Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 453.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois
Lachance) (37)
Subject: Scheffler's rival metaphors
[2] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk> (32)
Subject: empirical and imperial
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 07:13:22 +0000
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: Scheffler's rival metaphors
Willard,
Some time ago, I promised, if no other subscribers had time or
inclination, to take up Israel Scheffler's "rival metaphors" with which he
concludes his 1985 presentation "Computers at School?" (collected in _In
Praise of the Cognitive Emotions_, 1991). I thought I would follow through
on the promise before the commencement of the year of the horse soon to be
upon us.
I ask your forbearance for a post with longish bits of quotation.
Scheffler is reacting against what he considers to be a computer-model
based on the notion of "information". He summarizes and characterizes the
notion of information thus:
<cite>
A prevalent public image of the computer is, surely, that of an
information processor. Information comes in discrete bits, each expressing
a factual datum. Data may be entered and stored in the computer's memory,
retrieved from memory, and processed in simple or complex ways according
to various programs, which instruct the computer exactly what functions to
perform. These functions are in the nature of algorithms, specifying
determinately how the data are to be transformed. The human operator
determines that the solution to his problem might be computed by program
from input data, punches in his instructions to the machine to instituted
the relevant program, and eventually sees the solution displayed on the
screen before him.
</cite>
As well as the traces of gender-coding, one finds here the vocabulary
associated with main frames and terminals (e.g. "operators" and
"punching"). What I want to emphasize here is that some 20 years ago, not
withstanding the incursion of images personal computers, such as the Apple
McIntosh, upon the popular imagination. the debate about computers in the
classroom invoked a dichotomy which depicted the human as flexible and the
machine as being set in its configurations. I want to suggest that there
is now a set of players on the human side of the machine-human interaction
that can be figured as possessing an expertise lying between the
"operator" of the maching and the "programmer". As well more people
think beyond and around the image of a single machine. The network is
a key element in the representation of computers in popular culture.
I turn now to Scheffler's three rival metaphors: insight, equipping, rule
model. The insight model "speaks not of information but of insight and
perception, vision and illumination, intuition of nuance and pattern,
grasp of overtone and undertone. [This sounds very much like Seymour
Papert's work with children learning to programm with Logo -- Sherry
Turkle's reporting on this in _The Second Self_ appeared in 1984.] The
equipping model is contrasted with the information model in that it
concerns "the forming or strengthening of abilities, the know-how
commanded by a person, rather than the know-that, the capability to deal
with the tasks and challenges of practice in the various domains of daily
life." Finally, the rule metaphor "focuses on norms rather than
capacities, on the pronenesses, likelihoods, tendencies, and dispositions
of a person rather than what he _can_ do."
I wonder, if we put Scheffler's typology beside Turkle's musings about
gendered-styles of human group interaction as reflected in human-computer
interactions, if we cannot arrive at a model where the user and the
programmer both are like the humanist who percieves (with or without the
benefit of insight or the promise of arriving at a valuable insight), who
applies knowledge (in the true ignorance of the tester of the
hypothetical) and who judges self, result and apparatus (by the ever
changing measures of rules negotiated in communication (computer-mediated
and otherwise) with other judges, perceivers and applicators). It would
then perhaps appear or be deemed to appear that the "information" model is
incomplete without consideration of its articulation in a cybernetic (or
general) system that takes as its fundamental premise the fungibility of
data and program, instruction and state.
Thanks for the air time,
Francois
--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/ivt.htm
per Interactivity ad Virtuality via Textuality
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 07:16:07 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: empirical and imperial
Two ironies, or two stories that perhaps share an irony.
(1)
Years ago an old friend, a scholar of Mongolian and Chinese, told me that
he had received notice of publication of the first index ever to be made to
an old Chinese encyclopedia. (I am sorry to have forgotten the name of the
reference work.) Excited by the prospect at first, he was intending on
purchasing this index -- he used the encyclopedia quite frequently and, as
anyone who knows a bit about the language will understand immediately,
always spent quite a bit of time looking around in the book for whatever it
was that he wanted. In the end, however, he decided not to buy the index.
He reflected that nearly every time he took up the book, he found in the
process of looking for whatever thing it was something else unexpected and
far more interesting than the original object of enquiry. Having the index
would be just too tempting for the busy scholar.
(2)
Greg Dening, in "The Randy and Imperial Eye" (Readings/Writings, Melbourne,
1998), quotes the historian David Miller's account of a contemporary's
amazement at walking into the estate office of Joseph Banks in late
Hannoverian London:
"'There is a catalogue of names and subjects in every drawer so that
whether the enquiry concerned a man or drainage, or an enclosure, or a farm
or a wood, the request was scarce named before a mass of information was
before me. Such an apartment and such an apparatus must be of incomparable
use in the management of every great estate or indeed in any
circumstance.'" Then Dening goes on to note: "It is the retrievability to
purpose that makes knowledge empirical -- and imperial.... At the end of
the twentieth century, when the hardest of the sciences and the softest of
the humanities are preoccupied with copyrights, patents and economic
rationalism, we might have a better understanding of how visions of science
are subject to empires of many sorts" (pp. 82f).
The above suggests a number of things, and I think the moral is not hard to
find. One thing it suggests to me is part of what continues to bother me
about "big humanities" research: paying the piper. There's of course the
(mis)use of research results for purposes to which the original researchers
would never have agreed, but there's also the effective shaping of research
directions by the trail of money that we feel ourselves forced by
circumstances to follow. I don't wish to suggest that we can be pure. Of
course we cannot. But, being humanists, are we not obliged to ask
questions? And, getting back to the first story, are we also not obliged to
compare what the machined efficiences do against what unassisted human ways
lead to?
Yours,
WM
-----
Dr Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities /
King's College London / Strand / London WC2R 2LS / U.K. /
voice: +44 (0)20 7848-2784 / fax: +44 (0)20 7848-2980 /
ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/ maui gratias agere
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