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Now this post I can understand, and this comment in particular:
What we need to spend more time on articulating is the context in which
these "truths" hold so that everyone can be able to evaluate them
effectively based on their own needs and understanding, e.g. their own
personal context. If we can achieve this sort of thing, we'll be a lot
better at picking the right tool for the job because we'll have a much
better understanding of both the tool and the job.
That is just one lovely paragraph of well formed words and sentences to then form a paragraph that I believe belongs in some sort of HolyHackerShrine of some sort.
Nicely stated. :)
On 3/9/06, Andrew S. Townley <andrew.townley@bearingpoint.com> wrote:
On Thu, 2006-03-09 at 15:01, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> As I said, after a month of digging through papers
> on pragmatics and business intelligence, this is the
> subjective approach: reality is what you say it is
> if enough people agree. Subjective systems provide
> for multiple points of view over the same information.
> Objective systems provide for information plus operations
> so really, one point of view.
Neither one of your definition of Subjective or Objective really fits
with what David Bohm says regarding reality, but I actually think that
his thinking is particularly applicable to computer science as well as
his original context of physics (see Wholeness and the Implicate Order's
Reality and Knowledge Considered as Process chapter):
"Rather, it implies that any describable event, object, entity, etc. is
an abstraction from an unknown and undefinable totality of flowing
movement. This means that no matter how far our knowledge of physics
may go, the content of these laws will still deal with such
abstractions, having only a relative independence of existence and
independence of behaviour."
He goes on to say that knowledge is a process, but it's the process
that's the basis of both reality and any derived knowledge of reality.
>From this point of view, each of the subjective theories is as or more
correct than an objective one because the objective one is being treated
as a fixed truth when, if knowledge is a process, this is really a false
assumption. The basis of the objective theory is that this is just one
interpretation based on a certain context in which the knowledge of
reality can be seen as fixed. Twiddle any of those variables defining
the context, and the objective theory may or may not still apply.
One of the things that the last several years of computing should be
telling us is, like physics, no one is actually ever going to be
"right". The definition of "right" depends on the context and the
knowledge available to the one stating the "truth". Ultimately, this is
where permathreads on things from editors to languages (programming,
mark-up, schema,...) to politics come from.
What we need to spend more time on articulating is the context in which
these "truths" hold so that everyone can be able to evaluate them
effectively based on their own needs and understanding, e.g. their own
personal context. If we can achieve this sort of thing, we'll be a lot
better at picking the right tool for the job because we'll have a much
better understanding of both the tool and the job.
ast
--
Join me in Dubrovnik, Croatia on May 8-10th when I will be speaking at
InfoSeCon 2006. For more information, see www.infosecon.org.
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M. David Peterson
http://www.xsltblog.com/
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