Nick -
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 think this is a relevant and worthwhile exercise.
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.
So you probably appreciate both personally and professionally that the
gap between people speaking/thinking from these traditions is not
merely quantitative, but qualitative... there are fundamental
differences in perspective across them.
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 you are correct that understanding that the same terms mean
different things is critical to (beginning to) understand. What I find
highly suspect, however, is that these differences could ever be
reduced to a small (even finite?) translation.
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?
I think this last paragraph gestures in the direction of a lot of
truth. I think you (Byers?) has captured a facet of what I am trying
to point out. It is not just the romance of trying and failing that
makes it so, but also concepts like "the map is not the territory" and
"to name it is to destroy it" or "the finger pointing at the moon is
not the moon" play in.
"The wonderful
feature of the New Realism’s 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, I’ll
follow the snake toward the sound of your voice and you follow the tree
toward the sound of my voice and we’ll see what we feel along the way.”
PAUSE. Together;
“My God,
it’s an ELEPHANT!”"
I think this *also* gestures in the direction of some relevant and
useful concepts that we are struggling with here. But to the extent
that the guys on both ends of the elephant understand that neither of
them is actually holding a snake or a tree at the beginning, they might
also concede that when they discover that in fact they are fondling an
elephant, that this too may be it's own relative "illusion". By this,
I mean, that just as the trunk of an elephant might be mistaken for a
fat snake and the leg a tree trunk, it seems nearly as plausable that
our definition of "elephant" is as relative/contingent as our
definition/apprehension of "snake" and "tree".
Sadly, I know this has gotten a bit to philoSophistical for much of our
audience, so I'll try to stop here: Just because we have names for
things doesn't mean that there are things in more than a
practical-working-knowledge sense.
- Steve
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
-----
Original Message -----
To:
Steve Smith
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 severa! l 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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Eric Charles
Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
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