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.

November 11, 2006: Why I am not a Positivist

Once again, David Cole has written an excellent book review for The New York Review. The last time he came to my attention, he was writing about terrorism; this time the issue is the constitutional foundation of our legal system. The book under review is Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency, by Richard Posner (pictured above as rendered, with at least two meanings intended, by David Levine). What is at stake is Posner's legal philosophy, which basically reduces judicial ruling to the mechanics of cost-benefit analysis.

While Cole does not mention it explicitly, this kind of positivism-with-a-vengeance actually recalls Bertrand Russell's internationalism, where Russell envisioned a single government for the entire globe that would resolve all disputes by invoking the machinery of an appropriately designed logical calculus. Cole does an excellent job of challenging this vision. For me the most compelling passage of his text is a quotation of a 1961 dissenting opinion by Justice John Marshall Harlan concerning the nature of due process:

Due process has not been reduced to any formula; its content cannot be determined by reference to any code. The best that can be said is that through the course of this Court's decisions it has represented the balance which our Nation, built upon postulates of respect for the liberty of the individual, has struck between that liberty and the demands of organized society. If the supplying of content to this Constitutional concept has of necessity been a rational process, it certainly has not been one where judges have felt free to roam where unguided speculation might take them. The balance of which I speak is the balance struck by this country, having regard to what history teaches are the traditions from which it developed as well as the traditions from which it broke. That tradition is a living thing. A decision of this Court which radically departs from it could not long survive, while a decision which builds on what has survived is likely to be sound. No formula could serve as a substitute, in this area, for judgment and restraint.

While the focus of Posner's book and Cole's challenge involves the relationship between the current executive and judicial branches of the Federal Government, reading about the subtleties of due process reminded of when, about five years ago, John Seely Brown enjoined me to drop everything and read Lawrence Lessig's new book, Code (dragging me to a bookstore on Maui in the process). Revisiting the index of that book, I discovered only one entry for "due process," that being in a paragraph on page 7 that reviews the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. That neglect for one of the most important elements of our Constitutional process can perhaps explain the sort of position that Lessig tried to take in his book:

Government should push the architecture of the Net to facilitate its regulation, or else it will suffer what can only be described as a loss of sovereignty.

This, again, is positivism-with-a-vengeance, guided possibly by a calculus more sophisticated than one Russell could have ever imagined, but (in Harlan's language) a "formula" nonetheless. Today we may be more conscious of the judicial issues that have been arising in the way of American military adventurism. However, those issues are also likely to arise in other more mundane aspects of our lives; so we should all be aware of the cautionary arguments that Cole has articulated so excellently.