[FRIAM] Narrating Complexity

[Prof David West]

Glen, aformal is too strong if we admit 'patterns', 'regularities',  'heuristics', etc. as kinds of "formalisms;" which I agree with. However, my absolutism in speaking as if aformal really meant without formality, is a reaction to those who are equally fanatical about the idea that everything is formalizable (not a word) in "principle" and in time a pure, formal, system will account for everything.

But let me put that in context as my issue with the formal / aformal is mostly as it concerns software development, and particularly what it is we want the software to do.

The idea that we can best discover what a software system is supposed to do is to tell stories about the problem space, what it is that we want to 'improve' in the world. We also tell stories about how the computer/software system might resolve those problem space stories, and yet more stories about how the computer (executing software) might realize those solutions. Peter Naur is notable for advocating this kind of approach. But even mainstream "software engineering" texts and practitioners like Yourdon and Constantine insisted that less than formal (as opposed to aformal and informal) story telling was essential. The idea never gained traction because it was immediately beset for forces of formalism.

Nevertheless the idea keeps coming back, I have personal experience re objects and later agile, only to be suppressed by the forces of formalism.

Even tools (from data flow diagrams to user story cards) that were developed to support the telling of stories were subverted by, mostly, academics determined to get a Ph.D. with a thesis  formalizing, preferably with lots of math/logic software "requirements" or aspects of UML models. 

There is a wonderful book, Data and Reality, or Reality and Data -whose author I cannot cite because all my books are in a steel container on top of a mountain in Utah - who illustrates the problem wonderfully. I remember being able to tell stories about "data" "information" and "knowledge with hierarchical and network databases that became impossible once Codd formalized the relational model and the math behind it.

So I have gotten used to telling computer scientists and software engineers that stories are aformal within the context of their efforts.

davew


On Tue, Dec 19, 2017, at 6:18 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> I think "aformal" is too strong a word, assuming you mean "without 
> formality" or without any kind of regularizable structure whatsoever.  
> Things like archetypes, and typical story structures, as well as tropes 
> and banally formulaic things like romance novels or prime time TV all 
> argue that there ARE formal elements to stories.  We may not be able to 
> define a good story (or story teller), but we know it when we see/hear/
> read it.  That argues that it's not (completely) aformal.  I'd argue 
> that they're open/unbound in some sense, that stories have some (perhaps 
> formalizable) constraining structure within which they can wiggle quite 
> a bit.
> 
> On 12/19/2017 04:44 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> > My antipathy towards narrative theory, and the resolution of the partial contradiction above, is that I see narrative theorists as a group of academics that are trying to "formalize" something that is fundamentally aformal. 
> 
> -- 
> ☣ uǝlƃ
> 
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