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.

August 05, 2006 (2): Further Reflections on Wikipedia

The Wikimania conference, at least as being reported by CNET News.com, seems to be providing me with an abundance of material for reflection. In this case I would like to pick out one paragraph from the report on Jimmy Wales' address to the conference that touches on "competition" with Britannica and the recent Colbert dig:

"The problem is that the technology barrier to entry keeps out really smart people who are geeks but not computer geeks. And it doesn't keep out all the other idiots," he said.

This may be an indicator of why, at the end of the day, Wikipedia cannot seriously compete with an organization like Britannica. Both Britannica and its contributors recognize that "really smart people" are only part of the recipe for a successful reference resource. The other import part involves the "really smart editors." Having edited book reviews for Artificial Intelligence, I know that, even in the geekiest of settings, even the smartest of people need good editing. The Wikipedia philosophy seems to be that collaborative contribution can compensate for the lack of smart editing, and I just cannot buy into that philosophy.

My reason for this position is based on one of the simplest truths about any text: Any written text has two elements, the what-you-say part and the how-you-say-it part. (This is one of the things that makes the study of how narrative communicates so fascinating.) The best editors recognize these two elements and know enough to figure out which of the two (or both) need to be tuned before the contribution goes to press. I simply do not believe that the collaborative approach does a good job at keeping these two elements properly separated. Collaboration may remedy errors at the what-you-say level, because someone who knows more about the topic can use the mechanism to add his/her two cents worth. However, I suspect that content edited by the Britannica process will always trump Wikipedia content when it comes to how-you-say-it; and this is the element that is particularly important if a reader is trying to come up to speed on a new topic.

Perhaps (since he can probably afford to do so) Wales should volunteer some of his time as an intern among the editors working at Britannica to get a better feel for what makes an effective reference resource!

June 30, 2006: Burke's Pentad: How Narrative Communicates

Having posited the assertion that narrative can help us make sense of the complexity of the world, it seems reasonable to ask just how it can do this. What are the structural elements that are examined in the study of narratology? There are a variety of approaches to answering this questions. What I would like to do is examine one approach and show how it relates to a couple of others.

The above diagram illustrates a construct proposed by Kenneth Burke as a framework for the study of motives. As he put it:

What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?

He called his framework "the five key terms of dramatism;" and it would come to be known as "Burke's pentad." Burke defines his five terms as follows:

In a rounded statement about motives, you must have some word that names the act (names what took place, in thought or deed), and another that names the scene (the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred); also, you must indicate what person or kind of person (agent) performed the act, what means or instruments he used (agency), and the purpose. Men may violently disagree about the purposes behind a given act, or about the character of the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally different words to name the act itself. But be that as it may, any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose).

Those familiar with journalism will probably see a "family resemblance" of this framework to the so-called "5W1H" for reporting (who, what, where, when, why, how). 5W1H, however, is actually an abbreviated (by one) version that can be traced by to the scholastics: quis (who), quid (what), ubi (where), quibus auxiliis (by what means), cur (why), quo modo (how), quando (when). The item that the journalism framework dropped was quibus auxiliis, perhaps because it was felt to be an elaboration of "how." This seems to be how Burke feels in comparing the scholastic formula to his pentad:

The "who" is obviously covered by agent. Scene covers the "where" and the "when." the "why" is purpose. "How" and "by what means" fall under agency. All that is left to take care of is act in our terms and "what" in the scholastic formula.

Burke uses this as a justification for examining act in terms of form.

Incidentally, you can find this formula in Aquinas' Summa Theologica, where he attributes it to Cicero (or Tully). I have burned a fair amount of energy in both the physical and digital worlds trying to find this formula in Cicero, and I have still not succeeded. It may very well be of Roman origin, but I have yet to find the source! On the other hand Burke also explores the connection between his five terms and Aristotle's six elements of tragedy (discussed in "Poetics"). Here are Aristotle's six elements with explanatory quotes from Bywater's translation the source text:

1. Plot (muthos): “the combination of the incidents, or things done in the story”
2. Character (êthé): “what makes us ascribe certain qualities to the agents”
3. Thought (dianoia)

   “all they say when proving a particular point or, it may be, enunciating a general truth”
   “we may assume what is said of it in our Art of Rhetoric, as it belongs more properly to that department of inquiry”

4. Diction (lexis)

   the externalization of the internal order of the fable
   “What indeed would be the good of the speaker if things appeared in the required light even apart from anything he says?”
   the word is a component of elocution, which, in turn, is an element of tragedy

5. Melody (mélopoia)
6. Spectacle (opsis)

Aristotle does not say very much about either melody or spectacle. He regards these as having more to do with how the tragedy is performed, as opposed to its actual content.

Here is how Burke brings his pentad elements into alignment with Aristotle:

Plot would correspond to act. Character would correspond to agent (it is "what makes us ascribe certain moral qualities to the agents" [Burke uses a different translation]). Whereas the action is the purpose of the play from the standpoint of the audience, within the play we should probably assign purpose to the third element, Thought (which is shown in all that the characters say "when proving a particular point or … enunciating a general truth"). Since Aristotle himself calls Melody and Diction "the means of imitation," they would obviously fall under agency. The sixth element, Spectacle, he assigns to "manner" (presumably the quo modo of the Latin hexameter quoted above), a kind of modality that we should want to class under scene, although Aristotle's view of it as accessory would seem to make it rather a kind of scenic agency. It was not until modern naturalism in drama that scene gained its full independence, with the "property man" giving the environmental placement that was regularly suggested in Elizabethan drama, for instance, by the use of verbal imagery. Perhaps "Spectacle" had something of the significance we associate with "sheer pageantry." Aristotle says that the Spectacle, though an attraction, "is the least artistic of all the parts, and has least to do with the art of poetry." We can be affected by a tragedy without a public performance at all; and "the getting -up of the Spectacle is more a matter for the costumer than the poet."

So here are three (four, if you count the journalist's formula) different views of how a story communicates; and they all align rather well with each other. Of course making a good story is more than just making sure that all the ingredients are there. The ways in which the storyteller and combine those ingredients and engage them with each other are what makes storytelling an art, rather than a traversal of propositional statements. That art counts for a lot, as Peter Brooks has demonstrated in the chapters of his Reading for the Plot; but that, as they say, is another story!

June 28, 2006: Narratology 101 or Both Sides Now

Movies can be a great source of irony, particularly when they are juxtaposed in the just the right way. Last night I was watching Patton and was struck by the amount of ceremony associated with our first view of the man in Africa, being honored before the Moroccan army. His reaction is to praise the Moroccans for having developed the most disciplined troops he had ever encountered. That was all very well and good, except that the previous evening I had watched Moroccan soldiers rape the "two women" from the title of Vittorio De Sica's outstanding film. This led me to think back on observations about how we use narrative to make sense of the world around us, which then led me to wonder whether or not too many of us now deal with the world only in terms of the stories we are told about it, neglecting not only other sources but also the whole question of what the story is trying to tell.

One of the products of the structuralist movement, particularly on the European continent, was the emergence of the discipline of narratology. If hermeneutics is concerned with the full generality of texts, then narratology narrows the field down to narrative texts and then invokes similar methodological baggage. On the one hand there are questions concerned with how a narrative account is structured (which then bring up questions of priority of the structural elements); and then there are the questions of what the story is actually trying to tell. Needless to say, this can then run into arguments over whether or not a story can be interpreted in different ways, which brings us back to the conflict over diversity of interpretation. Where faith is involved, this is a particularly sensitive issue, since much of the absolutism of fundamentalism involves the conviction that there is only one way to interpret Biblical narrative.

My personal feeling is that, if narrative can help us to make sense of the complexity of our world, it is not by providing us with punch-line answers (or the morals of Aesop). Rather, it is by virtue of the fact that narrative, itself, is often highly complex; but it can still be rendered in such a way as to make that complexity more palatable. This is why (artificial intelligence notwithstanding) it is so absurd to trying to reduce a play like Macbeth to a representation in some logical calculus. If you only pay attention to the "facts," you miss out on all the things that Shakespeare does to draw you into this story; and, as Aristotle observed in his "Poetics," that "being drawn in" is actually a highly-charged learning experience. Furthermore, different narratives will then cross over each other in our own minds (like the scenarios for Patton and Two Women), leading to further access to that complexity of the world.

Think about that the next time you lay out $10 for two hours of special effects that do not hang on much of a narrative line. As a former colleague of mine once put it, "That's like picking all of the raisins out of the box of raisin bran." A narrative experience is yet another invitation to commitment. Every rejection of that invitation is made at our own peril.

June 18, 2006: Why Structure?

Returning to the theme raised in the hermeneutics entry on June 11, I thought it might be useful to ask why we should be so concerned with finding structure in the first place. In the world of information technology, we tend to take the need for structure for granted without asking this question; but this blog is all about not confusing that world with the real one. So why are we so interested in having rules for describing structural representation, and what do we really do with them?

In the world of structural linguistics, we tend to associate structural analysis with parsing and parsing with well-formedness. Thus, we have structural rules to tell us whether or not a string of words is legitimately a sentence. Unfortunately, as soon as we move from "standard expository prose" to the ways in which we actually use language (including speech acts), this concept of well-formedness loses much of its value. So then we fall back and say, "Well, we are just using the rules to describe the string of words (or utterances, or whatever)." However, that just begs the question. Why do we need such a description? Is it just a basis for representation in some database, even if we are not sure why we want that database in the first place?

I would argue that there is a bit more at stake; and that is because, as a rule, those descriptions tend to be hierarchical. That means that, between two elements, there tend to be (but not necessarily always) subordinate-superordinate relations. Put another we, there is information that is serving to elaborate; and it is associated with the information being elaborated. This allows us to prioritize the entire structure, sorting out those elements that matter most from those serving to elaborate.

The most important insight in Ray Monk's How to Read Wittgenstein has to do with the numbering system in the Tractatus. This numbering system is very strictly tree-structured; so, as Monk demonstrates, while the book is a depth-first traversal of the tree, the reader tends to get a better understanding by traversing the tree breadth-first. In other words get the important points under your belt first, even if you need to be convinced of some of them; you can get the convincing later when you descend into the elaborations. Not all texts are written this way, but this is the perfect example of how sorting things out is best served by structural analysis.