Excerpt from "Karl Weick Keeps You on Your Toes" - by Jordi Comas: "Karl Weick’s work is an influential example of the open systems approach. In grad school, it was a treat to read The Social Psychology of Organizing (still in print since 1967). Not least because he points out that organizations are never stable. They are always organizing. And because he used cartoons! Like this one.
Weick also built his understanding of organizations from the cognitive, the individual, not from the structure down. What I took from our discussion was that there were two ideas Weick covers that we wanted to describe not in conceptual terms, but in empirical terms. These were retrospective rationality and enacting the environment.
Retrospective rationality is the idea that we act in a myriad of ways and then “make sense” of our actions in cognitive and linguistic terms that attempt to make them rational. This is not because humans are dumb or lazy. We act and then think because the unending flow of activity of the world demands it of us. The ways in which we act are also due to a myriad of past reasons and contingencies. In other words, there are always more reasons we have acted or that may explain are actions than we need.
There is equivocality in the world. We don’t always know why things are. Hence retrospective rationality is about reducing equivocality; reducing the welter of contradicting reasons why we may have acted or that may explain why the world of human affairs is as it is. To be adaptive to this environment, to be open, requires tolerating some messiness, some disorder. For example, in SPofO, he writes:
…the inability of organizations to tolerate equivocal processing may well be the the most important reason they have trouble. It is the unwillingness to meet equivocality in an equivocal manner that produces failure, nonadaptation, autism, isolation form reality, psychological cost, etc. It is the unwillingness to disrupt order, ironically, that makes it impossible for the organization to create order (41).
But what about examples? In his 1995 book, Sensemaking in Organizations, Weick offers tow research-based examples (29-30). One involves asking film executives about the future of the film industry after they look at financial reports for the preceding three years. Logical approach, right? As it was reported, the exercise reflected how much variation in understanding there was about what had happened in the past. Hence, any attempt to understand the present and future was beset by equivocality. Something explained past performance? But what? Consumer tastes? Directors’ abilities? Cultural zeitgeist? A second example was a control group psychology experiment (very classic in style) where people were randomly assigned to groups that would be arbitrarily assigned low or high performance status (irrespective of actual results). Those in high performance groups reported that in most areas of group function, guess what, they scored higher than low performing groups."
"Retrospective Rationality" plays an important role in "sense-making":
"Sensibility is not something that can be taught; it can only be learned." - Mary Margaret Wildeblood ("Sensibility as distinguished from correct knowledge, right ideas, or other intellectual values") (via)
"According to Wuxing (五行) theory, the structure of the cosmos mirrors the five phases. Each phase has a complex series of associations with different aspects of nature. In the ancient Chinese form of geomancy, known as Feng Shui, practitioners all based their art and system on wuxing. All of these phases are represented within the trigrams. Associated with these phases are colors, seasons & shapes; all of which are interacting with each other." - Wikipedia
"For well over a century, Chinese fengshui, or "geomancy," has interested Western laymen and scholars. Today, hundreds of popular manuals claim to use its principles in their advice on how people can increase their wealth, happiness, longevity, and so on. This study is quite different, approaching fengshui from an academic angle. The focus is on its significance in China, but the recent history of its reinterpretation in the West is also depicted. The author argues that fengshui serves as an alternative tradition of cosmological knowledge, which is used to explain a range of everyday occurrences in rural areas, such as disease, mental disorders, accidents, and common mischief. The study includes a historical account of fengshui over the last 150 years augmented by the results of anthropological fieldwork on contemporary practices in two Chinese rural areas."
"Connecting with Specific Publics: Treating Communication Communicatively" - talk by Brenda Dervin, professor at The Ohio State University's School of Communications (2011)
Biographical Information: Brenda L. Dervin was born on November 20, 1938 . Dr. Dervin currently is Professor of Communication, and Joan N. Huber Faculty Fellow in Social and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Communication at Ohio State University. She has previously held posts on the communications faculty of Syracuse University and the University of Washington.
Education: Dr. Dervin received her BA in journalism and home economics from Cornell University in 1960. She went on to earn both a MA (1968) and a PhD (1971) in Communications Research from University of Michigan. Dervin was also awarded an honorary PhD in social sciences from the University of Helsinki in 2000.
Contribution to Reference: Dr. Dervin’s background in the field of communications has provided a unique vantage point at which to view the work of reference librarians. She has made significant contributions to the field of reference, specifically to the nature of the reference interview. Her research and writing focus on various aspects of how people make sense of their environments. Dr. Dervin’s development of a Sense-Making Methodology has been applied to numerous disciplines, including health communication (Teekman, 2000), understanding deaf culture (Linderman, 1996), feminist studies (Clark, 1999) and workplace processes (W-Y Cheuk, 1998).
Within the reference transaction, the Sense-Making Methodology frames the interaction between user and librarian as one in which the goal is to “bridge the gap.” Dervin’s research in this area explores the idea that people generally come to the reference transaction (or another instance of communication) with an obstacle or gap in understanding that serves as a fundamental block. The role of the reference librarian, Dervin argues, is to approach the reference transaction with a goal of understanding the “gap” from the user’s perspective. Through a series of query negotiations, the librarian attempts to paraphrase the information problem, and understand the context in which the question is being asked. The librarian must also determine the depth and scope of answer that is required, and elicits any relevant constraints. Such an approach may employ a mixture of Open Questions and Closed Ended Questions; though Dervin argues that a series of Neutral Questions ought to guide the interview, with the librarian careful to avoid imposing judgments or assumptions on the information need or the potential uses for the information.
Sense-Making Definition: According the homepage of the Sense-Making Methodology Site:
“Sense-Making is an approach to thinking about and implementing communication research and practice and the design of communication-based systems and activities. It consists of a set of philosophical assumptions, substantive propositions, methodological framings, and methods. It has been applied in myriad settings (e.g., libraries, information systems, media systems, web sites, public information campaigns, classrooms, counseling services, and so on), at myriad levels (e.g., intrapersonal, interpersonal, small group, organizational, mass, national, global), and within myriad perspectives (e.g., constructivist, critical, cultural, feminist, postmodern, communitarian).”(2005)
This extensive description explains the robust nature of this methodology. This definition is qualified by: “On this site, Sense-Making (capitalized) refers to the methodology; sense-making (not capitalized) refers to the phenomena of making and unmaking of sense. ” As Dervin notes in the Sense-Making Methodology Reader, the definition is continually in flux and adapts to accommodate new research. (Dervin, 1999).
Origins: Growing from Dervin’s post-doctoral research in communication, Sense-Making developed as an attempt to bridge the distance between the polarized camps of communications theory. Indebted to the work of communications theorist Richard F. Carter, University of Washington Professor Emeritus of Communication and his work in applying communication approaches to the communications field, this methodlogy is applicable across a wide range of disciplines.
Interview with Gregory Chaitin and links about Algorithmic Information Dynamics
"It seems to me that the most important discovery since Gödel was the discovery by Chaitin, Solomonoff & Kolmogorov of the concept called Algorithmic Probability which is a fundamental new theory of how to make predictions given a collection of experiences & this is a beautiful theory, everybody should learn it, but it’s got one problem, that is, that you cannot actually calculate what this theory predicts because it is too hard, it requires an infinite amount of work. However, it should be possible to make practical approximations to the theory that would make better predictions than anything we have today. Everybody should learn all about that and spend the rest of their lives working on it." - Marvin Minsky (2014)
Abstract:"Any science, including developmental science, functions within a broad set of concepts that generally go unnoticed during day to day research activities. These background ideas constitute the conceptual framework or context within which day-to-day research activities operate. A conceptual framework that has until recently dominated virtually all of science has been termed the Cartesian-Split-Mechanistic scientific research paradigm. In a number of scientific fields, including developmental science the inadequacies of this paradigm have become crystal clear, and new data has increasingly been highlighting these inadequacies. In this chapter this research paradigm is compared and contrasted with a newly emerged alternative scientific research paradigm termed the Process-Relational and Relational-Developmental-Systems paradigm. It has been said that science is taking a relational turn. This chapter explores the nature of this turn, and its implications for theory and methods, especially in developmental science."
#Comment: A peculiar characteristic of the dominant (western) science paradigm, is how little emphasis is placed on cultivating mind-body states (beyond pure book learning, jointly shaping mental & physicalconditions via exercise, meditation, diet, etc.) of participants (peers & public), while they interact with the science discipline and its fruits. During the past century, science has (re-) discovered, that the process of thinking-acting in living beings (incl. humans) is inherently embodied, multi-modal, contextual and distributed. Long dead is the notion of a disembodied philosopher king, generating objectivetruth from high above. Health and Cognitive accessibility are key for effective change-making. Yet, contemporary science is still practiced as strictly intellectual activity of sedentary elites, producing sacred knowledge on the assembly-lines of giant for-profit institutions. Peculiar indeed, as ancients cultures in India (Vedic, Yoga), China (Daosim, Qigong) or Greece (Philosophy, Sports) demonstrated the efficacy and joyfulness of a more holistic paradigm.
Idea 1: Culture always pays a price for technology.
Idea 2: There are always winners and losers in technological change.
Idea 3: Every technology has a philosophy: “The medium is the message.”
Idea 4: Technological change is not additive; it is ecological.
Idea 5: Media tend to become mythic.
"Conclusion: And so, these are my five ideas about technological change. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.
I will close with this thought. In the past, we experienced technological change in the manner of sleep-walkers. Our unspoken slogan has been “technology über alles,” and we have been willing to shape our lives to fit the requirements of technology, not the requirements of culture. This is a form of stupidity, especially in an age of vast technological change. We need to proceed with our eyes wide open so that we many use technology rather than be used by it."
Argument Map - visual representation of the structure of an argument.
Argument maps are box-and-line diagrams that lay out visually reasoning and evidence for and against a statement or claim. A good map clarifies and organizes thinking by showing the logical relationships between thoughts that are expressed simply and precisely. Argument maps are driven by asking, ‘Should I believe that? Why, or why not?’.
AGORA-Net - a Computer-Supported Collaborative Argument Visualization (CSCAV) tool. An argument is defined here as a set of statements—a claim and one or more reasons—where the reasons jointly provide support for the claim, or are at least meant to support the claim.
#Comment: If you have advanced "sensemaking" infrastructure, but in praxis predominately use it to advance the narrow interests of the military industrial complex ("kill, surveil, control"), shouldn't it be called "nonsensemaking" instead?
Exploring Abductive Reasoning - The Logic of Maybe
Abductive reasoning is a form of logical inference which starts with an observation or set of observations then seeks to find the simplest and most likely explanation for the observations. This process, unlike deductive reasoning, yields a plausible conclusion but does not positively verify it. Abductive conclusions are thus qualified as having a remnant of uncertainty or doubt, which is expressed in retreat terms such as "best available" or 'most likely.
Put differently, Abduction is drawing a conclusion using a heuristic that is likely, but not inevitable given some foreknowledge.e.g., I observe sheep in a field, and they appear white from my viewing angle, so sheep are white. Contrast with the deductive statement: "Some sheep are white on at least one side". To simplify and summaries: Deductive = Top down logic - Inductive = Bottom up logic - Abductive = What seems most probably?
The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) introduced abduction into modern logic. Over the years he called such inference hypothesis, abduction, presumption, and retroduction. He considered it a topic in logic as a normative field in philosophy, not in purely formal or mathematical logic, and eventually as a topic also in economics of research. (wikipedia)
In later years his view came to be:
Abduction is guessing. It is "very little hampered" by rules of logic. Even a well-prepared mind's individual guesses are more frequently wrong than right. But the success of our guesses far exceeds that of random luck and seems born of attunement to nature by instinct (some speak of intuition in such contexts).
Abduction guesses a new or outside idea so as to account in a plausible, instinctive, economical way for a surprising or very complicated phenomenon. That is its proximate aim.
Its longer aim is to economize inquiry itself. Its rationale is inductive: it works often enough, is the only source of new ideas, and has no substitute in expediting the discovery of new truths.
Pragmatism is the logic of abduction. Upon the generation of an explanation, the pragmatic maxim gives the necessary and sufficient logical rule to abduction in general. The hypothesis, being insecure, needs to have conceivable implications for informed practice, so as to be testable and, through its trials, to expedite and economize inquiry. The economy of research is what calls for abduction and governs its art.
"The interest in the use of abductive, analogic and intuitive problem-solving has major roots in the “design studies” movement of the late 1960’s & 1970’s.
This movement started in the UK, primarily thanks to the work of Leslie Martin and Lionel March at the Cambridge Centre at the Cambridge School of Architecture.March and Martin were at the head of a generation of scholars seeking to systematise and understand how architects and designers thought about the world. This paralleled research into cybernetics & AI in the states by Herbert Simon, but for some reason it seems that there was a critical confluence of design thinkers in the UK at that time, and most of the literature around induction, abduction, etc. seems to come from this period.
The key ideas: The original intention of this group was to understand and document the design process. The hope was that if you understood how architects and designers perceived the world, you could replicate this in computer or expert-systems (and then do away with or “improve” the designer). Because replicability was one of the key goals, a natural sciences approach was taken to observing designers. A lot of controlled experiments were set up in laboratories to test “design problem solving”, most of which failed miserably. This led to a more ethnographic approach, including some of the first anthropological approaches to knowledge elicitation that I’ve ever seen.
What they found was that:
“Scientists adopt a problem-focused strategy and architects a solution-focused strategy.” (Lawson, 1979)
“The scientific method is a pattern of problem-solving behaviour employed in finding out the nature of what existis, whereas the design method is a pattern of behaviour employed in inventing things of value which do not yet exists. Science is analytic, design is constructive.” (Gregory, 1966)
This places a heavy emphasis on action, testing, and observation, in that order, and highlights the essentially creative nature of design. Nigel Cross, who is still teaching at the Open University, suggests that design is “a process of pattern-synthesis, when the solution is not simply ‘lying there in the data’ but has to be actively constructed by the designer’s own efforts.”. You can see how this relates to the notion of abduction. Peirce suggests that, “the whole fabric of our knowledge is one matted felt of pure hypothesis confirmed and refined by induction.” This is very similar to design. In other words,
“[Architects] learn about the nature of the problem largely as a result of trying out solutions, whereas the scientists set out specifically to study the problem.” (Lawson, 1980)
Schum notes that if Peirce is correct, “new ideas emerge as we combine, marshal or organize thoughts and evidence in different ways.” Because the design method is fundamentally exploratory, it is about hypothesis generation based on the most uncertain and sketchy forms of data. It uses both abductive and constructive reasoning to show “what might be”, instead of deductive reasoning to show “what is”." Read more..
In recent decades, Abductive Logic and Reasoning has been extensively studied in the context of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning research. A few links, old & new:
Related Ideas by Abductive Logic pioneer Charles Sanders Peirce, on Semiotics:
"The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise." - Charles Sanders Peirce
BASED ON TRUE EVENTS: "I have been teaching Geometry this year,and trying my best to explain logic,deduction vs induction, and the ever present, always faulty, always useful, abductive “reasoning.”Without abductive reasoning, life itself would not be possible for humans. Induction and deduction? Entirely optional. Our car, (which only had 3 out 4 cyliders working) started to turn itself off, at apparently random intervals. There you’d be, changing lanes, in what you thought was a car,and poof no car, just a large metal box that looked like a car,with a seat belt, a driver’s seat, and a silent engine,rolling to a final velocity of zero. I drove the box / car to five dealerships in town,while searching for the best replacement for the box.I can now say, what others have noted before;
“Pure logic, when considering a car, (or any thing else other than numbers) does not exist.”
Notes on the Historical Division between "Logical thinking" and "Visuals"
Rudolf Arnheim suggested a historical division between "Logical thinking" and "Visuals" in his ground-breaking book, Visual Thinking (1969).
He pointed out that philosophers in ancient Greek credited the direct vision as the start and end source of wisdom although they also learned possible distortion in human’s visual perception (Arnheim, 1969. pp. 12). However, hundreds of years later, the potential of using sketching in creative problem solving are still paid less attention. Sketching is often not considered as a form of thinking. (found via viz-up-the-world)
In his book, Arnheim (1969. pp. 2-3) reflected on the issue as the followed:
“Today, the prejudicial discrimination between perception and thinking is still with us. We shall find it in examples from philosophy and psychology. Our entire educational system continues to be based on the study of words and numbers … More and more the arts are considered as a training in agreeable skills, as entertainment and mental release."
"As the ruling disciplines stress more rigorously the study of words and numbers, their kinship with the arts is increasingly obscured, and the arts are reduced to a desirable supplement…. The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought. In fact, educators and administrators cannot justify giving the arts an important position in the curriculum unless they understand that the arts are the most powerful means of strengthening the perceptual component without which productive thinking is impossible in any field of endeavor. The neglect of the arts is only the most tangible symptom of the widespread unemployment of the senses….”
"All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention." - Rudolf Arnheim
"My teachers Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler were laying the theoretical and practical foundations of gestalt theory at the Psychological Institute of the Uni of Berlin, and I found myself fastening on to what may be called a Kantian turn of the new doctrine, according to which even the most elementary processes of vision do not produce mechanical recordings of the outer world but organize the sensory raw material according to principles of simplicity, regularity, and balance, which govern the receptor mechanism. This discovery of the gestalt school fitted the notion that the work of art, too, is not simply an imitation or selective duplication of reality but a translation of observed characteristics into the forms of a given medium" (from Film as Art)
"We have been trained to think of perception as the recording of shapes, distances, hues, motions. The awareness of these measurable characteristics is really a fairly late accomplishment of the human mind. Even in the Western man of the twentieth century it presupposes special conditions. It is the attitude of the scientist and the engineer or of the salesman who estimates the size of a customer’s waist, the shade of a lipstick, the weight of a suitcase. But if I sit in front of a fireplace and watch the flames, I do not normally register certain shades of red, various degrees of brightness, geometrically defined shapes moving at such and such a speed. I see the graceful play of aggressive tongues, flexible striving, lively color. The face of a person is more readily perceived and remembered as being alert, tense, concentrated rather than being triangularly shaped, having slanted eyebrows, straight lips, and so on" (from Art and Visual Perception, first ed., 430).
"Without the flourishing of visual expression no culture can function productively" - Rudolf Arnheim
"There once was a scholar of Chinese thought who came to visit a village which was suffering from a most unusual prolonged drought. All the people were very worried, since everything had been done to end it. Every kind of prayer, charm and magic had been used, but all to no avail. So the elders of the village told the old scholar that the only thing left was to send for the rainmaker. The old scholar was very interested in this idea, since he had never seen a rainmaker before. The rainmaker arrived in a covered car. He was a small and wizened old man. He stepped out of the car and smelled the air in disgust. He then asked for a house on the outskirts of the village. He insisted that no one should disturb him and that his food should be placed outside his door.
No one heard or saw him for three days, when everyone was awakened by a heavy downpour of rain. It was even at times snowing, which was unusual for that time of year. The old scholar was deeply impressed and went to see him. The scholar asked, "So you can make rain?" The rainmaker scoffed at the idea and said "of course I can't." The scholar replied, "but there was the most persistent drought until you came, and within a few days it rains?" "Oh," replied the rainmaker, "that was something quite different. You see, I came from a region where everything was in order. It rains when it should and is dry when that is needed, and the people are also in order and Harmony with themselves. But that was not the case with the people here. They were all out of Harmony with themselves. I was at once ill when I arrived, so I had to be totally alone until I was once more in Harmony with myself and then of course quite naturally it rained!"
The essence of this little story is that when you are in Harmony with yourself the whole world begins to orchestrate with you. The Lazy Man's Guide to Relaxation is about finding this Harmony within yourself. You see, this is one of the great secrets of life, learning how to be in Harmony with yourself, and thus with the world. To do . this -- to be in Harmony -- to be yourself-- you must first know how to relax. If you are truly relaxed everything begins to change. There is no need for deep penetrating thought — only the Bliss of Relaxation.
In this little book written by a man with a vast knowledge encompassing various fields, the reader is treated to a nurturing and penetrating method of deep relaxation accomplished with simplicity and ease. After a few weeks of practice a new exhilaration will be yours. There will be joyousness in your heart and you will meet life with gaiety and vivacity. But, more importantly there will be peace of mind. You will be freed from the labour of worry.
So often the stress and strain of life makes us callous to friendship and love. We become short, sometimes even hostile. But it is very important never to forget that even though the frequent hardships of life cause pain, that asleep within — is Harmony, the Being at one with everything -- the profound graceful source that can turn everything into a symphony of Joy. - Bhagavan Jivananda
Excerpts from the book:
"You must now begin to learn something of the gentle and invaluable art of relaxation. A few minutes, once or twice a day, spent in relaxation will work wonders. You will eventually come to realize that you should have done this long ago."
" One becomes accustomed to living in and with a relaxed frame which is not exhausting its vital energies in maintaining unnecessary and useless tensions. That vital energy, therefore, being retained within, goes towards heightening and clarifying the mind. Energy must do something. Energy is defined as that which can perform work. If energy is not being wasted in keeping your neck or your abdomen or thigh rigid and taut, it is still retained within your own system. What happens to the energy therefore? In physics, as I have remarked, energy is considered very concretely as that which will do work.
Now, if you are relaxed and there is no needless expenditure of metabolic energy, that energy must do something. Hence, the work it does is entirely psychological in nature & scope. All your latent abilities and mental powers and faculties become sharpened. A distinct exaltation must accompany the process. There should be a fresh acquisition of intellectual power and capacity."
"You must experiment yourself with your own body to obtain relaxation and observe these incidents, sensations, and psychological phenomena. Explain them afterwards if you wish. First relax."
"Ritual is to the inner sciences what experiment is to the outer sciences.” - Tim Leary
A Zen Master was once asked, "What is Zen?" “Attention,” he replied. "Is that all?" asked the inquirer. "Attention,” the Zen Master repeated. "Won't you say anything else?" persisted the questioner. “Attention,” said the Master, one more time.
"The borders of our minds are ever shifting, and many minds can flow into one another; as it were, and create or reveal a single mind. . . our memories are part of one great memory; the memory of Nature herself.” - William Butler Yeats
"Chi theory is an ontology, in which it is pointless to declare one’s belief or disbelief prior to understanding".
"The differences between a living human being and a corpse are that the former has an EM field and movement (together called “bioenergy”) and neutral chemical acidity, whereas the latter lacks an EM field, does not move, and is highly acidic. Three possible implied explanations for the changes between the living and the dead can be stated in the form of propositions: (1) absence of bioenergy is an effect of altered biochemistry (the Western scientific proposition; (2) altered biochemistry and exhaustion of bioenergy are effects of a third factor; (3) altered biochemistry is an effect of exhaustion of bioenergy (the Chinese scientific proposition)."
Chi is not energy - which argues that "if you cultivate chi, you do not have more energy, you just become more efficient at using the energy you do have, and so you appear (even to yourself) more energetic."