January 13, 2007 (3): Decisions!

It all began when one of my colleagues and I parlayed the insights of knowledge management into an attempt to identify the role of communication and understanding in corporate decision-making. This began to take the form of a critique of decision support technology or, more properly, the ways in which that technology has now been appropriated by more recent enterprise software; and, with my tendency to always “push back to basics,” I found myself asking more general questions about the current state of decision theory and how consistent it is with decision practice.

There was a real irritant in asking these questions, however; and it seemed to lie in how “understanding,” as we were trying to study it, serves to “inform us to make informed decisions” (allowing for a circular turn of phrase). Well, for a start, what is it that we need to understand? The answer to that seems to be that we need to understand the situation (i.e. state of affairs, where I am choosing that word “state” because this involves taking a flow of events and relationships in which we are embedded and rendering it as something static) in which one or more actions need to be taken; and those actions need to be selected on the basis of one or more decisions. In other words, as any number of philosophers probably discovered long before I did, any theory of decision making must rest on a foundation of understanding the situation.

At this point I have to share some frustration with a book I am trying to read: Narrative Policy Analysis by Emery Roe. At the very least this book should wean me away from too much indulgence in postmodern deconstructionism; but, putting aside his stylistic preferences (obsessions), Roe is reluctant to come right out and say that he is trying to explore how narrative can serve explanation. This is not an unreasonable point to make; but for anyone of a philosophical bent it opens a real can of worms (if not several).

The most important can of worms is the very nature of explanation itself. I had A9 do an exact phrase search on “nature of explanation;” and the Amazon.com frame came up with 1355 books. My guess is that most of them have their roots in analytic philosophy, all sharing a positivist streak that can be traced back to Hempel (or someone who inspired Hempel). In my own intellectual development this is basically the pile of manure in the barn that convinces me that there must be a pony somewhere in the vicinity (but not in the pile of manure)! All that means, though, is that I am still looking for the pony.

However, finding the pony is only part of the story. Once you home in on the nature of explanation, you still have to worry about communicating an explanation to others. In other words you have to account for an explanation, and usually we do this by articulating it through text. This is another can of worms, since we now encounter all the subtleties associated with different text types and how we arrive at communication and understanding through those text types.

On the other hand, if we go back to Ancient Greece (well, if we go back to either Plato or Socrates as Plato tried to represent him), we discover that the two cans merge into one. The label on that can is the Greek noun λόγος, which means all sorts of things that, taken together, seem to orbit around the concept of an explanatory account rendered as text. (This is why “ology” is such a great suffix. The validity of the explanatory account is not necessarily part of the story. So “scientology” involves λόγος as much as “neurology” does!)

The good news is that, with all my experience in writing, I am never afraid of text. Furthermore, as my own blog header tries to proclaim, I do not try to hide from uncertainty or complexity behind fear, superstition, and/or pettiness. However, this may be an occasion to reflect on some wisdom of Richard Feynman:

In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.

Thus, I am beginning to feel that just about any action we take (not to mention the decision-making preceding that action) cannot help but be “surrounded by uncertainty;” and all we can to do manage is to keep expressing ourselves through texts that we utter and/or write, knowing full well that they will never be clearer than our all-too-muddled thoughts! In other words the final say goes to one of Feynman's most honored predecessors, Niels Bohr:

Never express yourself more clearly than you think.

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.

June 13, 2006: Control and Consequences

I want to get back on the theme of the "half life of technical education" and why I am concerned about it. I suppose it all has to do with why I am trying to tilt at the windmills of technical education (and probably just about any other form of specialized education) in the first place. My concern is basically one of objectives, because it seems to me that the focus of such educational programs always comes down to some approach to controlling the world. Now that seems like a perfectly reasonable way to go, particularly in the mind-set of post-Enlightenment Western civilization; but, as we need to become more aware of our role in the world at large, we must not fool ourselves into believing that it is the only way to go or that "control solves everything." What is often overlooked when we focus to intently on control is that the world is a complex case; and, whatever control we may have, it will never be a handle on all that complexity. Thus, at the very least, we need to live by the motto that control has consequences.

This is particularly important when we try to reduce everything we do to making decisions and acting on the results of those decisions. In this regard I need to draw attention to (and recommend) the book Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, by Richard Neustadt and Ernest May. This book is basically a series of case studies, each of which involves an act of presidential decision making in a time of crisis. The theme behind the entire book involves the way in which Neustadt and May characterize what they mean by "thinking in time." Basically, it involves asking two fundamental questions:

1. How did we get into this situation?
2. Given a course of action to consider, what will be the consequences of following that course?

In other words "thinking in time" involves more than analyzing a "state" in isolation: You have to understand that path through past states that led up to the present state; and, on the basis of your understanding that (and other) paths, you need to make a well-informed guess as to where the path out of that state (determined by the course of action) will lead (and, to invoke chess language, you have to look ahead more than a single move).

This also brings in an important reflection of decision support technology that goes all the way back to the pioneers of that technology: Peter Keen and Michael Scott Morton. Their first book on the subject, Decision Support Systems, begins by drawing the distinction between efficient and effective decision making. The punch line, of course, is that it is always necessary to strive for the latter, rather than the former. I believe that one of the hazards of the way in which specialized education is taught (if not of the subject-matter itself) is that efficiency tends to get the upper hand over effectiveness, simply because it is easier to evaluate efficiency, while evaluating effectiveness demands all the subtleties of "thinking in time." (We are back in the world of looking for your keys where the light is better, even if you know you did not lose them there.)

So perhaps there should be some corner of our educational process that makes sure we do not forget that it can be all right to just live in the world, without necessarily controlling (or feeling you can control) it. I do not mean this as a granola-based go-with-the-flow philosophy. Rather, to reflect on the quote in my Blast, you should be able to live in the world without "fear, superstition and pettiness," because the world throws so much at that stuff in our path that we should delude ourselves into believing the the only way to deal with it is to control it!