wallpaper animals

Critical Realism, the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer and a number of acolytes is a philosophical critique of the nature of causation. It is grounded in a re-examination of scientific knowledge and asks the question "given that we have scientific knowledge of the world, what must the world be like?" In responding to this, it argues that Hume's theory of causation (that scientists construct causes in the light of reproducible experiment) is wrong. Bhaskar is not the only person to say this: his supervisor, Rom Harre said much the same thing in his "Causal Powers". Bhaskar argues that the Humean mistake has had knock-on effects on the social sciences, where social science has tried to compensate for the lack of reproducible experiments (with statistics, probabilities, textual analysis, etc) so as to similarly facilitate a process of 'constructing causes' in an attempt to make defensible claims about the social world. A variety of social science methodologies do this - for example, the Grounded Theory of Glaser and Strauss.

I think Bhaskar's argument here is pretty solid, and it has led to some practical innovations like Pawson and Tilley's Realistic Evaluation, which I find far more sensible than most of the available social science methods. But my concern recently has been with the arts, not science. How does Bhaskar's argument transfer to the arts?

Where scientists concern themselves with cause, I think artists concern themselves with form. Form and Cause are related - at least for Aristotle, and I think both are related to knowledge. Artistic knowledge is different from scientific knowledge: but Shakespeare will still leave us astounded at insights into human nature and life that the most penetrating scientists barely touch.

Bhaskar's argument for scientists is that they do not construct causes, they discover them. Similarly, I think artists do not construct forms, they discover them. Picasso's famous comment "I do not seek, I find" would bear this out I think. But in much contemporary art (and particularly music) there is a tendency to focus on abstract phenomena and discover forms: mathematical series, formulae, concepts. I wonder if this is the analogue of the 'reproducible experiment' in the sciences. Are artists drawn to these things because the possibility of discovering universal form is questioned? It is as if the discovery of abstract form is used as a way of making artistically defensible claims about the world. This seems to me to be a methodological (or technical) error.

The question for the arts is "What is the form discovered by art delimited by?" Those artists who focus on abstract forms consider that the abstraction is the delimitation. I think the delimitation is always the world, and the challenge for artists is to find a way of discovering the form of our world today. This is a related enterprise to social science, for understanding the causes of our world is inextricably entwined with understanding its form.

My only reservation with this position is that artistic technique is always a delimitation of sorts: artists work by restricting themselves. But this restriction serves to control the form that they deal with and their own agency in manipulating it. That is technique: a necessary attenuation. But the challenge is to ensure that technique serves the discovery of form, rather than merely reveal itself.

There's something fascinating about Axelrod's model of cultural diffusion - particularly if you select the 'bubble mode' in the applet below (which I stuck into the Wookie widget server). It has a particularly realistic biological quality which I've always missed in most cellular automata models. However, there are still a great many questions where I think Luhmann and Beer's thinking might provide some deeper insights.


Some of Axelrod's most significant work stems from his examination of the Prisoner's Dilemma. He famously challenged a number of computer scientists to come up with algorithms which could deal with the repeated prisoners' dilemma. He identified that ultimately, cooperative 'altruistic' strategies seemed to be more effective in the long term, and that an evolved approach might lead to these sorts of strategies. Whilst I find this fascinating, I'm tempted to remark that a strategy isn't 'forgiving' or 'altruistic'; people are. And what goes on in people is rather more than the calculation of next moves in the prisoners dilemma. Tooth ache or an annoying twitch is more likely to sway things one way or another.

The fundamental issue relates to the locus of rationality. If a strategy is rational then it's locus is in someone's head, and that head causes the strategy to be rational because the head processes the available data and produces a logical conclusion. However, rationality may not be quite like this. With a distributed cognition approach, rationality (or what we think rationality is) exists in communications. The extent to which communications can be successfully made, we can deem these to be rational. In this sense, it is not whether someone wins or loses the prisoner's dilemma, but whether the move that a person makes can be deemed 'within the game'. Attributing mental causes to that rationality is inevitably an act of conjecture.

If rationality is simply about making successful communications (communications which are understood), then the question is not about the causes of rational behaviour, but about the causes of communication. With regard to communication, and thinking about Luhmann, I think there is a secondary mechanism at work which relates to sensuality, and this works hand-in-hand with communication processes. When we consider the full complexity of this, rational strategies for the prisoners' dilemma (altruistic, greedy, etc) seem a bit shallow.

The cultural diffusion model has, I think, gone down a similar path to identifying mental causes for strategy. The boundaries in the model reflect degrees of cultural affinity. But cultural affinity depends on the extent to which people can have conversations, and that depends on their ability to make communications at a number of levels. Are cultural boundaries in the world or are they in people? I think this is where we need Positioning Theory!

I presented an agent-based model of communication the other week at the CAL11 conference in Manchester. The construction of agents in this model is one where each agent has three levels of personal regulation which relate to three types of communicative act that they can make: Exhortation, Disruption and Coercion. The communications that an individual makes are probabilistically related to their individual state at any point in time (whether their regulation is focused on Disruption, Coercion or Exhortation). This is a simple choice determined by the relative values of their communication.

To run the model, select the number of starting people (the first slider which says 'starting-...'), and click setup, then click go. You can change the transparency of communication by altering the comms-r slider. When people are red, they are unhappy! You can add individual people by clicking 'add person'. Clicking 'disrupt-every...' is interesting. You can click and drag people from one part of the screen to another (this is like building teams). And obviously you can slow it down.


Internal regulation is affected by the communications they receive from others, and there is a need (in order to remain happy and viable) to make communications which will result in communications which will continue the maintenance of wellbeing. Thus agents 'position' themselves with one another.

In my model at present, each regulating mechanism is basically a type of 'random walk' where, on perceiving new communications, the regulation of each individual at each level is adjusted by various 'deltas' (values which are added or taken away from the current value). Each adjustment to each regulating level has a consequent effect on other regulating levels, and furthermore on future communication.

In my presentation, I demonstrated how this setup could demonstrate some 'critical incidents' in the university e-learning strategy, like the use of champions to stimulate new practice, or the increase in transparency of communication to stimulated richer activity and greater cohesion amongst staff, or the effects of large-scale disruptions like changing the platform. But I think the reaction of individual agents is at the moment too 'quick' to adjust to new circumstances.

This is why I am asking whether my agents could instead have regulating systems which were based on waves rather than random walks. This might introduce new elements of unpredictability into their behaviour, and would also introduce some degree of latency in their responses, but I think all of these things are real: we have to wait for colleagues to 'come round' to new ways of thinking. In such cases, something is going on inside them... is it that they have to wait for cyclic (harmonic) functions to reach particular points before they feel able to change?

Another way of thinking this through is to think that each communication we make has a 'resonance' - past echoes in the environment have some bearing on what happens in the present. Echoes may decay according to harmonic rules... Sugata Mitra wrote a paper where a similar idea of playing with time with cellular automata produced some fascinating results... (see http://www.complex-systems.com/pdf/16-3-1.pdf)

today i am over at effortless style doing camila's in her shoes post.....i didn't take a picture of my shoes b/c to be honest, i'm a barefoot kind of girl....

A number of seemingly disparate topics have come up in my blog in recent weeks. I feel it's worth trying to fit things together, particularly in the light of my current project work and deeper thinking about education. The topic are:
1. Sensuality and communication

I feel that feelings are not sufficiently appreciated in our understanding of communication and learning. Dealing with this means...

2. A cybernetic understanding of emotion and the relationship to communication

thinking through the implications of (1) means that an alternative model of communication needs to be proposed. I have attempted this by associating Luhmann's theory with Beer's Viable System Model (see particularly http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2011/02/luhmann-beer-and-emotion-machine.html) and Harre's Positioning Theory

3.  Understanding what the relationship between sensuality and communication means for educational technology

There are a number of aspects to this. In my post on new media (http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2011/04/positioning-and-new-media.html), I suggest that new technology provides new forms of utterance and that these can serve a purpose in boot-strapping more conventional linguistic communications.

 4. Understanding the relationship between Risk and emotion and its economic consequences

I've posted a lot about Ulrich Beck, and I'm broadly sympathetic to the idea of the Risk Society. Risk is perceived as anxiety, and it can be managed in a variety of ways. Beck's analysis indicates that individuals chose to manage it by 'trading' risks and that this drives our economy (where we produce little else other than risk). However, there are other ways of managing risk which have to do with individual capability and well-being.

 5. Capability, knowledge and education

Capability requires knowledge, and education is a means to knowledge. Education is also heavily laden with Risk, and the trade between anxieties of modern life and the promises of increased learning with large sums of money has dominated the recent transformation of higher education in the UK

 6. Illichian anxieties, human dignity and experience

Illich's thought is grounded in Catholic thinking about human dignity and I'm generally sympathetic to this. However, Illich's polemic seems to fall of deaf ears; the world is embarked on a course which in his view would lead to catastrophe. He may be right, but I suspect we'll somehow keep it together. We will learn to live with our anxieties. I think Illich tends to apportion blame to 'the system', and this is misdirected. The issue is with individuals, and it lies primarily in individuals who are not happy, and in their inauthentic and unhappy existence continue the pathologies he identifies. Rather than cast blame on 'the system', I would prefer to come to a deeper understanding of human experience, and how anxiety and risk affects it. Deeper knowledge can be transformative (so back to (1))

7. Knowledge and new ways to organise education

Illichian arguments around deschooling carry a distrust of the teacher and a dislike of the power relations associated with them. I think the word 'teacher' is misapplied because we are unable to make the distinction between a Jesus or a Marx (i.e. great teachers) and a typical insecure and inauthentic employee of the school system. Deeper knowledge and new distinctions about the experience of teaching and what teaching does to society can be transformative. The issue relates to knowledge and its performance in communication with others. Knowledge traditionally has been categorised by subjects; but equally, knowledge performances might be describable through engaging with tools. It is here that I become particularly interested in Scenarios.

8. Tools, knowledge and civil society

I think knowledge and civil society are inseparable. Knowledge has to be maintained and this is the prime purpose of universities. When knowledge is degraded (usually through the perversion of institutions) so civil society is degraded. In the 21st century knowledge rests in individuals who perform it in conjunction with remarkably powerful technologies. These technologies entail risk, and the management of risk is a key element in the knowledge that an individual has and in knowledge that they need to pass on. Paraphrasing Beck, the challenge of the 21st century is not "how can I eat?" but "how can I cope with my anxiety?"

 9. Employment, Underemployment, Capability and the Economy

The management of capability to "deal with anxiety" relies partly on "useful unemployment". Unlike Illich's conception of this (where he imagined people building their own houses, for example), I think useful unemployment is not necessarily related to producing goods for the community (a la 'big society') but rather on maintaining inner balance and well-being. In essence this means that individuals must balance employment or underemployment with useful non-employment activity that ensures that they 'maintain readiness'. Drawing on my points (1) and (2), I think communication lies at the heart of this activity. The world of tomorrow and the threats it brings will demand high levels of flexibility, and consequently high levels of well-being to provide that flexibility, as we will have to organise ourselves rapidly to deal with events that occur. My feeling is that this is the closest to what Illich might mean by 'conviviality': living together without killing one another.

The majority of my time is currently taken up with a large-scale European project called iTEC (http://itec.eun.org). iTEC is interesting in a number of ways, but not least because it proposes to organise education in partner schools around 'scenarios' rather than curriculum topics, and to provide technologies which pertain to those scenarios which will support teachers and learners in realising scenarios.

A scenario-driven approach has become more feasible in recent years because it has become possible to reproduce similar toolkits in a variety of environments which can support the necessary activities which make up a scenario. In curriculum-driven schooling, what was easiest to-hand in the school environment, and what was easiest to reproduce amongst a variety of schools was the curriculum. Teachers specialised in training colleges, schools equipped themselves with textbooks, and inspection regimes could audit whether the curriculum was being 'delivered'. Increasingly, technology is becoming to-hand in schools and universities, and as this happens, instead of organising education around the 'to-handness' of the curriculum, we can think of organising education around the to-handness of tools.

The problem with the curriculum-based organisation of education is that much of the education that is foisted on learners ill-fits their individual needs. Scenario-based education puts the needs of individual learners at the forefront, proposing activities and contexts where differentiated activities within authentic contexts can take place amongst varied groups of learners. In effect, a scenario is a detailed consideration of a lot of 'what if?' questions dealing not just with individual learning activities, but also economic and social trends, opportunities afforded by technology, etc. By taking this approach, issues of assessment and accreditation become more personalised and flexible as learners and teachers immerse themselves in the various activities of the scenario. The tool-focus of the scenarios means that collecting evidence for assessment can be tightly integrated into the performance of the various activities that take place, rather than be an add-on to learning activity.

iTEC aims for flexibility in the provision of tools for the realisation of scenarios. Some tools will work better in different contexts, and different tools may be equally good for the same job. This presents the possibility that individual learners might bring their own tools to their learning. In this way, a scenario might be realisable through personal technology and personal learning environments. However, the scenario approach is not directly related to the Personal Learning Environment. Instead it belongs to thinking about the coordination of education and curriculum design. But because of its tool-focus and the ability of different tools to do the same job, scenarios in the form of 'tool-kits' and 'activities' can be standardised whilst their implementation can be personalised. This is a challenge that other approaches to curriculum design have been unable to achieve.  IMS Learning Design, for example, sought to standardise patterns of activities, but the implementation of a learning design insisted on the use of particular technologies and gave teachers and learners little flexibility in the coordination of activities.

But what of knowledge in all this? Scenario-based education is grounded in work on 'situated cognition'. Within any situation, people 'perform' their knowledge. The advantage of the scenario for teachers is that there is nothing in a scenario which ties the teacher down to particular types of 'knowledge performance'; at the same time, it leads teachers away from didactic knowledge performances, so however they do convey their knowledge, it is unlikely to be from the front of the class.

But there's another problem. Using scenarios to organise education may replace the 'curriculum' as the organising principle with 'tools' or 'technical settings'. However, the curriculum is merely a body of knowledge whose reproduction requires a particular capacity alone (even textbooks can be dispensed with). Tools, on the other hand, require capacity, but often they also require a license, or at least an agreement with a technology provider. This, I think, is a problem, and much as I'm drawn to the sense of a scenario-driven pedagogy, moving the education system in the direction of tools raises new questions about the risks of engaging with technology. But maybe that is the crucial knowledge for us all in the 21st century.