IdeaFestival

"Methodological opportunism"

The longstanding divide between purely rational inquiry and empiricism, the problem of knowledge, is being challenged by more and more thinkers, academics and researchers in the business of discovery. On one hand, math can approach mind boggling concepts like infinity. On the other, naturalists see opportunities to apply empiricism to the human equation, perhaps most notably in the brain sciences. Neither method seems able to offer complete answers on its own.

The author at AlphaPsy believes in "methodological opportunism."

In November the Ecole des hautes études in Paris will organize a conference about social sciences and the “threat” of reductionism.

I imagine it will be a very representative occasion to assist to heated debates about why we have principled reasons to naturalize social sciences or not, opposing principled anti-naturalists such as Vincent Descombes to principled naturalist such as Dan Sperber.

Taking opposite sides, both agree that the ongoing naturalization of social sciences engages deep and substantial philosophical, methodological and epistemological questions. I think they are both wrong.

He appears to believe that deeper questions are inconsequential - a point with which I disagree - but he does the raise the role of methodology in problem solving. The back and forth in the comments is worthwhile as well.

I'll probably be embarrassed when I realize why, but I again cannot link directly to AlphaPsy. Use this Google results page instead to jump to the site.

Wayne

Decision time

Luke Wroblewski at Functioning Form rounds up four popular decision making theories he's heard recently.

Wayne

Elizabeth Spiers recommends

Elizabeth Spiers, who participated on The Future According to mental_floss panel at the ideaFestival, suggested Steven Johnson’s "The Ghost Map" when asked for recommended reading.

Her debut novel, "And They All Die in the End," will be published by Riverhead in 2007.

Wayne

Kevin Smokler recommends

When asked for recommended reading Kevin Smokler, who participated in the recently concluded ideaFestival, suggested "Talking Right" by Geoffrey Nunburg.

Kevin also followed IF with this reaction at Huffington Post.

For those of you interested in the recommended reading, a complete list of suggested books can be found in the 'books' category on the lower left side of this page. Page down until you see the category cloud.

I'll post the recommended reading of Elizabeth Spiers, John Stempel and Ethan Zuckerman by the end of the week to conclude the series. Thanks for following along.

Wayne

Getting a grip on sight and sound

Sound and Mind contributor Kris Shaffer posts a reaction to a recent talk by Robert Walser on music cognition.

In addition to its tonal physics, New musicology sees music as a cultural force in which meaning is "co-constructed" rather than simply appropriated by the brain as a sensual pleasure, a position with which Edmund Blair Bolles appears to agree in this post at Babel's Dawn on the relationship between music and language. In this view, music is a cultural force that can be compared contrasted to the "conduit" model whereby music is simply delivered, or as Shaffer writes, "encoded/sent, delivered, and received/decoded."

In art and science, it's the derived meaning of the work that fascinates me -the what and how we know. For example, in studio furniture, a specific interest of mine, the object presents itself for inspection and, depending on the tastes and understanding of the viewer, can elicit an appreciation for its technical execution and visual completeness. In some ways it's the thought that counts. Of course in addition to its notation in the score, music has the added attribute of living in its sonic rendition.

Shaffer's post reminds me that there are many ways to experience things, an idea which phenomenologists explore and map in surprising variety.

I suppose I bring this up because I'm currently reading Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Giveness, which takes the phenomenal inquiry in a fascinating new direction. More later.

Wayne 

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, beauty, cognition, consciousness, craft, creativity, design, epistemology, phenomenology

The technologies we choose

Does technology have a mind of its own?

Here are three views on technological determinism. One is from Kevin Kelly, who recently spoke at Pop!Tech. Ethan Zuckerman says Kelly acknowledged an uneasy relationship with technology, but he, Kelly, is nonetheless "fascinated by the idea that technology has its own agenda and directions:"

Technology, like children, are not neutral - they’re creative forces for good. They can turn good or bad, but civilization depends on having the good outweigh the bad, even by a thin margin. Civilization is the 1% difference between the good and the bad.

The comment reminded me of this post from Douglas Rushkoff, who said that we may be moving into an era that is defined as much by the technologies we refuse as the ones we accept, which I summarized earlier this year as "no thanks, I'm pro-consciousness."

The ethical dimensions of technology choice can be encountered in variety of contexts, from the Mennonite and Amish communities, who balance communications and transportation technologies against their vision of community, to the advance directives and living wills adopted by the terminally ill, who weigh the benefits of medical technologies in life's last days.

Lastly, Wired editor Mark Vamos touches on technology-aided memory in the current (November) issue of the magazine when he says in the letter from the editor that

successful technologies have a way of creating their own justification.... In an age of computer-assisted human memory, it may one day be as unacceptable to claim you've forgotten something as it is, in our time of pervasive cell phones and BlackBerry's, to say you're unreachable.

It's an arresting thought: when everything knowable can be known, what then?

Wayne

Digital literacy

To follow up on my post earlier this week, Findability.org links to a MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative white paper that describes "11 new literacies" in a flat information society. The paper is called Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture (.pdf).

Wayne

Museum swagger

Not even the automobile, our popular form of transportation, has undergone as many stunning architectural changes as have some of our contemporary art museums.  These structures, forcefully disavowing the famous classical Greek order of things, zip off and sway back, lurk and lunge to stir things up, not settle them down.

The most dramatic of the many now causing public ogling is the famous Bilboa Guggenheim Museum acclaimed to be Frank Gehry’s masterpiece. Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish architect, interested in translating organic form into fixed form, designed a wing-like brise soleil as part of his dramatic addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Now Daniel Libeskind can smile with satisfaction as his addition to the Denver Art Museum has opened and made its various titanium forms complements to the Rocky Mountains that caught the architect’s eyes.

In a statement on the museum’s website, Libeskind says of this work: it is “an icon whose character and form will attract a wide public to the museum.”

Traditional museum architecture, like its bank building look alike, sternly impressed the visitor to tread softly and proceed with a sober demeanor.

Libeskind says his building “does not separate inside from outside.”  The “classical” forms have been laid to rest, and the new asymmetries that jut and twist suggest that building and collection share a new dynamic that causes the art viewer’s feet to tingle.

The public  reception?  Condominiums in a new building across the street from the Libeskind addition found that the condos facing the museum addition sold more quickly than those facing the Rocky Mountains.

Ray Betts

Neuroaesthetics?

Neuroaesthetics?

AlphaPsy, though writing often of the links between the humanities and the sciences, finds the idea a bit premature:

I'd like to take this opportunity to jump up on my soapbox and ask, what exactly do we want biology (or neuroscience) to say about art? What are the questions that biology can hope to answer and art history or aesthetics cannot?

The rest is available at the following URL: http://www.cognition.ens.fr/~alphapsy/blog/

I've tried in vain to hyperlink to the article (it 505's), so if you're interested in AlphaPsy, copy and paste the address into your browser.

The blog also offers a feed, which, once you're there, works fine.

Wayne

Pop!Tech wrap

Ethan Zuckerman posts a thoughtful Pop!Tech wrap-up and links to others who also blogged the meeting.

Wayne