20.392 making, saying, understanding

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 392.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

   [1] From: "Amsler, Robert" <Robert.Amsler_at_hq.doe.gov> (18)
         Subject: RE: 20.391 Feynman's version of Kelvin's declaration

   [2] From: "hinton_at_springnet1.com" <hinton_at_springnet1.com> (7)
         Subject: Re: 20.391 Feynman's version of Kelvin's declaration

   [3] From: "Elaine Lally" <E.Lally_at_uws.edu.au> (73)
         Subject: RE: 20.391 Feynman's version of Kelvin's declaration

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 06:20:47 +0000
         From: "Amsler, Robert" <Robert.Amsler_at_hq.doe.gov>
         Subject: RE: 20.391 Feynman's version of Kelvin's declaration

Since I create software every day, I think the comparable statement for
a software developer would be, "That which I cannot write code to
perform, I do not understand". This has been a guiding principle for me
in the fields of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.
Theory is fine, but if you can't construct a program that performs as
the theory claims things work, then the theory is insufficient as an
understanding of the phenomenon.

Writing also has an aspect of this. Research results seem to be
incomplete until they are written up, and in the writing comes new
insights into the work that you didn't have when you were performing it.
Language structures thought through rhetorical conventions which
stimulate additional thought. Research activity proceeds in a fairly
linear fashion, whereas language poses problems of explanatory necessity
to complete its statements. You can often DO something immediately
following a prior action, but you often cannot SAY something following a
previous statement without setting the background for its understanding.
I suppose the missing component is that when writing you understand that
you cannot assume the reader had your same state of mind, whereas as the
actor DOING things, you knew your state of mind.

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 06:21:20 +0000
         From: "hinton_at_springnet1.com" <hinton_at_springnet1.com>
         Subject: Re: 20.391 Feynman's version of Kelvin's declaration

>
> >In a nutshell, the point is that making is different from saying, and yet
> >we learn from made things and from the act of making.

Oh, Willard ! I know you know that the words poet and poetry come
from Greeks words for "maker", "making", and that at least as late as
Dunbar, poets were referred to in Scottish as 'makirs'.....(compare
OE 'scop'). Which brings us to Auden:

"How can I know what I think till I see what I say ?"

--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 06:21:44 +0000
         From: "Elaine Lally" <E.Lally_at_uws.edu.au>
         Subject: RE: 20.391 Feynman's version of Kelvin's declaration

Dear Willard,

Feynman's phrase resonates for me with D.W. Winnicott's description
of the unfolding of the intellect from the infant's relationship with
transitional objects, the 'first not-me possessions' (such as teddy
bears or special blankets). Transitional objects inhabit a liminal
space at the interface between the self and the outside world, which
he calls 'potential space'. This is essentially 'a place for living
that is not properly described by either of the terms "inner" and
"outer"' (_Playing and Reality_, 1971, p.106). Winnicott says we
should never confront the infant with the question 'did you create
that or did you find it?' Epistemologically, potential space is our
interface with the world, and in moments when we are particularly
intensely cognitively engaged, such as when we write or make
something or learn something new, in a profound sense that new
reality is both created and found at the same time.

best,

Elaine

________________________________

From: Humanist Discussion Group on behalf of Humanist Discussion
Group (by way of Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>)
Sent: Thu 11/01/2007 20:04
To: humanist_at_Princeton.EDU

                 Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 391.
         Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
    www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
                          www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                       Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

           Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2007 08:37:40 +0000
           From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
           Subject: Feynman's version of Kelvin's declaration

Whatever the exact words Kelvin used to proclaim the importance of
model-building, much the same was written out by another physicist,
Richard Feynman, on his chalkboard: "What I cannot create I do not
understand." According to Davis Baird, in Thing Knowledge: A
Philosophy of Scientific Instruments (Univ of California Press,
2004), citing Gleick's The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
(1993), this declaration was discovered after his death. Baird remarks,

>In a nutshell, the point is that making is different from saying, and yet
>we learn from made things and from the act of making. Cognitive content
>is not exhausted by theory, and for the same reason, epistemic content
>should not be exhausted by theory either....
>Feynman subjectively knew something through
>his efforts to create it, after which it carried the objective
content of this
>knowledge in a way that might be subjectively recovered by someone else...
(p. 16)

I suppose that the job for us is as different as a model made of
software is different from a model made of less
word-like material. I suppose that there is a genuine puzzle here,
not simply a curiosity. This puzzle seems to me to lie at the root of
some quite practical and even political problems we have, for example
establishing the software creations of humanities computing as
communicable humanities research rather than as the serviceable cogs
that allow the PI of a project to carry out research.

It is well known that for many of us research happens in the actual
writing of what we write, that, to paraphrase Feynman, "What I cannot
write I do not understand." Perhaps some part of the puzzle to which
I refer is due as much to our misunderstanding of the verbal medium
as to our failure to grasp the epistemic nature of made things. Do we
have any idea how words and what we call "meaning" are related?
Northrop Frye wrote at the beginning of Anatomy of Criticism that
poems are dumb as statues, and that criticism is required to give
them discursive voice. And it seems that after criticism more words
are needed, the need being in proportion to the greatness of the
criticism -- to its fruitfulness, as Frye said. Perhaps a big part of
the puzzle is that we focus on the golden egg rather than the goose
who lays it, and another, and another. Perhaps Feynman's sentence is
clearer if written, "What I am not creating, I do not understand."

Comments?

Yours,
WM

Dr Willard McCarty | Reader in Humanities Computing | Centre for
Computing in the Humanities | King's College London |
http://staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~wmccarty/.
Received on Fri Jan 12 2007 - 01:59:33 EST