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 28, 2006: Terrorism 101

One of the things that makes Max Rodenbeck's essay on terrorism for the November 30 issue of The New York Review so compelling is his choice of introductory quotations. The one from Clausewitz could be expected: where else would we turn when having to confront the fiasco of our own military adventurism. However, it is the perceptiveness of the second quotation that is far more fascinating:

The actual reason for the failure of the US policy in its political field and international relations is their lack of information regarding the world's realities and also the enclosure of the decision making people of that country in their own fabricated and false political propaganda.

It would not be hard to imagine these words coming from the apologetic mouth of Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, but that guess would fall about as far from the mark as one might imagine. No, the author of that sentence is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and the text is an entry from his personal blog written after his visit to New York this past September. Of course one of the ways in which we all deprive ourselves of "information regarding the world's realities" is through our assumption that those who disagree with us substitute fanaticism for reflection; and, as far as Ahmadinejad is concerned, the media (with the possible exception of Mike Wallace), do a very good job of fueling that assumption. I suspect that Ahmadinejad's blog is written in a language that I cannot read very well (if at all); so I have no idea how consistently reflective he is in his writing. However, Rodenbeck made a powerful rhetorical move by situating him next to Clausewitz as the "voices of reason" that preface his analysis.

His next rhetorical move resides in his choice of language to describe the current "state of play" in those military adventures:

What has happened … is that the mental construct that framed the Bush administration's reaction to September 11 as a "war" is beginning to fall apart.

At the end of the day, it is not a matter of the illogic of White House rhetoric about democracy. Instead, it is about a "mental construct," "fabricated" (to use Ahmadinejad's language) by virtue (sic) of "lack of information regarding the world's realities." We can, of course, address the question of whether this lack of information had to do with the willful decision to sublate information in deference to faith; or we can flip the coin around and blame it on the myopia of those "dogmas" of Western civilization that sublate other cultural perspectives in deference to "scientific" thinking. Whether we followed the faith-based path of fundamentalism or the rationalist path that consumed McNamara, we blundered badly; and there is a supreme irony that a blog entry by a supposed faith-based fundamentalist should reveal such reflective insight into our blunder.

Most of Rodenbeck's article has to do with why it took so long for the general American public to recognize this insight; but he never really factors in the role that media play in shaping public opinion (or the role that the White House played in controlling those media). Instead, he writes about books that will probably never come to general public attention. The core of the article focuses on a "Terrorism 101" textbook entitled What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat:

One of the best [recent explanatory books] is by Louise Richardson, a Harvard professor who not only has been teaching about terrorism for a decade, but brings the experience of an Irish childhood, including youthful enthusiasm for the IRA, to understanding the phenomenon. As she explains, she had always thought it wise for academics to stay out of politics. The sheer boneheadedness of Washington's incumbents, who have ignored decades of accumulated wisdom on her subject, prompted her to write a belated primer.

Nevertheless, we can see the problem in getting out Richardson's message when, at this point in the article, Rodenbeck's rhetoric fails him. He decides to outline a dozen points from the book, and I believe that contemporary rhetoric would do well to acknowledge the cognitive impact of honoring "Miller's magic number" (seven plus or minus two). The Macarthur Report on media literacy makes a similar rhetorical blunder; but, while each of the Macarthur items can be distilled down to a relatively manageable phrase, each of Rodenbeck's points involves (at least) one paragraph of subtleties that would impede such distillation. Whether we like it or not, the path to public opinion leads through quick slogans and compelling images; and there we have it. Those "boneheads" know how to play the slogan-and-image game; and, once again, analytic thinking, regardless of how powerful its message may be, is left out in the cold. Once again we must confront that postmodern world in which fiction rules with a double-edged sword.

October 25, 2006: The Ultimate Fiction of Value

One way to reflect on the implications of postmodernism and its foundations in fictions is to consider some of the articles Gabor Steingart has been writing for SPIEGEL ONLINE (available in English). The one with the greatest impact was filed today with the full title: "Playing With Fire: America and the Dollar Illusion." This is an excellent follow-up to yesterday's article, "A Superpower in Decline: America's Middle Class Has Become Globalization's Loser." Given how hard it is to count on any American news source these days (even the so-called "public" sources) and the accusations of bias now being levelled at the BBC, it is probably quite valuable that Der Spiegel has chosen to support an English-language on-line edition. Even more important is that both these articles are excerpted from a book: Weltkrieg um Wohlstand: Wie Macht un Reichtum neu verteilt werden (which translates as "War for Wealth: The Global Grab for Power and Prosperity"). It is rare enough to find excerpts from a "serious" book in a magazine. In this case Der Spiegel has provided us with English-language content before any translated edition has been published. So, to get a feel for the economic implications of postmodern thinking, here are a few paragraphs from the "dollar illusion" article:

For capital market investors, reality isn't reality until the majority of investors are convinced it is reality and have begun reacting accordingly. Right now, everyone is watching everyone else closely. Everyone knows the dream of the stable economic superpower has ended, but everyone is keeping his eyes shut just a little longer.

Government bonds and shares don't have any objective value -- nothing you can see, weigh, taste or even eat. Their value is measured by investors' faith that the purchasing power of $1 million will still be $1 million 10 years from now, rather than having been reduced by half. This faith is measured on the markets almost every second -- and the measure used is nothing but the faith of other investors. As long as the faithful outnumber the skeptics, everything works out fine for the dollar (and the world economy). The trouble starts the day the scale begins to tip.

The process is complicated by the fact that investors aren't driven by blind faith alone. In part, it seems, hard facts also push them to extend their credit of trust a little longer. US economic growth -- an impressive figure on paper -- is an important benchmark. When it is high, investors feel reassured in their faith in the power of the US domestic economy to perform well. True, the trade balance deficit has skyrocketed since it first appeared in the mid-1970s. But the economy is growing steadily anyway, as the dreamers note with growing self-confidence. It may not be growing as rapidly as the Chinese economy, but it is growing twice as fast as the European economy.

And yet this benchmark is not as reliable as it seems. The faith investors have in the figure has actually helped create it. After all, the purchasing price of a government bond feeds almost directly into state consumption, just as the purchasing price of a share makes companies more inclined to consume. It also extends the credit basis of millions of private households -- which in turn boosts consumption. In this way, the expectations of investors -- including the expectation that the United States will continue to grow -- transform into certainties almost all by themselves.

In other words, the capital of trust creates the very growth rates it needs in order to justify itself. US economic growth, in fact, is fueled by ever-increasing consumer spending -- puzzling given that American wages are dropping as is industrial output. Still, everyone knows the answer to this riddle. The rise in consumption isn't based on an expansion of production, a rise in wages or even an increase in exports. To a large extent, it's based on the growing debt. But why do banks keep issuing credit? Because they accept the ever-increasing prices of stocks and real estate as a kind of collateral. A closed circuit of miraculous money minting has been created.

So, in the language of yesterday's post, are these fictions "intended to deceive?" I would answer in the affirmative. This system can only sustain itself if you have a critical mass of agents willing to believe in it, regardless of how sound that belief is. In the postmodern fashion of warping words, trust is being melded into faith until the two can no longer be distinguished. Thus, we are no longer dealing with the ways in which shareholders speculate over their investments; we are now in the domain of those individuals who, in one way or another, agree on questions concerned with the value of currency. Steingart has a useful characterization of those players:

Everyone knows how dangerous the game is, but continuing to play it strikes them as less dangerous than quitting.

Also, as was revealed in Lulu (play and opera), the best players are rarely seriously hurt by their decisions; the pain "trickles down" to those who lack the strength to endure such hits (without whom, however, markets would not be as strong as they are).

Meanwhile, lest we think that this game is only played with the relatively virtual concept of money, the online edition of the London Times ran a story today about the latest generation of "players" in the European Union "subsidy game." Olive oil producers in Spain, Greece, and Italy have been able to net €2 billion in subsidies based on inflated crop figures; and livestock farmers in Slovenia are now playing the same game with their cows, sheep, and goats! In other words the "concrete objects" that are out there in the fields are less important than the reports that are filed about those objects; and those reports have just as much fiction to them as the economic reports used to establish currency values.

Welcome to the postmodern world!

October 16, 2006 (1): Postmodern News?

Any doubts we may have about the postmodern condition being more than a passing fad will have to confront today's press release from Reuters. I am not sure when was the last time (if ever) that Reuters released as story about itself; but it did so today to announce the opening of its "virtual news bureau" in Second Life. What is particularly interesting about this effort is the extent to which it is a dual endeavor:

"In 'Second Life,' we're making Reuters part of a new generation," Reuters Chief Executive Tom Glocer said in a statement. "We're playing an active role in this community by bringing the outside world into 'Second Life' and vice versa."

"Second Life" citizens can stay tuned to the latest headlines by using a feature called the Reuters News Center, a mobile device that users can carry inside the virtual environment. Stories will focus on both the fast-growing economy and culture of "Second Life" and also include links to Reuters news feeds from the outside world, ranging from Baghdad to Wall Street.

One wonders to what extent the "vice versa" will continue in the form of "standard" Reuters releases starting to cover events with Second Life.

So what is happening here? Do we now have a population that is so inured to seeing the world through their computer screens that "reality is too much with them?" Sherry Turkle tried to argue otherwise when the BBC ran a story about Second Life, but she may be too deep in her Life on the Screen mentality to see this in a broader context. The postmodern condition that this represents may well be a retreat into a world of fictions by those who seek a world that offers a stronger sense of empowerment and control.

September 25, 2006 (1): Postmodernism is Still with Us

In a contribution to Confused of Calcutta, Dominic Sayers delivered a sort of "obituary" for postmodernism. Much as I sympathize with his position and enjoy his way of framing it ("we have had our playtime and it’s time to put the functional elements to the best and simplest use we can"), I would say that any announcement of the death of postmodernism is premature. Sayers wrote, "It seems to me that today you can represent yourself with humility, sincerity and openness without suffering for it." These are the words of someone with little (if any) exposure to Fox News and Bill Clinton's recent attempt to retaliate against their version of journalism.

Personally, I find Fox News the latest phase in United States' history of sustaining itself on “fictions of convenience” that reaches back way before “postmodern” entered our vocabulary. I am not sure I can easily track down its origins; but the first example that had an impact on me was Malcolm Cowley’s description of the primary narrative of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! as “a long and violent story that he regards as the essence of the Deep South, which is not so much a mere region as it is … an incomplete and frustrated nation trying to relive its legendary past.” The operative word there is “legendary,” as in the most memorable line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (hardly a postmodern classic): “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” (J. Hillis Miller actually continued Cowley’s argument by demonstrating the key role of “fictions of convenience” in the secondary narrative of Absalom, Absalom!) So, while playtime may be over in Mr. Sayers' corner of the United Kingdom (which I would be the first to applaud), the games continue over here and the stakes keep getting higher, whether you are talking about policy-making in the public sector or the conduct of business in the private!

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.