Eric, Steve,
I am trying to reconcile my agreement with the spirit of your correspondence
with my largely failed attempts to work toward a common language in our
conversations about complexity on this list and on Friday mornings. I, too,
was trained in many traditions.... comparative psychology, ethology, zoology,
some physical anthropology, quite a lot of english literature, and even a
little meteorology. And some of my best friends are mathematicians. But
perhaps unlike Eric (?) (who was my last [postdoctoral] student, by the way,
and my great intellectual benefactor) I am convinced that the effort to
communicate amongst perspectives is valuable. And I cannot see how
communication is possible without some attention to and adjustments of the use
of specialized languages. It bothers me still, for instance, that two members
of our community can use words like "system" or "information" in entirely
contradictory ways and yet fancy that they are communicating with one another.
I think this is where an analogy to the paradox of mathematics that Byers
highlights might be useful. The struggle over language is worthwhile but
only because it fails. No man struggles in order to fail, but still, failure
is the wet edge of science.
What do you think?
Nick
PS, to Eric: "The wonderful feature of the New Realisms metaphor is that it
honors our separate points of view without giving up on finding a point of view
that integrates them. Two blind New Realists groping an elephant: OK, Ill
follow the snake toward the sound of your voice and you follow the tree toward
the sound of my voice and well see what we feel along the way. PAUSE.
Together;
My God, its an ELEPHANT!"
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]
----- Original Message -----
From: ERIC P. CHARLES
To: Steve Smith
Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 3/23/2010 6:20:41 AM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] multiple tool kits [was (advice needed!)]
Steve,
As a partial endorsement of your argument, I was trained as a comparative
psychologist (comparing between species) and an ethologist (the European branch
of animal behavior that showed we could treat behaviors as evolved phenomenon
in the same way we treat anatomy). I was specifically trained in these as two
separate, but related traditions. When I arrived at at U.C. Davis, which has
(or at least had) the premier graduate training program in Animal Behavior in
the country, and as I started attending more of the Animal Behavior Society
national conferences, I noticed a disturbing trend:
There was a conscious attempt to create a generic study of animal behavior in
which everyone did basically the same thing from the same perspective (though
with variation in species studied and behavior focused on). I kept trying to
explain to people, most forcibly to the grad students, as I thought I had a
chance with them, that this was bad. They were trading in several hard-won and
highly-specialized tool kits (those of comparative psych, ethology, behavioral
ecology, biological anthropology, etc.) for a 101 piece toolkit from Walmart.
If they were trying to encourage collaboration, I would have been all for it,
but instead they were trying to create a shared language by destroying the
uniqueness of the distinct approaches. Yuck!
Anyway, just an endorsement of your project from a very different context,
Eric
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 08:26 PM, Steve Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
siddharth wrote:
>
> you're right about the language issue - even a basic word in the
> complexity debate- eg. 'modeling'- is interpreted/understood slightly
> differently in architecture..its easier when they mean things totally
> different, like your example- its really tricky when they mean things
> almost the same, yet not - these micro-shifts in meaning make things,
> well, complex-er!
> thanks!
For what it is worth, I've been working with Dr. Deana Pennington of UNM
on this very topic... a joint UNM/Santa Fe Complex proposal to the NSF
was just declined, but had it been funded, we would have been extending
work done on a related NSF grant just ending this month on the topic of
"the Science of Collaboration". Central to this work is the notion
that each discipline (and subdiscipline and individual) has a
distinct
but complementary set of concept and terms that they use to understand
and share their work. One of the tools to be developed is a
collaborative tool for eliciting and resolving the terms and concepts
across cross-disciplinary teams and projects.
We are still seeking funding and opportunities to continue this work and
it is an obvious project to carry forth at the Santa Fe Complex (in
collaboration with UNM, etc.) if possible.
We (Santa Fe Complex) just hosted a workshop for this team on Agent
Based and Cellular Automata Modeling. It did not address the problem
of language directly but indirectly did by providing a variety of
practitioners with a common working vocabulary (to whit, NetLogo) for
expressing and exploring simulations. Of course, within the context
of this course, we immediately encountered terminology conflicts (when
is a "patch" a "cell"? etc.)
Seconding the spirit of Nick's point, it is this very ambiguity that
provides the expressiveness and the leverage. If you constrained
everyone to a controlled vocabulary, you would have nothing more useful
than an efficient bureaucracy within a fascist government. Things
would generally be unambiguous, but rarely useful!
- Steve
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Eric Charles
Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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