Bruce,
I read through your paper and this level thing surfaced for me. You of
course mentioned Rose's neat frog example. You describe in modeling how
explanation on the bit level has no meaning for someone who is engaged in
the activity on a knowledge level.
I guess since you used dialectics to look at modeling, I am curious not so
much of meaning but appropriateness. Rose touches on this a bit with
determism in that an explanation on a lower level (bit level in your
modeling paper) is inappropriate in explaining something on a higher level
(not linear).
Two examples from recent threads that come to mind are (g) and intelligent
paper. With the (g) there is definately something on a processing level -
processing time - that is being used to explain things that are very clearly
on a societal level; school, race, class etc. The "intelligent paper" would
be the opposite using a concept "intelligence" that is on the social level
to explain something on a lower level. We recently had a problem with the
MCA page in which an old page that no longer existed kept coming up. It
definately appeared as if there was some intelligence on the document level
(gremlins). While this is fun for community building there does seem to be a
danger with it on a explanatory level. For documents to "appear" intelligent
it often means we make the creater or programmer (human) invisable to a
certain extent. Bruce, the webmaster one, mentioned the easier the web gets
for users the more headaches it creates for programmers - script upon
script.
I guess my question would be not so much along the lines of how the moon is
described differently by the poet and astronomer, but when and where
particular descriptions are appropriate/inappropriate. I hope this is not
too much off the gist of your paper, I entered via dialectics. Also, for me,
you explained the dialectical concepts clearly.
Nate
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Mar 07 2000 - 17:54:00 PST