Difference between revisions of "IMAGES"
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− | <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Liberating knowledge</h2></div> | + | <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Liberating knowledge and knowledge work</h2></div> |
− | <div class="col-md-7"><h3> | + | |
+ | <div class="col-md-7"><h3>Creating the way we look at the world</h3> | ||
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[[File:Polyscopy.jpg]] <br><small><center>Polyscopy ideogram</center></small> | [[File:Polyscopy.jpg]] <br><small><center>Polyscopy ideogram</center></small> | ||
<p> </p> | <p> </p> | ||
− | <p>The | + | <p>Our [[prototypes|<em>prototype</em>]] [[methodology|<em>methodology</em>]] is called [[Polyscopic Modeling]]. What we call [[polyscopy|<em>polyscopy</em>]] is the [[praxis|<em>praxis</em>]] it fosters. Usually, however, we simply refer to both as [[polyscopy|<em>polyscopy</em>]]. </p> |
− | <p>The Polyscopy [[ideograms|<em>ideogram</em>]] stands for the fact that at the point where we've | + | <p>The central notion in [[polyscopy|<em>polyscopy</em>]] is the [[scope|<em>scope</em>]] – which is by definition whatever determines how we look at the world and what we see. This then includes first of all our concepts and methods.</p> |
+ | <p>The Polyscopy [[ideograms|<em>ideogram</em>]] stands for the fact that at the point where we've come to see our [[scope|<em>scopes</em>]] as our own creation and not our discovery, then it becomes natural to adapt them to the purpose of seeing what above all needs to be seen. </p> </div> | ||
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− | <div class="col-md-6"><h3> | + | <div class="col-md-6"><h3>From the pen of a giant</h3> |
<p><blockquote> | <p><blockquote> | ||
+ | Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought. | ||
+ | </blockquote> | ||
+ | This, and the next quotation of our chosen [[giants|<em>giant</em>]], will give us a clue how exactly we may use this approach to liberate our view of the world from disciplinary and terminological constraints. | ||
+ | <blockquote> | ||
I shall not hesitate to state here in a few sentences my epistemological credo. I see on the one side the totality of sense experiences and, on the other, the totality of the concepts and propositions that are laid down in books. (…) The system of concepts is a creation of man, together with the rules of syntax, which constitute the structure of the conceptual system. (…) All concepts, even those closest to experience, are from the point of view of logic freely chosen posits, just as is the concept of causality, which was the point of departure for this inquiry in the first place. | I shall not hesitate to state here in a few sentences my epistemological credo. I see on the one side the totality of sense experiences and, on the other, the totality of the concepts and propositions that are laid down in books. (…) The system of concepts is a creation of man, together with the rules of syntax, which constitute the structure of the conceptual system. (…) All concepts, even those closest to experience, are from the point of view of logic freely chosen posits, just as is the concept of causality, which was the point of departure for this inquiry in the first place. | ||
− | </blockquote> | + | </blockquote></p></div> |
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<div class="col-md-3 round-images"> [[File:Einstein.jpg]] <br><small><center>[[Albert Einstein]]</center></small></div> | <div class="col-md-3 round-images"> [[File:Einstein.jpg]] <br><small><center>[[Albert Einstein]]</center></small></div> | ||
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− | <p>You'll notice that there is no reality in | + | <p>This is how Einstein stated his "epistemological credo" on the introductory pages of his Autobiographical Notes. Already the fact that a scientist should begin his personal account of the development of modern physics by stating an "epistemological credo" is significant – Isn't that exactly what we are doing here, on this page? </p> |
+ | <p>You'll notice that there is no reality in the above excerpts; only "the sense-experience" on the one side, and "the system of concepts" and "syntax" or method on the other. This latter part, posits Einstein, is "freely chosen", and even "the concept of causality" – which was the point of departure of traditional science (whose goal was, indeed, to <em>explain</em> how the observed phenomena follow as a consequence of the inner workings of nature) is freely chosen.</p> | ||
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+ | <h3>XXXXXXX</h3> | ||
+ | <p>Text</p> | ||
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+ | <h3>Simplicity and clarity are in the eyes of the beholder</p> | ||
+ | <p> | ||
<p>[[polyscopy|<em>Polyscopy</em>]] offers provisions for creating concepts and methods by convention, as we have seen. We can define concepts by convention, and also ways how they may be related – which, you'll recall, we called [[patterns|<em>patterns</em>]]. Both are part of our ways of looking at experience, or [[scope|<em>scopes</em>]]. </p> | <p>[[polyscopy|<em>Polyscopy</em>]] offers provisions for creating concepts and methods by convention, as we have seen. We can define concepts by convention, and also ways how they may be related – which, you'll recall, we called [[patterns|<em>patterns</em>]]. Both are part of our ways of looking at experience, or [[scope|<em>scopes</em>]]. </p> | ||
<p>The "aha experience" – that the things are related in experience as suggested by the provided [[scope|<em>scope</em>]] <em>to a sufficient degree</em> – is then also considered as just an experience, which can be communicated from an author to a reader.</p> | <p>The "aha experience" – that the things are related in experience as suggested by the provided [[scope|<em>scope</em>]] <em>to a sufficient degree</em> – is then also considered as just an experience, which can be communicated from an author to a reader.</p> | ||
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<p>Since [[scope|<em>scopes</em>]] are human-made by convention, they can be as precise and rigorous as we desire – <em>on any level of generality</em>. Simplicity, indeed, is in the eyes of the beholder (it is a result of the [[scope|<em>scope</em>]]). | <p>Since [[scope|<em>scopes</em>]] are human-made by convention, they can be as precise and rigorous as we desire – <em>on any level of generality</em>. Simplicity, indeed, is in the eyes of the beholder (it is a result of the [[scope|<em>scope</em>]]). | ||
<p>From this foundation a social process follows, which is a fine interplay of the complexity of phenomena and systems on the one side, and the simplicity of our models on the other.</p></div></div> | <p>From this foundation a social process follows, which is a fine interplay of the complexity of phenomena and systems on the one side, and the simplicity of our models on the other.</p></div></div> | ||
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Revision as of 16:49, 7 November 2018
Contents
- 1 Federation through Images
- 1.1 What should knowledge be like?
- 1.2 These images are ideograms
- 1.3 Repurposing knowledge
- 1.4 Liberating knowledge and knowledge work
- 1.4.1 Creating the way we look at the world
- 1.4.2 From the pen of a giant
- 1.4.3 XXXXXXX
- 1.4.4 Simplicity and clarity are in the eyes of the beholder</p> <p>Polyscopy offers provisions for creating concepts and methods by convention, as we have seen. We can define concepts by convention, and also ways how they may be related – which, you'll recall, we called patterns. Both are part of our ways of looking at experience, or scopes. The "aha experience" – that the things are related in experience as suggested by the provided scope to a sufficient degree – is then also considered as just an experience, which can be communicated from an author to a reader. The "aha experiences" are essential. They provide us the sense of meaning and orientation. They are especially valuable when they are shared – because they can then orient our collective action. But they can also be dangerous, because we can hold onto them as "reality" and remain closed to further creative exploration and communication. Polyscopy emphasizes that there are multiple ways of looking and multiple ways to make sense. "Truth" in polyscopy (we tend to avoid this word) is a matter of an inner and social dialog – where a fine balance between understanding and staying open is maintained. Since scopes are human-made by convention, they can be as precise and rigorous as we desire – on any level of generality. Simplicity, indeed, is in the eyes of the beholder (it is a result of the scope). <p>From this foundation a social process follows, which is a fine interplay of the complexity of phenomena and systems on the one side, and the simplicity of our models on the other.</div></div> <h3>General-purpose science</h3> What results is a general-purpose method which – like a portable flashlight – can be pointed at any phenomenon or issue The objective of studies needs to be to direct the mind so that it brings solid and true judgments about everything that presents itself to it. René Descartes is often "credited" as the philosophical father of the limiting (reductionistic) aspects of science. This Rule 1 from his manuscript "Rules for the Direction of the Mind" (unfinished during his lifetime and published posthumously) shows that also Descartes might have preferred to be remembered as a supporter of polyscopy. René Descartes Growing knowledge upward
- 1.5 Knowledge federation in pictures
- 1.6 Examples
Federation through Images
What should knowledge be like?
The way we handle knowledge is historical and accidental
Perhaps no rational person would argue that knowledge should not be useful; or that information should not provide us the big picture and general, direction-setting insights, but only details.
There is, however, a reason why we don't have a culture of big-picture knowledge – and the reason is historical.
This excerpt from Einstein's Autobiographical Notes, where he describes physics at the point when he entered it as a graduate student, around the turn of last century, will provide us a snapshot of that history at the point where modern physics stepped in.In spite of all the fruitfulness on particulars, dogmatic rigidity prevailed on the matter of principles: In the beginning (if there was such a thing), God created Newton's laws of motion together with the necessary masses and forces. This is all; everything beyond this follows from the development of appropriate mathematical methods by means of deduction.
Einstein continues by explaining this state of affairs, the belief that Newton's or scientific concepts corresponded with reality in an objective sense, as a consequence of the omnipresent successes of science, in both explaining the natural phenomena and in changing the human condition. A complete model of the clockwork of nature appeared to be within reach, or even as having been reached already. It seemed plausible that this would not only enable us to understand the observable phenomena, but even to control them, to subdue them to our human purposes and desires. Science organized itself as a collection of disciplines, whose goal was divide and conquer the mechanics of nature. The scientific "reality picture" replaced the old Biblical one in education, and in the modern mind.
And then it all exploded – with the bomb that fell on Hiroshima! The mass, and the matter itself, turned out to be convertible into energy. Even the passage of time – once the very epitome of objectivity – turned out to be relative.
The future of knowledge is in our hands
Necessarily, the giants of modern science saw that what they were discovering was not only physics, or neurology – but that the bare foundations of how we think and create knowledge were emerging from the ground. Having thus lost its secure bearings in "objective reality", science acquired a whole new capability – to self-reflect. And through self-reflection to understand its own limitations, and the limitations of our knowledge and our knowing.
We are about to see that when we combine their insights, when we "stand on their shoulders" – then a whole new foundation for the creation of truth and meaning can be perceived as a natural next step in this process. A foundation that is both academically rigorous and that empowers us to create the kind of knowledge we need.
These images are ideograms
Pictures that are worth one thousand words
Not all pictures are worth one thousand words; but these ideograms are!
By using the ideograms we shall at the same time demonstrate big-picture science and its power. Recall the philosophical systems of the past; the works of Hegel and Huserl took thousands of pages! We shall see how ideograms allow us to summarize the philosophical findings of giants, and how they empower a new paradigm, by using no more than a handful of – images! That is what will best serve our core purpose – to ignite a conversation.
For brevity's sake, we shall allow Einstein to represent all other giants here. In Federation through Stories we'll hear also some other giants speak. But here Einstein will appear in his usual role, of an icon for "modern science". So when we quote Einstein, interpret it as "modern science" sharing her insights, and showing us a new way.
Repurposing knowledge
Seeing ourselves in the mirror
On every university campus there is a mirror – which, being so busy with article deadlines and courses, we tend to overlook.
When we look at this mirror, we see the same world that we see around us. But we also see ourselves in the world!
We in this way realize that we are not those disembodied spirits hovering over the world and looking at it objectively we believed we were. We are people living in the world and creating the world – and responsible for it.
We cannot really know reality
Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison.This often quoted excerpt from Einstein and Infeld's Evolution of Physics will serve us as a snapshot of that very moment when modern science saw itself in the metaphorical mirror. We are not discovering reality by looking through the objective prism of scientific concepts and methods. The scientific theories – and the very methods by which they are created, and the concepts in terms of which they are expressed – are really our own that is human creations.
All we can do is make models. And our reason is amiss when it even tries to imagine a procedure by which we could confirm that our models correspond to the real thing.
This second excerpt, from Einstein's comments on Bertrand Russell's theory of knowledge, will suggest that the common supposition that our conceptions of the world correspond to reality has been a result of illusions.During philosophy’s childhood it was rather generally believed that it is possible to find everything which can be known by means of mere reflection. (...) Someone, indeed, might even raise the question whether, without something of this illusion, anything really great can be achieved in the realm of philosophical thought – but we do not wish to ask this question. This more aristocratic illusion concerning the unlimited penetrative power of thought has as its counterpart the more plebeian illusion of naïve realism, according to which things “are” as they are perceived by us through our senses. This illusion dominates the daily life of men and animals; it is also the point of departure in all the sciences, especially of the natural sciences.
But if the goal of our pursuit of knowledge is to distinguish real truth from illusion – how can we rely on a criterion (correspondence with reality) that is impossible to verify? And which is itself a product of illusion?
Academic reality on the other side of the mirror
As the case is in Louis Carroll's familiar story, from which the mirror metaphor has been borrowed, this academic mirror too can be walked right through! And when we do that, we find ourselves in an entirely different academic reality – where familiar things are turned upside down; and where we recognize, to our surprise, that they are far more stable, and serve us a lot better in that way. You may now understand Knowledge federation as a model or prototype of the academic reality on the other side of the mirror.
What makes this apparent magic academically possible is what Villard Van Orman Quine called truth by convention. In "Truth by Convention", Quine posited that
So if that is how the sciences progress – why not allow knowledge work at large to progress in the same way?The less a science has advanced, the more its terminology tends to rest on an uncritical assumption of mutual understanding. With increase of rigor this basis is replaced piecemeal by the introduction of definitions. The interrelationships recruited for these definitions gain the status of analytic principles; what was once regarded as a theory about the world becomes reconstrued as a convention of language. Thus it is that some flow from the theoretical to the conventional is an adjunct of progress in the logical foundations of any science.
Truth by convention is the kind of truth that is common in mathematics: "Let x be... Then..." It is meaningless to ask whether x "really is" as stated.
What makes 'the magic' possible, of 'walking through the mirror', is that the truth on the other side is (by convention) the truth by convention. We call this basic convention the methodology.
Truth becomes rigorous
It stands to reason that our foundations for creating truth and meaning should themselves be unshakable.
The foundations we've just sketched are made solid in three ways independently:
- They are a convention – and what's asserted in this way is true by definition, irrespective of what happens "in reality"
- This convention express the state-of-the-art epistemological knowledge, and the insights of giants
- The convention – the methodology – is conceived as a prototype; it has provisions for updating itself, when relevant new insights are reached
Knowledge becomes useful
Consider now the task of adapting knowledge and knowledge work to some timely purpose, such as 'showing the way'. If we should say that knowledge "really does" have that purpose, we'd surely run into a controversy. Someone would object that this is not really the case, and rightly so!
Everything changes when we allow ourselves to create conventions, and to create a specific methodology in that way, and a multiplicity of methodologies! We can now assign a purpose to knowledge, simply by making a convention!
In this way, we have at once liberated knowledge from its age-old subservience to "reality" (and therewith also with the age-old traditional procedures and methods which, we tend to assume, secure that knowledge will correspond with reality) – and by the same slight of hand assigned it another purpose, of orienting us in the complex reality.
By combining truth by convention with the creation of a methodology, knowledge work becomes securely established on the academic terrain that Herbert Simon called "the sciences of the artificial". The sciences of the artificial, according to Simon, do not study what objectively exists in the natural world – but man-made things, with the goal of adapting them to the purposes they serve in the human world.
Liberating knowledge and knowledge work
Creating the way we look at the world
Our prototype methodology is called Polyscopic Modeling. What we call polyscopy is the praxis it fosters. Usually, however, we simply refer to both as polyscopy.
The central notion in polyscopy is the scope – which is by definition whatever determines how we look at the world and what we see. This then includes first of all our concepts and methods.
The Polyscopy ideogram stands for the fact that at the point where we've come to see our scopes as our own creation and not our discovery, then it becomes natural to adapt them to the purpose of seeing what above all needs to be seen.
From the pen of a giant
Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.
This, and the next quotation of our chosen giant, will give us a clue how exactly we may use this approach to liberate our view of the world from disciplinary and terminological constraints.
I shall not hesitate to state here in a few sentences my epistemological credo. I see on the one side the totality of sense experiences and, on the other, the totality of the concepts and propositions that are laid down in books. (…) The system of concepts is a creation of man, together with the rules of syntax, which constitute the structure of the conceptual system. (…) All concepts, even those closest to experience, are from the point of view of logic freely chosen posits, just as is the concept of causality, which was the point of departure for this inquiry in the first place.
This is how Einstein stated his "epistemological credo" on the introductory pages of his Autobiographical Notes. Already the fact that a scientist should begin his personal account of the development of modern physics by stating an "epistemological credo" is significant – Isn't that exactly what we are doing here, on this page?
You'll notice that there is no reality in the above excerpts; only "the sense-experience" on the one side, and "the system of concepts" and "syntax" or method on the other. This latter part, posits Einstein, is "freely chosen", and even "the concept of causality" – which was the point of departure of traditional science (whose goal was, indeed, to explain how the observed phenomena follow as a consequence of the inner workings of nature) is freely chosen.
XXXXXXX
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