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30 Oct 09

World of Warcraft and Philsophy - Boing Boing

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philosophy gaming

17 Oct 09

Abductive reasoning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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future design philosophy

What is Design Thinking Anyway? : Observatory: Design Observer

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Tim Brown of IDEO has written that design thinking is “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”
The design-thinking organization applies the designer’s most crucial tool to the problems of business. That tool is abductive reasoning.
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- Deductive logic — the logic of what must be — reasons from the general to the specific. If the general rule is that all crows are black, and I see a brown bird, I can declare deductively that this bird is not a crow.
- Inductive logic — the logic of what is operative — reasons from the specific to the general. If I study sales per square foot across a thousand stores and find a pattern that suggests stores in small towns generate significantly higher sales per square foot than stores in cities, I can inductively declare that small towns are my more valuable market.
- Yet a reasoning toolbox that holds only deduction and induction is incomplete. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, American philosophers such as William James and John Dewey began to explore the limits of formal declarative logic — that is, inductive and deductive reasoning. They were less interested in how one declares a statement true or false than in the process by which we come to know and understand. To them, the acquisition of knowledge was not an abstract, purely conceptual exercise, but one involving interaction with and inquiry into the world around them. Understanding did not entail progress toward an absolute truth but rather an evolving interaction with a context or environment.
- New ideas came into being, Peirce posited, by way of “logical leaps of the mind.” New ideas arose when a thinker observed data (or even a single data point) that didn’t fit with the existing model or models. The thinker sought to make sense of the observation by making what Peirce called an “inference to the best explanation.” The true first step of reasoning, he concluded, was not observation but wondering. Peirce named his form of reasoning abductive logic. It is not declarative reasoning; its goal is not to declare a conclusion to be true or false. It is modal reasoning; its goal is to posit what could possibly be true.
- Whether they realize it or not, designers live in Peirce’s world of abduction; they actively look for new data points, challenge accepted explanations, and infer possible new worlds. By doing so, they scare the hell out of a lot of businesspeople. For a middle manager forced to deal with flighty, exuberant “creative types,” who seem to regard prevailing wisdom as a mere trifle and deadlines as an inconvenience, the admonition to “be like a designer” is tantamount to saying “be less productive, less efficient, more subversive, and more flaky” — not an attractive proposition. And it is a fair critique that abduction can lead to poor results; unproved inferences might lead to success in time, but then again, they might not.
- Some abductive thinkers fail to heed Brown’s requirement that the design must be matched to what is technologically feasible, launching products that do not yet have supporting technology. Consider the software designers who inferred from the growth of the Internet that consumers would want to do all their shopping online, from pet supplies to toys to groceries. Online security and back-end infrastructure had not yet caught up to their ideas, dooming them to failure.
- Other abductive thinkers fail to address Brown’s second requirement: that the innovation must make business sense. Looking back on the dot-com crash, Michael Dell, founder of Dell, argues that little has changed. “Still today in our industry, if you go to a trade show, you walk around and you will find a lot of technology for which there is no problem that exists,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Hey, look at this, we’ve got a great solution and there is no problem to solve here.’ ” [2]
- Making Peirce’s logical leaps is not consistent or reliable; nor does it faithfully adhere to predetermined budgets. But the far greater risk is to maintain an environment hostile to abductive reasoning, the proverbial lifeblood of design thinkers and the design of business. Without the logic of what might be, a corporation can only refine its current heuristic or algorithm, leaving it at the mercy of competitors that look upstream to find a more powerful route out of the mystery or a clever new way to drive the prevailing heuristic to algorithm.

13 Oct 09

Edge: WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? By Jonathan Haidt

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08 Oct 09

Harsanyi: The doers against the "thinkers" - The Denver Post

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28 Sep 09

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

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27 Sep 09

John Dewey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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11 Sep 09

Christian List

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23 Jul 09

Portrait: 'Charles Taylor' by Ben Rogers | Prospect Magazine February 2008 issue 143

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idea people philosophy

15 Jul 09

Wicked problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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14 Jul 09

Pip was right: nothing is so finely felt as injustice. And there the search begins | Amartya Sen | Comment is free | The Guardian

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It has been argued that some children carry out odd acts of brutality to others – other children or animals – precisely because of their inability to appreciate adequately the nature and intensity of the pains of others. There is perhaps a strong connection between being antisocial and the inability to think clearly.
One approach concentrated on identifying perfectly just social arrangements, and took the characterisation of "just institutions" to be the principal – and often the only identified – task of the theory of justice.
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- Woven in different ways around the idea of a hypothetical "social contract", major contributions were made in this line of thinking by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, and later by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, among others.
- n contrast, a number of other Enlightenment theorists (Adam Smith, Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, for example) took a variety of approaches that shared an interest in making comparisons between different ways in which people's lives may go, jointly influenced by the working of institutions, people's actual behaviour, their social interactions, and other factors that significantly impact on what actually happens.
- "social choice theory" – which can be traced to the works of Condorcet in the 18th century, but has been developed in the present form under the leadership of Kenneth Arrow in the last century – belongs to this second line of investigation. That approach, suitably adapted, can make a substantial contribution, I believe, to addressing questions about the enhancement of justice and the removal of injustice in the world.
- What moves us is not the realisation that the world falls short of being completely just, which few of us expect, but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate.
- One of the limitations of the social contract approach to justice, which is so pervasive in contemporary political philosophy, is the unjustified conviction that there could only be one precise combination of principles that could serve as the basis of ideal social institutions. In contrast with this rigid insistence, a social choice approach allows the possibility of a plurality of competing principles, each of which is given a status, after being subjected to critical scrutiny.
- yet we have every reason to try to see whether we can get reasoned agreement on removing what can be identified as clear injustice in the world

18 Jun 09

Actor-network theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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science philosophy idea research methodology

The approach is related to other versions of material-semiotics (and notably the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault
It can also be seen as a way of being faithful to the insights of ethnomethodology. There are also obvious links to symbolic interactionist approaches such as the newer forms of grounded theory like situational analysis that seek to frame social circumstances as various forms of relationships associated with situations.

28 Apr 09

Saxelab Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at MIT

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psychology philosophy research cognition

28 Mar 09

Pragmatism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

. Pragmatism, in short, provides what might be termed an ecological account of knowledge: inquiry is construed as a means by which organisms can get a grip on their environment.

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philosophy

Pragmatism is the philosophy of considering practical consequences or real effects to be vital components of meaning and truth.
James and Peirce were inspired by the crucial links among belief, conduct, and disposition by saying a belief is a proposition on which a person is prepared to act. Inspiration for the pragmatists included Francis Bacon, who coined the phrase "knowledge is power", David Hume, for his naturalistic account of knowledge and action, Thomas Reid, for his direct realism, Immanuel Kant, for his idealism and from whom Peirce derives the name "pragmatism", Georg Hegel, for his introduction of temporality into philosophy (Pinkard in Misak 2007), and J.S. Mill for his nominalism and empiricism.
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- The epistemology of early pragmatism was heavily influenced by Darwinian thinking.
- Pragmatism, in short, provides what might be termed an ecological account of knowledge: inquiry is construed as a means by which organisms can get a grip on their environment.
- In the second half of the twentieth century, Stephen Toulmin argued that the need to distinguish between reality and appearance only arises within an explanatory scheme and therefore that there is no point in asking what 'ultimate reality' consists of. More recently, a similar idea has been suggested by the postanalytical philosopher Daniel Dennett, who argues that anyone who wants to understand the world has to adopt the intentional stance and acknowledge both the 'syntactical' aspects of reality (i.e. whizzing atoms) and its emergent or 'semantic' properties (i.e. meaning and value).

23 Feb 09

Data, Information, Knowledge, & Wisdom

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technology architecture KM collaboration research information psychology learning management knowledge philosophy

12 Feb 09

Born believers: How your brain creates God - science-in-society - 04 February 2009 - New Scientist

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07 Feb 09

Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives | Video on TED.com

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