Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 401.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 08:11:42 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: new books
(1)
Animal Bodies, Human Minds
Ape, Dolphin, and Parrot Language Skills
by
W.A. Hillix
San Diego State University, CA, USA
Duane Rumbaugh
San Diego State University, CA, USA
DEVELOPMENTS IN PRIMATOLOGY: PROGRESS AND PROSPECTS --
Several books chronicle attempts, most of them during the last 40 years, to
teach animals to communicate with people in a human-designed language.
These books have typically treated only one or two species, or even one or
a few research projects. We have provided a more encompassing view of this
field. We also want to reinforce what other authors, for example Jane
Goodall, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Penny Patterson, Birute Galdikas, and Roger
and Deborah Fouts, so passionately convey about our responsibility for our
closest animal kin.
This book surveys what was known, or believed about animal language
throughout history and prehistory, and summarizes current knowledge and the
controversy around it. The authors identify and attempt to settle most of
the problems in interpreting the animal behaviours that have been observed
in studies of animal language ability.
Hardbound ISBN: 0-306-47739-4 Date: December 2003 Pages: 224 pp.
EURO 121.50 / USD 135.00 / GBP 87.00
(2)
Effective Inquiry for Innovative Engineering Design
From Basic Principles to Applications
by
Ozgur Eris
Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, CA, USA
Designers think in a specific way that is both ubiquitous and unique, often
referred to as "design thinking" or "design cognition". Effective Inquiry
for Innovative Engineering Design presents empirical evidence for this
claim. It demonstrates a unique attribute of design thinking by identifying
and characterizing a class of questions called "Generative Design
Questions". These questions are frequently asked by designers in dialog.
Their use constitutes a fundamental cognitive mechanism in design thinking.
Their discovery stems from another finding of the work: a conceptual
duality between questions and decisions that is engraved deep within the
design process.
This duality challenges a view that treats designing as decision making.
Decisions form the tip of the iceberg; Questions keep it afloat:
* Can an effective decision making process be performed without having
high quality information?
* Can high quality information be acquired and generated without
performing an effective inquiry process?
The answer to both questions is no, and underscores the importance of our
quest to better understand the role of inquiry in design.
Pragmatically, Effective Inquiry for Innovative Engineering Design presents
a new design thinking model. It illustrates the effective transformation of
design requirements into design concepts and those concepts into design
decisions and specifications as a question-driven process. The ability to
leverage this cycle in operating at the necessary level of conceptual
abstraction throughout the design process is a defining quality of high
performance innovative design teams.
CONTENTS
* Preface.
* 1: Introduction. 1.1. Why Study Question Asking? 1.2. Why Study
Design Cognition? 1.3. Research Questions and Approach.
* 2: Question Asking: A Fundamental Dimension in Design Thinking. 2.1.
Contemporary Topics in Design Research. 2.2. The Question-Decision Duality.
2.3. Learning from Existing Taxonomies of Questions.
* 3: Development of a Taxonomy that is Comprehensive of the Questions
Asked while Designing. 3.1. Context for the Observations on the Nature of
Questions Asked While Designing. 3.2. Definition of a Question. 3.3. An
Argument for the Search for the "Possible" and Its Characterization as
Question Categories. 3.4. Comparison of the Taxonomic Approaches.
* 4: Hypothesis Generation in the Field: Shadowing the Design Team.
4.1. Grounded Principle for Hypotheses Generation. 4.2. Context of the
Preliminary Observations. 4.3. Two Techniques for Capturing Design Activity
in the Field and Generating Hypothesis. 4.4. Findings of the Field Research.
* 5: Designing the Intervention: Differentiating Designing from Problem
Solving. 5.1. Deriving Requirements for the Design Experiment. 5.2.
Addressing the Requirements. 5.3. Meeting the Requirements: The Pilot
Experiment.
* 6: Learning from the Pilot Experiments: "Good" Questions and
Discoveries. 6.1. Improving the Experimental Methodology. 6.2. Augmenting
the Hypotheses: Discovery Making as another Internal Performance Metric.
6.3. Refining the Hypotheses: Characterization of a "Good" Question. 6.4.
The Augmented Hypotheses.
* 7: Conducting the Redesigned Experiment: Putting the Question Asking
Aspect of Design Cognition under the Microscope. 7.1. Data Collection and
Analysis Procedures. 7.2. Data Analysis and Results. 7.3. Revisiting the
Hypotheses.
* 8: Synthesizing a Question-centric Design Thinking Model. 8.1.
Question Asking as a Process. 8.2. Question Asking as Creative Negotiation.
8.3. Question Asking as a Mechanism for Managing Convergent and Divergent
Thinking Modes. 8.4. Implications of the Verified Hypotheses. 8.5. A
Question-Centric Design Thinking Model. 8.6. Potential Applications of the
Design Thinking Model.
* Appendix. References. Index.
Hardbound ISBN: 1-4020-7717-3 Date: December 2003 Pages: 168 pp.
EURO 105.00 / USD 115.00 / GBP 72.00
(3)
The Paradoxes of Action
(Human Action, Law and Philosophy)
by
Daniel González Lagier
University of Alicante, Spain
LAW AND PHILOSOPHY LIBRARY -- 67
What is an action, and what is an omission? Are actions natural phenomena,
or rather a product of our vision of the world? What is the difference
between an action and a mere bodily movement? Can actions be counted? What
is the role of intention for the identification of actions? Can we make
mistakes in identifying our own actions? Under what conditions is it
possible to impute a non-intentional action to someone?
This book suggests answers, or at least presents conceptual tools for
finding answers, to these and other, related questions. The author displays
a sovereign command and profound understanding of the complex theoretical
issues involved and offers an original approach to the analysis of action.
The book is written in a very accessible style and is of interest to
lawyers, legal scientists and philosophers. It will be of specific interest
to specialists of action theory and non-specialists who wish to learn more
about some of the principal philosophical and legal conceptions of action
and the analysis of their structures.
Hardbound ISBN: 1-4020-1661-1 Date: December 2003 Pages: 146 pp.
EURO 69.00 / USD 76.00 / GBP 48.00
Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Nov 18 2003 - 03:30:34 EST