, are attempts to freeze the flowing stream of life; only fragments, intimations, broken glimpses can begin to convey the perpetual movement of reality. The prophet of Strum und Drang, Hamann, had said that the practical man was a somnambulist, secure and successful because he was blind; if he could see, he would go mad, for nature is ‘a wild dance’, and the irregulars of life – outlaws, beggars, vagabonds, the visionary, the sick, the abnormal – are closer to it than French philosophers, officials, scientists, sensible men, pillars of the enlightened bureaucracy: ‘The tree of knowledge has robbed us of the tree of life.’ The early German Romantic plays and novels are inspired by an attempt to expose the concept of a stable, intelligible structure of reality which calm observers describe, classify, dissect, predict, as a sham and a delusion, a mere curtain of appearances designed to protect those not sensitive or brave enough to face the truth from the terrifying chaos beneath the false order of bourgeois existence.

In twentieth-century America this spirit may best have been captured by Henry Miller (yes!), who, in Tropic of Capricorn, wrote, "Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood."

I have to insert a digression here. My first teaching job was at the Technion in Haifa. I began in the fall of 1971, and the first course I had to teach was in data structures. At the time the only source was Fundamental Algorithms, the first volume of Knuth's uncompleted project, Art of Computer Programming. This book was both too expensive and too locked into Knuth's own invented machine language to serve particularly well as a textbook, so I prepared my own notes to distribute to the students. However, I was inspired by Knuth's indulgence in literary quotations (as were many of my contemporaries); so I could not resist showing off my reading background. Therefore, I began my notes with the above quotation from Tropic of Capricorn, a book that did a lot to help me maintain my personal sense of identity and sanity during my first experience as an expatriate!

I think it is important to appreciate the significance of the Miller-Berlin perspective because we are seeing the anarchic nature of the Internet coming into confrontation with our "inescapable universal" (to borrow a phrase from Max Weber) fixation on bureaucratic organizational forms in the worlds of both work and government. After all, the Internet is probably the only successful anarchy the world has seen since the Ancient Greeks took it upon themselves to invent the concepts of government and politics; but we are so terrified by the prospect of "an order which is not understood" that we desperately try to impose it on the Internet, whether through the Semantic Web, "neutrality" regulation, or God-knows-what-else.

This is not to say that anarchy is not scary. Berlin is right: It takes bravery "to face the truth from the terrifying chaos beneath the false order of bourgeois existence." If it is any help, we can bear in mind the principle that the order is not so much false as it is subjective. One of the things that Jeff Hawkins did not seem to get in all of his waxing on intelligence is that our brains have a natural inclination to impose order on their stimuli. Gerald Edelman called this perceptual categorization and made it the foundation of his own attempts to model the nature of intelligence (which he has tried to substantiate with studies of "wet brain" behavior). What we fear, then, is not that we cannot grasp order in the midst of the confusion but that the order that I grasp may not (probably will not) be the same order that you grasp. Now back in the Sturm und Drang days, Fichte tried to teach us that we should not fear this, that it is through this I-you opposition that each of us develops our own self-awareness (and, while Edelman does not explicitly invoke Fichte, his model of consciousness is definitely sympathetic to Fichte's philosophy). Thus, we can understand the confusion; and, if we are bold enough to let our understanding confront the understandings of others, then we can only benefit from the growth of our own self-awareness. Given all the different ways in which both government and media seem hell-bent on cultivating a culture of fear, the last thing we need to do is waste our cycles on fear of anarchy.

One final point: The way in which Berlin characterizes the Strum und Drang conception of reality is very much verb-based, rather than noun-based. On the other hand the whole "culture of organization," which has invaded our educational system as much as the worlds of business and government, is, by its very nature, noun-based. We have to get beyond the myth we have cultivated that reasoning can only take place when we "freeze the flowing stream of life." Berlin demonstrated how to get beyond the myth in his "Political Judgement" essay. Perhaps it is time to unravel (with "burning patience," as Neruda put it) all of his elaborate sentence constructions and see what those sentences are actually structuring!

August 07, 2006: Isaiah Berlin's Values

Since reading Isaiah Berlin is so often a major effort of wading through sentences that are as stimulating as they are lengthy (one of which has already been quoted), I found it nice to come up with a summary of his thoughts in a single pithy statement:

Civilisation is a garden made rich and beautiful by the variety of its flowers, delicate plants which great conquering empires – Rome, Vienna, London – trample and crush out of existence.

This seemed worth considering in the midst of the current turbulence.

July 06, 2006: An Observation by Isaiah Berlin

I want to continue the theme of efficiency and effectiveness by citing a passage from Isaiah Berlin's essay on "Political Judgement:"

Bismarck understood something which let us say, Darwin or James Clerk Maxwell did not need to understand, something about the public medium in which he acted, and he understood it as sculptors understand stone or clay; understood, that is, in this particular case, the potential reactions of relevant bodies of Germans or Frenchmen or Italians or Russians, and understood this without, so far as we know, any conscious inference or careful regard to the laws of history, or laws of any kind, and without recourse to any other specific key or nostrum – not those recommended by Maistre, or Hegel or Nietzsche or Bergson or some of their modern irrationalist successors, any more than those of their enemies, the friends of science. He was successful because he had the particular gift of using his experience and observation to guess successfully how things would turn out.

July 05, 2006: Chapter 6 of "On Intelligence:" Where the Action Is

I have now made it through Chapter 6 of On Intelligence; and I am glad that I persisted (even in the midst of all other stuff competing for my attention). Personally, I probably would have been happier with a monograph that consisted only of this chapter, since, in terms of such factors as rhetoric and style, I think that Chapter 6 is stronger than anything preceding it. The fact that it is disproportionately longer than any other chapter in the book seems to indicate that it received much more attention, which is why I think it would have been better off delivered as a monograph. In that setting there would have been less temptation to pad out the preceding material in ways that damaged those factors of rhetoric and style.

This is not to say that I was altogether happy with Chapter 6, just that this chapter gave me a better sense of what Hawkins felt his message was. As a matter of fact, at the end of the day, I would characterize Chapter 6 as "Edelman-lite," meaning that it covers much the same ground that Gerald Edelman covered in The Remembered Present, but in a generally more accessible manner. The stories are about the same, as are the settings "in terms of regions of the brain." As a matter of fact, the most important difference involves the prize on which the respective authors eyes are focused. Edelman wants to talk about consciousness, and Hawkins wants to talk about intelligence. I want to make the case that this difference is insignificant because, at the end of the day, that terminology does not matter very much.

My argument is based on Drew McDermott's paper "Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity." Like the little boy who saw the emperor as naked, McDermott had the courage to describe an "expert system" in terms of what it really did (essentially the operationalization of a rule base) and then make the argument that there was no sound reason for assuming any connection between that operationalization and such elevated concepts as "intelligence" or "expertise." I think there is much to be gained from reading both Edelman and Hawkins with such dispassionate insight.

From that point of view, both are writing about a single functional capacity. Since Edelman got there first (but also because Hawkins never calls it out as a concept unto itself), I shall use Edelman's label for that capacity: perceptual categorization. The bottom line is that this is what the neocortex does. This affirms Mountcastle's observation about its uniformity and his hypothesis that, by doing that one thing well (like the hedgehog of Isaiah Berlin's essay), it can cover most of the ground necessary to account for not only interpreting sensory signals but also acting on them. Edelman goes deeper into details (and has tried to use simulation as a tool for better understanding of those details); but his peer group expects that of him. More importantly, Edelman devotes more attention to the whole body, rather than just worrying about the neocortex. So he puts a lot more weight in analyzing the tight coupling between perception and motor behavior and less on the Hawkins idea of a "memory-driven" system (since the system is driven by perceptual categories and Edelman argues that memory is a higher-level phenomenon). Also Edelman argues for a tight coupling between any "cognitive" functionality in neocortex and activity in the limbic system associated with emotional functionality. This part is totally beyond the scope of Chapter 6 (I shall have to wait for Chapter 8); but Edelman now has a lot of support for his position from Damasio.

So my strongest quibble with Hawkins is probably over his title! The fact is that Turing is the one who got it right: He began his classic "Turing test" paper by positing that we cannot define the concept of intelligence and probably will not be able to do so for some time, if ever. He then said (in paraphrase), "Well, if we cannot answer the question 'Can a machine think?' let us consider a simpler question whose answer may be within our grasp;" and that is when he lays out the Turing test. Searle then got all bent out of shape because he felt that too many people were taking the simpler question to be a question about intelligence; and, if you look at the kind of discourse that was flying around the AI community at that time, he was probably right. Unfortunately, the more heat that got generated over the Turing test, the less attention was paid to why we were thinking about it in the first place! Ironically, I probably would have been happier if Hawkins had called his book How the Brain Works. A serious brain theorist would probably have found that title just as hyperbolic as On Intelligence, but it would have been a more straightforward account of the most important subject matter in the book.