[FRIAM] Abducktion

Sun Aug 9 01:29:55 EDT 2020

Thanks, jon, for digging up this old thread.  We are really, really good!  We should write a book some day.  I encourage you all to go back to the beginning of this thread, which began the first year I was reading Peirce, I think.  I particularly was moved by re-reading Owen’s contribution about Duck-typing.  I don’t think I quite saw its significance at the time.  Hey, Owen:  How come we don’t hear more from you???

Thanks again, you-all, for what you do. 

nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Friday, August 7, 2020 8:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abducktion

On Thu, Aug 6, 2020 at 8:54 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > wrote:

Forgive me, but can you spell that out a bit?  How does working in a
particular programming Language shape an approach to the problem.  

As an example of FRIAM thread spelunking, here's a 2005 entry from the late great Mike Agar on programming languages and the Whorfian Hypothesis - a principle claiming that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language. (Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity> ):

Ray's topic suggestions are good ones. Steve and I talked some about

another angle, applying the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from ling anthro (that

language and habitual patterns of thought co-evolve) to "speakers" of

different computer languages and seeing how that plays out in project

teams.

I don't know this territory as well as I should, given my new life as a

planet in the FRIAM orbit, but from colleagues' stories way back when

I'm pretty sure the human/machine interface emphasis came out of the

pioneering use of ethnographers at Xerox PARC together with the infuence

of Latour's theories that technology must also be viewed as an actor in

a situation. John Seely Brown, the PARC-man who made this happen, tells

some of the stories in his book the Social Life of Information,

co-authored with Paul Duguid.

Mike

http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ethnography-and-information-systems-td519925.html  

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