January 02, 2007: Augustine on (in?) the Brain

For me the most fascinating part of Augustine's Confessions is his attempt to come to terms with the concept of time. From the very beginning he makes it clear that he is up against a serious challenge:

What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know. But I confidently affirm myself to know that if nothing passes away, there is no past time, and if nothing arrives, there is no future time, and if nothing existed there would be no present time. Take the two tenses, past and future. How can they ‘be’ when the past is not now present and the future is not yet present? Yet if the present were always present, it would not pass into the past: it would not be time but eternity. If then, in order to be time at all, the present is so made that it passes into the past, how can we say that this present also ‘is’? The cause of its being is that it will cease to be. So indeed we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends towards non-existence.

Ultimately, he can do little more than clarify his terminology, anticipating Wittgenstein by concentrating more on how the terms are used than on what they mean or are:

What is by now evident and clear is that neither future nor past exists, and it is inexact language to speak of three times—past, present, and future. Perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come. In the soul there are these three aspects of time, and I do not see them anywhere else. The present considering the past is the memory, the present considering the present is immediate awareness, the present considering the future is expectation.

What has interested me the most is the extent to which our increasing knowledge of the physical brain has turned out to align nicely with Augustine's metaphysical soul-concept. The "present of things past" anticipated that engram that Lashley invested so much of his life in trying to find without success, although within the last ten years in appears that Richard Thompson and his colleagues at USC have managed to associate it with a localized region in the cerebellum. Meanwhile, we have Gerald Edelman to thank for demonstrating that the "present of things present" is actually a "remembered" present. New BBC NEWS has reported results from Washington University concerning the "present of things to come," presenting evidence that this, too, is localized, in this case in the left lateral premotor cortex, the left precuneus and the right posterior cerebellum. It is nice finally to home in on some good news at the start of a year that began with so many ill omens!

December 14, 2006: An Economist for the Age of the Service Economy

As we continue to debate the question of whether or not service is a "science" and what sort of academic curriculum (if any) provides the necessary foundations for study we would do well to check out the resume of Deirdre McCloskey in Alan Ryan's New York Review article about her recent epic volume, The Bourgeois Virtues. McCloskey is, in Ryan's words, "a professional economist, trained in the Chicago School;" and, back when she was Donald McCloskey, he was one of the key economic advisers to the Reagan administration. (The "pronoun shift" was documented in her book Crossings, briefly cited by Ryan and excellently reviewed by Maxine Kumin in the November 14, 1999 New York Times Book Review.) With both Ronald Reagan and a sex-change operation behind her, McCloskey is now a distinguished professor of economics at both Erasmus University in Rotterdam and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is also a professor of rhetoric and English and has published knowledgeably in the areas of history of ideas, social theory, and philosophy. Given that both the theory and the practice of economics now has to contend with the rise of the service economy (not to mention globalization), I can think of no better combination of academic disciplines to meet this challenge!

November 23, 2006: Tracking Down a Source

It began when I found the following quote attributed to Plotinus:

Τό γάρ ϊχνος τόυ άμόρφου μορφή

I had two problems:

1. I wanted to track down the translation
2. I wanted specific source information

The Perseus online Greek dictionary helped me with the first. Once I got from ϊχνος to "trace," I was able to home in on a translation of the phrase: "Form is only the trace of that which has no form." I also had a specific location in the Enneads: VI, 7, 33. The only problem was that the phrase was not in my copy! It was only after a Google Book Search led me to Plotinus Or the Simplicity of Vision, by Pierre Hadot, that I was able to track the source to a specific line. I then discovered that, while my copy had the same translator that was cited for the phrase (MacKenna), that copy was a newer translation. In the new edition the phrase came out as: "Shape is an impress from the unshaped." I do not think I could have solved this problem with Google, but it was still a tough fight!

September 28, 2006: Where it all Began

Enough of Generation M and the fictions we are making up to hide behind it! Let us try to remember, for better or worse, that there is a "world of work" out there. This makes it a good time to remember that the same essay that carries Marx' wonderful assessment of religion also signals his discovery of the proletariat. This forms the basis for today's commonplace book entry:

Where, then, the positive possibility of emancipation in Germany? Answer: In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong as such. There must be formed a sphere of society which claims no traditional title but only a human title, which is not partially opposed to the consequences but is totally opposed to the assumptions of the German political system; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, and thereby emancipating all of them; a sphere, in short, which is the total loss of humanity and which can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat.

This seems to be where it all began, and one can only wonder if Marx could imagine where it would lead!

September 21, 2006: Marx on Religion

We all know that Marx invoked opium as a metaphor for religion, but how many readers know the context for this metaphor? I recently found it in a review ("critique") of Hegel's Philosophy of Right that Marx had written for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844. Since I still find the Philosophy of Right to be Hegel at his most impenetrable (which is saying something, given all the other Hegel texts out there), I have to confess that I took a great deal of pleasure in observing Marx have a go at the text with one of his most flamboyant rants. I would not say that religion was one of the major topics in Hegel's text; and, to be fair to Hegel, Marx does not seem to lay out what it is that Hegel says about religion that he opposes. The bottom line is that, Hegel or no Hegel, Marx uses this review as an opportunity to launch a rhetorical salvo at the concept of religion that goes way beyond the metaphor we know so well. Here is the heart of it:

The basis of irreligious criticism is: man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion, indeed, is the self-consciousness and the self-esteem of the man who has not yet found himself or who has already lost himself. But man is not an abstract being crouching outside the world. Man is man’s world, the state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world because state and society are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedia, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and the general ground for the consummation and justification of this world. It is the ghostly realization of the human essence, ghostly because the human essence possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The overcoming of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand that they should abandon illusions about their conditions is the demand to give up conditions that require illusions.

September 20, 2006 (1): Ignoring History

It is time to "read into the record" those sentences from Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which always seem to be ignored in spite of their value:

Hegel observes somewhere that all great incidents and individuals of world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Never mind that we have yet to track down the source of Hegel's observation. We can forgive Marx the rhetorical flourish in light of the subsequent insight!

I was reminded of this remark while reading Guenther Roth's (necessarily?) massive introduction to Economy and Society, the project to translate all of Max Weber's Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft into English. One particular sentence leapt out at me this morning:

Weber looked more closely at the consequences of the seizure of power than did Marx in spite of the "dictatorship of the proletariat"; he saw that revolutionary domination can survive only when an efficient administration suppresses the expropriated former holders of legitimate power.

Can we read this sentence without thinking about Iraq? Can we think about Iraq without thinking about Marx's two-fold analysis of history: the revolutionary overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy followed by the revolutionary overthrow of Ba'athist rule? There is no doubting the general consensus regarding the tragic nature of the first phase. We have only to read the news every day to complete Marx's couplet. I suppose there is little need to comment on how much thought was given to "efficient administration" before going in with the big guns!

September 19, 2006: Did Kleist Anticipate Sokal?

To call Heinrich von Kleist a strange writer is to mince around with understatement. There are too many examples of his fiction and drama that leave you thinking, "I can't believe I'm reading/seeing this!" So one has to wonder whether or not one should react the same way to some of his essays. He could have perpetrated the sort of hoax that, in our time, Alan Sokal pulled off in publishing "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" in the journal Social Text. As we now know, Sokal tried to "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions" and succeeded. Two hundred years earlier, Kleist published some "learned essays" on topics sufficiently odd for his time to leave the reader wondering whether or not to take him seriously.

My favorite is "On the Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking." The basic thesis is that the thoughts we have "in our head" are, for the most part, vague and ill-formed; and it is only when we try to express them in words that they become concrete enough to be called ideas. (At this point I should not that the fact that Kleist had a thesis at all makes him more credible than Sokal. The editors of Social Text apparently did not require him to have a thesis statement, so he did not provide them with one: He wrote no abstract and avoided anything that looked like a thesis sentence in both his opening and closing paragraphs. Kleist may have decided to explore a weird thesis, but at least he told you where he was going!) After stating this thesis, he backs it up with a series of examples and concludes by reaffirming that thesis. In that respect it is a model essay.

As a matter of fact, I think everyone should read it, not only because it is a model essay but also because I think his examples do support this thesis! Why not? In his "Theaetetus" Plato has Socrates lead Theaetetus to explore the definition of "knowledge." Theaetetus proposes four definitions, each of which is deftly refuted by Socrates, leaving us at the end of the dialog with no definition for knowledge! Perhaps we have such muddled ideas about "thoughts in the head" that Kleist may be right: Those thoughts really are not there and only take shape when we try to express them. In Kleist's own more poetic language, "it is not we who 'know'; it is rather a certain condition, in which we happen to be, that 'knows.'"

So, the next time you encounter an article that does have an authentic thesis, rather than a mere concatenation of meaningless jargon, no matter how absurd it may seem, accord it the respect of a serious claim. Then see if the author can back up the claim with an argument, making sure that the argument is not pulling off any rhetorical sleight-of-hand. If you can drag the claim through that test and it emerges intact on the other side, it may be less absurd than you thought!

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 11, 2006: Normal (?) Science

One of the interesting ideas to come out of the "knowledge movement" was the attempt to view an business organization as a "knowledge structure." One of the champions of this position was Bruce Kogut, who, together with his colleagues Shan and Walker, published a paper in 1993 with the intriguing title, "Knowledge in the network and the network as knowledge: Structuring of new industries." In a recent survey paper on communication networks, Peter Monge and Noshir Contractor summarized one of Kogut's key insights:

Once organizations choose partners, however, they tend to spend less time seeking other partners. As Kogut, Shan, and Walker (1993) say, "because information is determined by previous relations and in turn influences the subsequent propensity to do more relations, the structure of the network tends to replicate itself over time. The early history of cooperation tends to lock in subsequent cooperation" (p. 70). Further, they observe that "The replication of the network is a statement of the tendency of learning to decline with time. The structure of the network is a limiting constraint on how much new learning can be achieved. ...But when viewed from the perspective of the evolution of networks, there is a tendency for old lessons to be retaught" (p. 71).

This got me to thinking about the concept of "normal science" and the role it played in Thomas Kuhn's study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Here is how Kuhn characterized the concept:

In this essay, ‘normal science’ means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice. Today such achievements are recounted, though seldom in their original form, by science textbooks, elementary and advanced. These textbooks expound the body of accepted theory, illustrate many or all of its successful applications, and compare these applications with exemplary observations and experiments. Before such books became popular early in the nineteenth century and until even more recently in the newly matured sciences, many of the famous classics of science, by such writers as Aristotle, Newton and Ben Franklin, served for a time to define the legitimate problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations of practitioners.

It strikes me that Kogut's characterization of an organizational network as knowledge bears a strong family resemblance to Kuhn's characterization of normal science. The kind of knowledge that Kogut seems to have in mind is knowledge of "how things are supposed to be done" in an organization; and one strategy for maintaining that organization is to replicate that knowledge. In a similar way scientific communities may be viewed as organizations; and, to the extent that any community is based on the need to distinguish a collective "self" from an "other," normal science defines the community, not by its scientific results, but by the implicit knowledge of how things are supposed to be done. Straying from the path entails leaving (or being banished from) the community. Abandoning normative standards entails abandoning the recognition of one's activities as legitimate.

This returns us to the theme of order and chaos. Organizations, both industrial and scientific, depend heavily on a sense of identity in order to "get things done." However, we are now confronted with the question of how one establishes identity (which implies some sense of stability) in a context that is becoming increasingly chaotic. Normal science, in a sense, denies that there is chaos out there (or, to invoke Henry Miller's language, denies that there is no confusion that cannot ultimately be understood). Romanticism challenges this premise and, in so doing, challenges a normative approach to science (which is why Kuhn introduces the concept of scientific revolution in the first place) and may also challenge a normative approach to business organization.

Meeting that challenge may involve returning to the theme of the opposition of faith and interpretation. At the end of the day, the decision to accept that the conduct of science or business management rests on normative standards is an act of faith. One cannot invoke scientific method to justify the conduct of normal science. Indeed, much of the reaction against Kuhn had to do with the fact that the concept of a scientific revolution could be seen as a refutation of the validity of the normative conduct of normal science, thus challenging the prevailing faith of scientists at the time Kuhn's book appeared. Similarly, our commitment to normative standards of business management is also an act of faith; and all it takes are intimations of refutation to remind us how strong that faith is in the established community of managers.

In posing interpretation as an opposition to faith, I argue that anything we confront in the world always needs to be subject to interpretation; and, because the context is always changing, we cannot assume that any interpretation is stable or enduring. All we can do is hone our interpretive skills and continue to exercise them as a safeguard against atrophy. There is no guarantee that this will solve any major problems like unemployment or war, but it should at least keep us from sleepwalking through the world that others want to make for us!

August 09, 2006: The Sense of Identity on the Other Side of the Chaos Coin

I prepared the above diagram after reading Plato's "Theaetetus." This dialogue is often invoked by the knowledge management crowd for its definition of knowledge as justified true belief. However, if you go to the source itself, you discover that, in the course of the dialogue, definitions of knowledge are considered (justified true belief being the last of these); and all of them are found wanting. The dialogue concludes by accepting (almost in the Kubler-Ross sense) the fact that Socrates and Theaetetus have failed in their attempt to define knowledge. What Socrates manages to demonstrate, though (although he never says this explicitly), is that the difficulty of defining knowledge may have to do with how tightly coupled it is to at least three other equally fundamental concepts: memory, being, and description (which may be a poor translation of the Greek λόγος).

I raise this summary because I think that the concept of being (along with the related concept of identity) must not be neglected in considering the strategy of embracing chaos that I discussed yesterday. This occurred to me while reading some of the business literature invoking terms such as "network organizations," "boundary-less organizations," and "virtual organizations." I realized that, from the point of view of actually getting the work done, this kind of language can raise some challenging questions of identity, for both individual workers and the "entities" (who knows what we want to call them any more) that, at least nominally, serve as their employers. As I suggested yesterday, this issue of identity is critical, because it is only through our sense of self that we can engage our own subjective skills of perceptual categorization, which are all we have in order to manage ourselves in that chaotic setting that we may be obliged to embrace. To some extent Social Psychology has recognized this with its sub-discipline of Identity Theory and the roots of that sub-discipline in George Herbert Mead's symbolic interactionism. In that respect it should be no surprise that Habermas' work on his theory of communicative action draws heavily on Mead's symbolic interactionism. However, what matters at the end of the day is how the issue of identity surfaces when each of us faces the prospect of going to work every day or confronts the fate of having lost one's job. Pop psychology has trivialize the phrase "identity crisis;" but it may be that one of the most critical consequences of the Internet has been the cultivation of an identity crisis of global proportions. As I have already suggested, these consequences have economic, social, and political implications, all of which have received little more that gratuitous lip service as a price for the worship of innovation. However, an emerging identity crisis may be an instance of what Malcolm X had called the chickens coming home to roost!

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 26, 2006: Husserl's "Crisis" Revisited

In light of the focus of scienticism on controlling the world, this might be a good time to review some of the basic ideas behind Edmund Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences. A good summary of Husserl's critique of scientific thinking was provided by Habermas in his "Knowledge and Human Interests" lecture. Habermas breaks down Husserl's argument into three stages:

1. “It is directed in the first place against the objectivism of the sciences, for which the world appears objectively as a universe of facts whose lawlike connection can be grasped descriptively. In truth, however, knowledge of the apparently objective world of facts has its transcendental basis in the prescientific world. The possible objects of scientific analysis are constituted a priori in the self-evidence of our primary life-world. In this layer phenomenology discloses the products of a meaning-generative subjectivity.”
2. “Second, Husserl would like to show that this productive subjectivity disappears under the cover of an objectivistic self-understanding, because the sciences have not radically freed themselves from interests rooted in the primary life-world. Only phenomenology breaks with the naive attitude in favor of a rigorously contemplative one and definitively frees knowledge from interest.”
3. “Third, Husserl identifies transcendental self-reflection, to which he accords the name of phenomenological description, with theory in the traditional sense. The philosopher owes the theoretical attitude to a transposition that liberates him from the fabric of empirical interests. In this regard theory is ‘unpractical.’ But this does not cut it off from practical life. For, according to the traditional concept, it is precisely the consistent abstinence of theory that produces action-orienting culture.”

He then makes the astute observation that Husserl worked on this book in the early Thirties, at a time when the rise of the Nazis in Germany brought along an increased attention to scienticism in the name of "rising barbarism" (to use Habermas' phrase). With such a context I can only wonder if, once again, science is not being enslaved by another period of "rising barbarism," when the power of the government purse is ultimately determining what scientists can and cannot think and then lauding the virtues of their "objective thinking." The cover of my 1986 paperback printing of Husserl's book had a series of time-lapse photographs of the detonation of an atomic (or hydrogen) bomb. The cover of the current printing (shown in the poster above) is much more neutral. Is there a message here about how we ought to think about interpreting Husserl's message today?

July 19, 2006: Two Cheers for Google (or Peter Norvig)!

Candace Lombardi provided a nice account of the exchange between Tim Berners-Lee and Peter Norvig (Google Director of Search) in today's CNET News.com. This is a case where I have to side with the Google supporters' comments. Here is my elaboration on one of those comments, edited to include a hyperlink, which CNET would not let me include:

What we are really talking about here is human nature; but that is still only part of the story. What most of the techno-centric community does not understand is that every technology artifact is based in three "worlds:" the objective, the subjective, and the social. (This is a generalization of Habermas' observation that all personal interactions take place in those three worlds simultaneously.) Berners-Lee would really like the World Wide Web to be strictly an artifact of the objective world, which may be all right if you are trying to write a doctoral thesis in artificial intelligence but does not wash if the Web lies at the heart of your business model. Norvig's rebuttal addressed issues in both the subjective and social worlds, and I doubt that anyone would dispute the fact that Google's success has as much to do with their successful management (even if intuitive) of the social world as with their efforts to build the best artifacts according to criteria of the objective world.

However, beyond the subjective and social flaws that Norvig identified, the fact is that the "semantic" infrastructure of the "Semantic Web" is equally flawed. As I have tried to argue, you cannot have an ontology that is not grounded in phenomenology. In Semantic Web language, this means that the objective nature of the RDF (Resource Description Framework) will always fall short of the demands of the subjective and social worlds.

So isn't history just repeating itself? Ten years ago we had the SGML advocates who were trying to push for the formal structuring of all content. The limited amount of support for that vision was quickly blown away by the advent of HTML, and the resulting rush to search engine technology demonstrated that structure was not as important as the SGML folks wanted to believe. Guess what? NOW it is not as important as the Semantic Web advocates want to believe!

July 11, 2006: Whose Intelligence is it Anyway?

My primary reaction upon completing Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence seems to be, "I should have stopped after Chapter 6!" My "corollary" reaction, so to speak, is one of my favorite clichés: "To a small boy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." If Hawkins were an admirer of Keats (which I suspect he is not), he would probably say, "Intelligence is neocortex; neocortex is intelligence. That is all you know on earth and all you need to know."

The problem is that this does not necessarily wash. As I had previously observed, when you take such a narrow view of the brain, that brain may as well be in a vat; and, when Hawkins turns his attention to "The Future of Intelligence" (Chapter 8), it seems as if he does not think that such a vat is that bad an idea. Now I do not want these final remarks on Hawkins' book to be a matter of choosing sides. I think that there is a lot of subtle philosophy that still needs to be worked dealing with the relationship between mind (wherever it may reside, if it "resides" at all) and body and the implications of that relationship upon being itself. This is neither the time nor the place to deep-end on that philosophy (although Hawkins has certainly provided me with the incentive to study it in greater depth)! Instead, I shall bring my own rant to closure through a single observation:

The Hawkins model of intelligence is totally autonomous: Intelligence emerges through sensorimotor interactions with the rest of the world, but I doubt that anyone (including Hawkins) would call such interactions "social." So, for the sake of argument, let us assume that we all live long enough to see Hawkins' model implemented in some realistically operational fashion; and let us further assume that his implementation has at least some of the scale-up properties (such as capacity or speed) that interest him so much. Would we (the all-too-human) be able to engage with these artifacts for our own benefit? My guess is that we would not. We probably would not even be able to communicate with them in natural language because of our radical differences in context. (This would be a living example of the Wittgenstein quip: "If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.") So it could very well be that Hawkins knows how to build devices that would make the world a better place, but who's world would it be? This is not meant to be a defeatist position that celebrates weaknesses that we have that we may never overcome; it is just a pragmatic suggestion that all of us can do no better that play with the cards dealt to us. At the end of the day, I suppose I am just a Voltairian meliorist!

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 25, 2006: Service is a Science, or is it?

Thinking back on yesterday's comments about nostalgia, I have decided that not all of the agonies of Hell involve happy memories. One can also be tortured by unpleasant memories, particularly when you feel you could have taken some action (or just said something) to change them. (You might call these the agonies of "coulda-shoulda-woulda.") I had one of those hauntings this morning, so now I have to get it off my chest.

This is a memory from March 24, 2004 and the Almaden Institute I attended that day. The topic was "Work in the era of the global, extensible enterprise;" but the focus was on work in the service sector. The tone was set by the welcoming remarks, which, as I recall, were delivered by Paul Horn, Senior Vice President of IBM Research. The main thing I remember from those remarks can be roughly paraphrased (if not directly quoted) as follows:

Fifty years ago IBM partnered with Columbia University to invent the academic discipline of computer science; today I am announcing that we are partnering with the University of California at Berkeley to invent the discipline of service science.

This was my first unpleasant experience of the day. I had always felt (courtesy of one of the many citations dug up by Knuth) that the foundations of computer science were laid in a series of lectures in the summer of 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania, after their pioneering work in digital computing (the Eniac) for the military during the Second World War. I have to confess to a strong personal bias behind this belief, since the first lecture was delivered on July 8, 1946, which happens to be the day I was born! However, I also remember Edsger Dijkstra's Turing Award speech, in which he talked about those people who can only understand concepts when delivered in their own terminology. The examples he gave were Catholics and Communists; but, when history is involved, I have discovered there are plenty of other examples!

The real memory-agony, however, dealt with the whole idea of their being a science of service, particularly since one of my activities that day involved a break-out session to discuss the curriculum for that new academic discipline. To this day I believe that our session went absolutely nowhere, because we could not think of any area of study that could be excluded from the curriculum; and so it is that I am haunted. Fortunately, I think Hegel has been helping me see some light. My entry about putting philosophy in its place can actually be boiled down to deciding whether the objective of the study of philosophy is descriptive or prescriptive. Hegel came down strongly on the former option, arguing that those descriptions should be as clear as possible, since they depicted "reality as it is." As a result I would extend Hegel and argue that, just as philosophy is a descriptive discipline, science is a prescriptive one, concerned primarily with understanding enough about the natural world to exercise control over it. So, in the tradition of answering one question with another question, before asking if there is a science of service, we might consider the extent to which the study of service can lead to prescriptive results.

Here I would like to cite some of the work of Orion White, a sociologist who was studying service organizations before their operations had been influenced by digital technology. He drew the distinction that a service organization is dialectical, rather than bureaucratic (Public Administration Review, 1969). In more contemporary language we could say that the operations of a service organization cannot be reduced to business processes, which may then be "engineered" for optimal efficiency. Instead, operations are all about recognizing underlying oppositions and resolving them synthetically, rather than coming down on one side or the other as "the way it has to be." I would then argue that, while it may be possible for a bureaucratic organization, one cannot take a prescriptive approach to the operations of a dialectical organization. One can only build up a repertoire of keen descriptive skills, through which one can grasp the reality of the entire situation, and then, with a Habermas-like ambition, apply that grasp to achieving an understanding that is social and subjective, rather than strictly objective. Since science only "plays" in the objective world, the very concept of a service science entails an impoverished view of the world.

What, then, is the primary descriptive goal in the study of service? I would argue that it involves the nature of value and how value is perceived by individuals in their social settings. In this respect one could do worse than begin with the study of the production of value that Marx began to develop at great length in his Grundrisse (even if much of that work went through a major overhaul by the time he was writing Capital). Marx was well aware that the production of value was not strictly a matter of the commodities that enter a production process in one form and leave in another. Much of Marx' attention focused on the consequences of viewing labor, itself, as a commodity; but Habermas expanded his own scope beyond the basic operation and operators of the production line. He presented evidence "that we consider whether the work incorporated in rationalization must not be understood and evaluated as second-order productive labor—as an independent one, because it depends on productive labor of the first order." (In many ways this is Habermas' first recognition of the role that understanding plays in work practices.) Thus, any understanding of the nature of value has to account for the ways in which knowledge contributes to value (an issue that was given lip service during the heady days of the "knowledge movement" but never subjected to the standards of descriptive discipline that Hegel had set for philosophy).

So am I just playing out a pun that the study of service should be grounded in the Grundrisse? Am I trying to send a be-careful-what-you-wish-for message to IBM, because the path to that wish may lead through Marx? No, I am just content to play Hegel's game and do my part towards the depiction of "reality as it is," however, complex that reality may be!

June 23, 2006: Hegel Puts Philosophy in its Place

While reading Habermas' Theory and Practice I came upon his summary of an observation that Hegel made in the preface to the Philosophy of Right: "Philosophy cannot instruct the world about what it ought to be; it is solely reality which is reflected in its concepts, reality as it is."

June 22, 2006: Faith and Interpretation

It occurred to me this morning that one of the reasons I have been investing so much energy in this blog is that I feel a very strong personal commitment to the practice of interpretation, and I can probably trace that commitment back to the first time I encountered a copy of the Bible that included commentary on the text. In retrospect (although I did not know it at the time) this was most likely my first exposure to hermeneutics, since, while I made no mention of this in my "Hermeneutics 101" entry, the practice of hermeneutics originated in problems concerned with the interpretation of Biblical texts. This raises an interesting irony, which I would like to explore briefly.

It goes back to a throw-away line delivered during last summer's San Francisco Mime Troupe production, Doing Good. One of the characters is a retired CIA agent who had considered going back to his old job but decided that "faith-based intelligence is not for me." As you might imagine, this got a good laugh from the audience; but, as I think back on it, it feels as if there is now a sense of opposition between interpretation (which is the primary work of intelligence analysts and hopefully is also a required skill for field agents) and faith. The age in which an appreciation of a religious text comes from the scrupulous examination of all the different things it might mean seems to have given way, in many circles, to the conviction that interpretation is irrelevant because the text has only a single, absolute meaning; and that meaning is given to you by some authority or, in a clutch, by your own devout sense of right and wrong.

Thus, I am confronted with evidence of a vociferous (if not strong) body of opinion that has written off one of the intellectual skills I most value as irrelevant! How seriously should I take this judgment? I would still prefer to subscribe to the more liberal attitude that reasonable people may differ and continue to explore the nooks and crannies of this deep-felt passion; but, as this note has probably demonstrated, I now seem to be exercising that skill in the interpretation of the actions and events I observe in the world at large, rather than confining myself to texts!

June 11, 2006: Hermeneutics 101

Having provided introductory outlines to phenomenology and Habermas' theory of communicative action, I figure I ought to do the same for hermeneutics, since I feel that this is another non-technical discipline that offers some critical "survival skills" for the Internet age. I must confess that I was led into this one by a conversation I had with a friend at PARC who made the pronouncement that it was time for us to stop wasting time on concepts that really had nothing to contribute, like hermeneutics. So if this particular introduction reads something like an apology, then that can be attributed to my personal past history!

Actually, one of the difficulties in introducing the concept of hermeneutics is that it seems to have meant many different things to different people. Therefore, I should being by stating up front that my own primary influence comes from the writings of Paul Ricœur, whose book on metaphor I discovered on a business trip to Basel and has had me hooked ever since. What has most interested me about Ricœur is that he took the traditional view of hermeneutics, as the study of methods for interpreting texts, and generalized it to the interpretation of meaningful actions. This puts him on the same field of interest as Habermas, who has had his own prolonged debate with Gadamer over hermeneutics. John Thompson's Critical Hermeneutics focuses explicitly in the intellectual relationship between Ricœur's phenomenological stance and Habermas' foundation in social theory (anchoring them both in Wittgenstein's ordinary language philosophy). This is what I mean when I say that any attempt to get a sense of the nature of hermeneutics quickly leads you into a vast Web of opposing opinions!

Ricœur's approach is basically a dialectical one. He begins with the exploration of two opposing concepts: explanation and understanding. From his point of view, "explanation" means "structural explanation," a syntactic perspective that can be generalized beyond the sentence to the broader scale of a paragraph or an entire work (if not an entire corpus). "Understanding," on the other hand, is concerned with interpretation and thus involves a semantic perspective. The opposition comes from the fact that, often, you cannot determine the syntactic structure of the text unless you know what it is trying to say; and you cannot interpret the text without knowing how it has been structured. (This was discovered "in the trenches" when Terry Winograd was doing his pioneering doctoral research on a computer system that understood natural language.) Ricœur proposed that hermenutic interpretation could only succeed through a Hegelian (Fichtean?) style synthesis of these two concepts, dealing with explanation and understanding as interrelated processes, each of which informs the other (which is one of the most important features of Winograd's SHRDLU system). This is why I clipped in the above diagram (which I discovered through an A9 image search, back when A9 was still using Google for image searches).

Why is this important? The primary reason is that computer science (or information technology) still tends to assume that intepretation is concerned strictly with the denotation of symbol structures, which is fine if you are writing a compiler or a system that interprets database queries but (as Winograd discovered) starts to break down when you more from formal languages to natural ones. So this takes us back to the debate over what we can realistically expect from the Semantic Web and whether or not we can call it "semantic" in any way that makes sense the the real world of how we all use the Internet (i.e. the world in which the Internet is used by ordinary people trying to get things done, for business or pleasure, as opposed to computer science students or professionals).

It is nice to see that Ricœur seems to have had a healthy appreciation of the pioneering work of C. S. Peirce on the interpretation of symbol structures. It is nice to reflect that, in one of his early essays ("Some Consequences of the Four Incapacities"), Peirce came up with the wonderful observation that "men and words reciprocally educate each other." I think this gets to the heart of the synthesis upon which Ricœur's approach to hermeneutics is based, and I think we can do worse than live by that insight.