P6. Technology/Culture-Driven "Thirdness" Practice (DTP) - Kick off Notes
P6. Kick off Notes
Technology/Culture-Driven "Thirdness" Practice (DTP)
("Thirdness" is the known C.S. Peirce category - Essential Backgrounders
and References are provided at the end of the note).
In the note You will find a proposal for a working style, simple cases
and a suggestion for a do-it-yourself start-up project, plus few words
about advanced issues emphasizing the difference among knowing and
saying, as the intuition of "Beauty" in front of Art.
Roberto Bordogna bordogna@tin.it .
1. The Proposal Description.
> http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/suo/email/msg13435.html
Cultures (including the anthropological modification of the
"natural" ambit and the territory) appear often to drive intuitions and
to influence "abductions", and how "commons" (including knowledge
representation systems) contribute to personal understanding.
The proposal is to focus on Pragmatics, and not only on Semantics, to
identify good practice in using "commons" and knowledge representation
system as an Agency, in front of what sometimes can not be described,
but that appears to have nevertheless some influence on understanding,
(including "material signs" as physical objects and buildings because of
new information embedding possibilities).
Knowing versus Saying.
The recipe for a soup is a good example of something that can be really
understood only by experiences. In fact a soup is made out of
ingredients (described by an ontology), rule of cooking and actual
procedures (recorded in some form for instance in a knowledge
representation system), that only the one who cooks can interpret
properly, by learning a "skill" by actually experimenting the whole
process cooking the "real soup". What the "real soup" is for a person
is "really understood" (and the knowledge of the recipe actually shared)
only when that person eats the end-product.
The same need for a practice can be said about learning for instance
pottery-making, learning how to ride a bicycle or a car, "how a
clarinet sounds"("...one can know something and not be able to say it"
noted Wittgenstein - and before him Augustine).
Actually driving a car on a road somewhere may represent a good example
of a Technology/Culture-Driven "Thirdness" Practice and of the need to
pay attention to Pragmatics and not only to Semantics (such as the road
plus the white line sign painted along the middle of the road) in the
natural/artificial ambit of action. That line is a material mediation
sign (a "Legisign" in Peirce definition - that "is a law that is a
sign") that means as we know: keep right from the line in USA or in
Continental Europe, but in the UK or in Japan the same sign means keep
left. Rarely we find the proper information actually written on the
surface of the road. So crossing cultures borders without paying
attention to implicit cultural assumptions and contingent pragmatics may
produces a cultural (and eventually a car) crash.
The same can be said for culture specific domains in organizations
and Enterprises where KR Semantics may play a role similar to roads
signs as middle lines, that is to say to assume a complete diverse
meaning in a different cultural and physical ambit of action. Actually
several information infrastructures appear more similar to railways,
where also the culture of operators and users is standardized somehow
and enforced to serve the infrastructure. But this approach is not
suitable for a diffused, global and sometimes creative infrastructure as
it is Internet and the "Semantic Web" ambit.
The following note can be considered an invite to pay attention to how
the Semantics is actually "cooked" in practice, to produce actual
"meaning" in some ambit of action characterized by a given
culture.
2.Working style.
(a dedication to prof. Charles A. Moore for many years director of the
East-West Center for Cultural Studies in Hawai'i - died 1967).
Prof. Moore used to ask (Asian) experts to make themselves understood to
an audience (of Westerner) instead to propose his own personal point of
view about the various Asiatic "cultural minds" studied in his
workshops. It is an approach that seems similar to some Persons oriented
systems (as the Higgins project appear to be).
Experts such as prof. D.T. Suzuki were for instance capable, thanks to
prof. Moore working framework, to at least evocate some understanding
about cultural specific experiences (such as Zen experience) in a
Westerner audience. (Japanese culture here is used
as a reference because of the known complexity for Westerners).
I propose to adopt such peer-to-peer working style in this project to
share experiences among participants.
3.A possible do-it-yourself experimental test.
(Experts may just skip this paragraph).
A possible little project that can be experimented in every organization
by anybody involved in some system mediated agent-patient process of
understanding is to verify the abduction of the agent directly asking
the patients about some intended meaning. This is generally a common
practice for experts working with users, but (in my experience) the
experts that pay also attention to the local culture and to the material
ambit of the communication process at the same time are very rare
(because is not needed for the job at hand). This lack of attention may
produce knowledge communication problems when the formal representation
of knowledge is used in a different ambit, and teams in organizations
generally tend to produce their own cooking procedure of the provided
recipe for tasks even in a "structured" working ambit (as still is very
likely almost every major organization), not to mention more creative
organizations.
So You perhaps may be willing to test the "recipe" proposed in this mail
by asking to your users why they came to a given judgment about some
conceptualization or formalization of yours and so on (people like to
speaks about their problems generally) as a first attempt to create a
base of knowledge useful to identify local cultures in the future or
somewhere else.
4. Advanced Issues. Tacit modes of Communications.
While Cultures appear to define Agency and Personal possibilities of
learning or not from experiences, Arts appear capable to drive a
"thirdness" such as the judgment of "Beauty" directly, as a "real soup"
does for the idea of "good", often without the need of any word or
additional description (like for music).
Documented historical case like Eiko Ikegami characterization of the
aesthetic "Bonds of Civility" that existed among Japanese in the
Tokugawa period, even before the modernization of Japan generally
associated with the visit of the US Commodore Perry's black ships in
(1853) that went to Japan to sustain social-economic cooperation,
suggests the possibility to create a background culture that goes beyond
description and rationality and that eventually may help the
understanding and the convergence of abductions and formalizations on a
cross-cultural base. As the Japanese tea ceremony "a performing art that
is mediated by the movement of the body" and dedicated objects and
spaces capable to evocate a whole cultural world.
5. Possible developments for the practice.
1. Start and begin to collect data about the local organizational
culture and practice for your own needs - if you do not have them yet-
and share the results only if you wish, for what is possible and if
other participants are willing to do so, accordingly to the proposed
philosophy.
2. Find eventually a common core project, with the support of the P6
"on line test bed" as a technology driver of the described convergence
to explore understanding constraints and possibilities of a lattice of
organizationally distributed knowledge objects, not only paying
attention to Semantics but also to Pragmatics and Agency potential in
practice.
3. Explore the dynamics an possibility of common practice and
technological infrastructure in front of abductions and knowledge
formalization processes, and update the action list looking for
understanding before convergence.
--_
Essential Backgrounders and References for this Note.
John Dewey, Art as experience, Perigee, New York, 2005
Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, Cambridge University Press, 2005
Charles A. Moore, The Japanese Mind, University of Hawaii Press 1967
John A. Nagal,
Learning to eat soup with a knife, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005
John F. Sowa, Knowledge Representation, Logical Philosophical and
computational foundations, Brooks Cole, Usa 2000
On Fri, 2007-12-14 at 23:51, Schoening, James R Mr CIV USA AMC wrote:
> All,
>
> Below are 3 projects, 5 discussion topics, and 2 Admin tasks,
> and the volunteers offering to lead them. There are still plenty of
> initiatives that still need leaders (see
> http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/suo/email/msg13447.html), and new ideas
> are always welcome. Co-leaders are welcome at any time.
>
> Each leader will kick things off and seek participation, so
> let's all help them build some momentum. The discussion topics will be
> released one-at-a-time, but the rest of the efforts will run in
> parallel. If a given effort starts generating too much email, it will
> create its own discussion list and report updates back to the group.
>
> Jim Schoening
> James.Schoening@us.army.mil
>
--
Dr.Ing.Roberto Bordogna
Independent Researches
bordogna@tin.it
Corso Magenta 32
Milan 20123 Italy
Phone (39).02.8690867
and
Collegio Nuovo - Pavia University
roberto.bordogna@unipv.it