---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 15:10:59 -0400 (EDT)
To: dhcs-l@lists.village.virginia.edu
From: Geoffrey Rockwell <grockwel@mcmaster.ca>
Subject: Modelling
Dear all,
While in Toronto I heard Willard McCarty give a keynote talk on
"Knowing things by what their mockeries be: Modelling in the
humanities" which I recommend to you as an alternative to "knowledge
representation" as a way of describing what we do. The paper is at:
http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/essays/knowing/
In it Willard, for the first time to my knowledge, sets out his ideas
about modelling as paradigm for research in humanities computing.
Modeling, if I understood his talk, has the following advantages over
KR:
1. Modelling, as he develops it, comes from the philosophy of science
not from logic and therefore more closely approximates what
scientists really do rather than coming from a positivist tradition
which can confuse what they do with what they ought to do.
2. Modelling is far more humble about the outcomes of its practice.
Willard, unlike Sowa, is clear about the importance of failure. For
Willard, where a model fails to fit is as important as where it
succeeds. Positivists are tempted to say that where logical
description fails there is problem not with the system but with the
phenomenon and accuse those who are interested in the leaky failures
of mysticism.
It would be interesting as a way of returning to knowledge
representation to compare modelling and KR as practices and theories
of practice for the digital humanities.
Geoffrey R.
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