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 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!”" ** *
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]
----- Original Message -----
*From:* ERIC P. CHARLES <[email protected]>
*To: *Steve Smith <[email protected]>
*Cc: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee
Group<[email protected]>
*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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Eric Charles
Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
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