J.Newman (jne@gcal.ac.uk)
Sun, 3 Oct 1999 10:20:50 +0100 (BST)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 10:20:50 +0100 (BST) From: "J.Newman" <jne@gcal.ac.uk> Subject: Nature and Artefact
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Martin Owen <t.m.owen@bangor.ac.uk> wrote (to IFETS-discuss):-
[snip]
> Fred comments:"By the way my definition of 'technology' is 'order imposed
> on nature', by
> which I mean that the way we think about nature precedes the way we
> see technology, and that issue is rarely addressed.
> "Nature" is one of the social constructs which I realise causes many people
> poblems... (It did for me). Why does a society's vision of what "nature"
> is, take precedence over the tools and artefacts we use?
>
> Yes I know I get blown over in hurricanes and that the ebola virus would
> probabaly kill me But we put isues into semantic classification which
> become reified. we arive at almost heroic discriptions of "technology"
> triumphing" over "nature".
>
> Can't human engagement with artefacts to secure production of life needs
> and social interaction be described in terms of human action without
> recourse to the concept "nature" and certainly its "ordering" ( in most
> technological systems inevitably we increase entropy<< this is meant as a
> bit of a joke... irony is hard in email>>).
Natura Parendo Docitur: Nature is tamed by obeying her (Bacon).
There seems to be a long history of conflicting attitudes to the
relationship between Technology and Nature. We seem to have inherited
a view that tends to equate Technology with Science, and to see them
both as opposed to Nature. I suppose that Blake was an early and
effective exponent of this:
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among those dark, Satanic mills?
(apparently, though, in that context the "mills" are a metaphorical
named for the established church!)
and again:
The atoms of Democritus
And Newton's particles of light
Are sands upon the Dead Sea shore
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright."
We know that the sensibility of the 18th century tended to see
Nature as "horrid". By the mid-19th, we find people looking back
on a world of unity with Nature as a nostalgic golden age, and we think
of this as the legacy of the romantic movement. So it
was a big surprise to me, a few years ago, when visiting a superb
exhibition on "The Romantic Spirit in German Art", to discover how
deeply and actively involved the romantics were in the development
of science. Goethe, the extreme case of this, was not only a
playwright and poet, but also a mining engineer, as I learned recently
on a visit to Ilmenau in eastern Germany. Also, there was an excellent
radio program recently on (I think) BBC Radio 4, which discussed
Shelley's
famous "Ode to the West Wind" with respect to known meteorological
phenomena. Matthew Arnold, in the mid-19th century, described
Shelley as "an ineffectual angel beating his wings in a void"; and
Leavis in the 20th castigated Shelley, and this ode in particular,
as having a weak grasp on reality. Well it turns out that almost
every metaphor in his description of the wind fits in with known
regularly observed phenomena in the part of northern Italy where
he was living when he composed it!
So it seems to me that the opposition between Science/Technology
and Nature is a modern set of categories that we tend to
impose, perhaps arising from educational practices, i.e.
specialisation in the curriculum which forces pupils to define
themselves as "Arts" people or "Science" people at the age of 12
or 13; so that when they become students, they have already
had several years of living that opposition. (I do not know
how widespread that specialism is. It is very strong in
England, Wales and Northern Ireland but less so in Scotland.
However the attitudes it has shaped have no doubt percolated
into Scotland from our much larger neighbour.) Clearly one
of the needs that Flexible Learning has to address, is how
to overcome such a split (CP Snow's famous "Two Cultures")
- although we do have voices such as the former editor of
The Times who thinks that there is really no need to
understand Science, you just have to know how to use it ...
Yet the Nature-Science split cannot just be a product of the
modern curriculum, for the tension between a "rational"
and an "emotional" understanding of the same phenomena
already comes out in some of the greatest romantic works.
Consider Goethe's "Erlkoenig". Why does the child die?
Either: he see the spirit-world, which is
trying to draw him away, and the father's reassurances are
a mere defence-mechanism, "rationalisations" of something
which is truly deeper and more mysterious.
Or: the world is objectively as the father sees it, and
the son falls victim to his own terror.
So far, I have gone along with the view that makes Science and
Technology alike (because rational) and opposes them to Nature,
Feeling and the Arts. But I would want to challenge that, and
in some ways to extol the approach initiated by H A Simon in
"The Sciences of the Artificial", where he calls our attention
to the fact that academic Engineering departments have tended
to do research in Applied Science, rather than in the design
and development of engineering products and systems. He wants,
so it seems, to found a third group of disciplines, separate
from both the Arts and the Sciences (meaning here the Natural
Sciences), and these "Sciences of the Artificial" will be
disciplines of design. Applied Science is of course a
valuable tool for the design disciplines, but doing Applied
Science is not the same thing as designing. Simon emphasises
that the design of any artefact must take account of the
"Outer Environment" in which it will be used and operate,
and which imposes requirements on it, as well as of the
"Inner Environment" or techology with which it will
be constructed.
Other people who have written about these issues include
Donald Schon and John Long.
Long makes a useful distinction amongst:
1 Science (Pure and Applied) - gets basic knowledge
2 Engineering - uses the basic knowledge to develop functions
(lifting, calculating, etc)
3 Systems Development - takes the results of the first two, and
uses them to analyse requirements, and to propose solutions
that are optimised with respect to those requirements
[a quibble here - Simon has shown how in most cases we cannot
optimise but only satisfice]
Perhaps a big challenge for Flexible Learning is to teach
people who have a grasp of only one (or none) of these, how
to move easily between them. This would require that appropriate
tasks were undertaken and that appropriate forms of reflection
were then brought to bear on them. But our knowledge in this
field does not seem to be sufficiently well articulated to
support what pedagogy requires.
I say this with some feeling, because one of the things I have
to teach is Research Methods, on a course that is mainly taken
by students who are embarking on an M Sc in Computing or
Informatics or Information Management. For an M Sc they take
8 months taught courses followed by a 4 month project on which
they write a Dissertation. [British "Dissertation" equates
to American "Thesis" and vice versa, so I believe!] I suppose
Computing and related disciplines are a paradigm case of Simon's
Sciences of the Artificial. Yet every book I have seen on
"How to Research", "How to write your Dissertation" and so
forth completely ignores the existence of this third
category of disciplines. And the expected structure of the
Dissertation is very much the product of the Hypothetico-
Deductive philosophy of science, which is great for Science and
even for Social Science, but which just does not fit to the
situation where the practical part of the study involves
developing an artefact. So students get into a hopeless
confusion between the evaluation of a design and the testing
of a hypothesis, produce some very half-baked research proposals
and struggle terribly when they come to write up their results.
I infer that it is not just that they are inexperienced
researchers, but that the tasks we give them and the
structures available for reflection on those tasks, do not
make for a coherent educational experience.
Now, we might say that the solution is simply to write a new
textbook or amend the existing ones. But the trouble, I think,
is that we would not *really* *know* what to put in the new texts!
We don't have a properly articulated philosophy of design research.
There are theories of design, but they mainly seem to me to
be theories about the designer, not theories about the artefact
and its relation to its environment; and whereas we could clearly
enough criticise an experiment on methodological grounds, and/or
find that a scientific theory is wanting because it is not
specific enough to enable investigators to derive testable hypotheses,
it is not at all clear on what grounds we would evaluate either
the appropriateness of a particular design activity as a
research instrument, or the appropriatness of a purported
theory of the artefact as in some way testable or potentially
objective knowledge. I am sure that the way towards answering
these questions must be somewhere in the directions that Simon
has pointed - but somehow I feel that his own work is still too
much concerned with the logic of design, as opposed to the
logic of design research. And without grasping the logic of
design research, we shall never be able to identify what it
is that can make a piece of work a valid contribution to
design knowledge. At present, for lack of any suitable
textbook, I get my students to read Simon's "The Sciences
of the Artificial" in order to get them thinking about these
things -- but I have to say, they find it pretty tough!
Anyone have similar thoughts and experiences?
Julian Newman
Glasgow Caledonian University
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