Russ Abbott wrote:
Both Eric and Nick use the phrase "I was trained". I
would like to know more about the intention here. Normally one talks
about training an animal, e.g., to sit or roll over, etc. One also
talks about training people to do relatively formalizable jobs or to
obey fairly well understood rules, e.g., train someone to run a piece
of machinery or to be a police officer. It strikes me as strange to say
that someone was trained to be a scientist. Would you be willing to
elaborate on that.
I can't speak for Eric and Nick, but I use this idiom myself from time
to time and believe it to be meaningful and useful. By describing the
formal education one received, one acknowledges the "traditions" that
they were therefore steeped in. Such traditions are an "aggregating"
force that balances the natural "expanding" forces between ideas.
These traditions actually *try* to do what I claim cannot be done,
which is to agree on definitions of words and narrow an understanding
down to something which can be shared among those "trained in the
tradition". I understand the point of doing this and believe it
fulfills an important function. Once we all agree (in a very general
sense) on what we are studying and what we believe to be the underlying
paradigms involved, then we can go off and look for interesting and
useful excursions from that position.
Nick's attempts to get this kind of understanding out of Complexity
Science is applauded, and maybe doable. On the other hand, to the
extent that it may well still be something of a "Pidgen Language"
composed of terminology borrowed from many other disciplines, it may be
somewhat of a fool's errand as I think Nick's group reading/discussing
Emergence may have discovered.
Mature fields of study seem to have two properties: 1) They have very
rigid definitions of terms which can be used like "engineering
principles" to extend knowledge incrementally with significant
confidence that these extensions will be robust; 2) They are ripe for
revolutionary ideas to come in and completely undermine their roots,
exposing phenomenology and offering theories that essentially say
"everything you know is wrong.
We all once agreed on what the terms "phlogiston" and "aether" meant...
and they were very useful in their time, but I think it has been well
over a century since they have been used sincerely. What terms from
Complexity may turn out to be like this? Emergence? Self Organized
Criticality? Attractors? These all may be very useful terms to
describe phenomena we don't understand and may help us to keep a handle
on them until we *do* understad them, but I would contend that they are
not yet useful for understanding the phenomena which they point at.
I'm very interested in the opinions of others here with a bent to
thinking about language and thinking about thinking (about thinking
about ....) .
- Steve
On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 10:05 AM, Nicholas
Thompson <nickthomp...@earthlink.net>
wrote:
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,
-----
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 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 <sasm...@swcp.com>
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
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Eric Charles
Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
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