Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 488.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 08:16:50 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: science, formal methods &c
Following is an exchange of letters between Richard Giordano and myself on
the topic introduced by my announcement of the Colloquium "Humanities
computing: formal methods, experimental practice" here at King's College
London 13 May. Comments are of course most welcome. --WM
>Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 13:35:21 -0500 (EST)
>From: Richard Giordano <richardg@HOOVER.MIT.EDU>
>To: willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
>>
>
>Willard,
>
>This is a post to you personally. I don't mind if you post it on Humanist,
>but I don't think the wider group would be interested in reading this.
>It's your call. By the way, I'm the person who posted the questions, "Is
>there a difference between a formal method and a structured method? Are
>the use of structured methods more appropriate in this regard? Why is
>scientific investigation privileged? Are methods of design and
>investigation in technology as appropriate as science?" I was finishing a
>paper (which I gave over the weekend at Stanford on, uh, knowledge in
>technology communities) and wrote those questions to you very quickly when
>the Humanist email arrived.
>
>As you probably know, I got my PhD in American history, but have worked in
>the science and technology communities since about 1988, having taught CS
>at the University of Manchester. At MIT, I am working on a few projects
>concerned with the nature of knowledge in technology communities,
>especially, roughly speaking, knowledge generation, knowledge transfer,
>the emergence of communities of practice, and what not. All this is to
>say that I have had a long and complex exposure to different work and
>thought styles over the years. Hence the question on science. Why
>reference science as a system of knowing? Why not think more broadly about
>the sociology of knowledge in general and see how hat plays out? Collins's
>work is at root, at least to me, concerned with the sociology of coming to
>know. And there are many ways to know, even in science. Harry Collins,
>whose work I both know and admire, would agree with this. I'm just a bit
>confused why you're concerned with how scientists come to know. What
>makes them special?
>
>About 'formal' v 'structured' methods. When engineers work on a problem,
>they go about within a framework that guides their actions. This helps
>them to know which steps to take when, and helps them to manage
>complexity. This is called a structured method. It's something of a
>design method. I am familiar with formal methods from computer science.
>A formal method is a verifiable method. Typically, the method refers to
>mathematics for verification. This helps you to know when your work is
>correct, altough not neccesarily complete. By using the term 'formal
>method' in the context of science, I'm wonderin if your using it in this
>context, if you mean a structured way of working, or if you want to avoid
>using the phrase scientific method. If you mean a verifiable method, then
>the question is do we mean that research results can be replicated? Is it
>a structured methodlogy? If it's the latter, what discipline does not use
>a structured methodology? Because I get so easily confused, thought that
>going back to first principles and looking at the sociology of knowledge
>in general would help.
>
>/rich
>Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2000 08:11:21
>From: willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
>To: Richard Giordano <richardg@HOOVER.MIT.EDU>
>
>Richard,
>
>At the end of his book Changing Order, Collins says that he hopes that
>with the other work he has done and that of his colleagues it "will be
>seen to have had three consequences: to have changed the way we study and
>understand the history, sociology, and philosophy of science; to have
>changed the relationship of science with other cultural endeavours; and to
>have become a foundation for the science of knowledge" (p. 191).
>
>So, yes, his objective (and I think ours) is aimed at understanding how we
>come to know, what we mean by "knowledge", well beyond the confines of the
>sciences. My look toward the sciences is part of a project to understand
>and articulate the practice of humanities computing. It seems to me a
>rather obvious thing to do, to look toward the practices of others who
>also use equipment as part of their epistemological activities, who also
>make this equipment the centre of their collaborations, who share the
>activity of modelling with us and who, for various reasons, have attracted
>the attentions of historians, philosophers and sociologists, through whom
>we can begin to understand the commonalities. Why turn down or aside from
>some rather obvious parallels? Paying attention to the sciences is not
>necessarily to privilege them, esp when one pays attention to them via the
>likes of Galison, Hacking and Collins, with a good dollop of Searle on the
>side.
>
>The analogy of the experimental sciences, it seems to me, raises some
>rather interesting questions, the answers to which are not obvious, or at
>least not to me. Once one gives up on the "spectator view of knowledge",
>as Hacking calls it, then how does one formulate the difference between
>the sciences and the humanities? Lots of quicksand here, but I see no
>other path ahead that is quite so compelling. And the topic is so clearly
>in the air, which means we have many interesting, smart people to talk to
>about what we're doing. Not only is there the flood of books and articles
>in those disciplines but also discussions in the wider community. The
>latest issue of the London Review of Books, for example, has a long piece
>by Richard Rorty, "The End of the Epistemic Wars", on this topic, more
>precisely, on the convergence of the sciences and humanities because of
>the current work in philosophy, history, sociology of science. I don't
>want to oversimplify the complexities of the arguments involved, nor to
>pretend that I can follow them all, but I am utterly convinced that our
>minds need to be in the midst of the debate.
>
>Our colleagues make reference all the time to what we do as "scientific",
>and we continually puzzle over our relationship with computer science.
>Would it not be better if we understood what "scientific" means, when it
>means anything at all beyond the purely, dangerously honourific term that
>Searle would rather avoid? Would it not be better if we actually
>benefitted from the experience and wisdom of others in and around the
>sciences? At the end of my project it may become obvious that the analogy
>with experimental science is not so good after all, but knowing what we're
>not about is a positive step. It is most certainly the case that as you
>say the sciences represent only one part of the epistemological scene. All
>I'm saying is here's a good place to begin.
>
>About "formal methods". In the context of the Colloquium this term refers
>to an argument that one of our speakers, Tito Orlandi, will be making. I
>don't want to try to say what he will say on 13 May. If your Italian is in
>good working order, you can start with his 1997 publication, INFORMATICA,
>FORMALIZZAZIONE E DISCIPLINE UMANISTICHE, which is online at
><http://rmcisadu.let.uniroma1.it/~orlandi/formaliz.html>. In a forthcoming
>paper I go at this question by assuming the most ambitious claim one could
>make, i.e. the claim of strong AI; the papers in the Stanford Humanities
>Review 4.2, previously announced on Humanist, are helpful. Replication, as
>you know from Collins and Hacking, is a very complex idea; they also deal
>with the multiplicity of scientific methods. So, to answer your question,
>I didn't mean much in particular by "formal methods", though I think that
>the formalisation forced upon us by use of computing is a very fruitful
>topic indeed.
>
>Yours,
>W
>
>PS I am publishing your note and my reply on Humanist; BOTH authors have
>given their permissions :-).
-----
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Dr. Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer, King's College London
voice: +44 (0)171 848 2784 fax: +44 (0)171 848 5081
<Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk> <http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/>
maui gratia
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