Hi Folks,
i've been trying to make sense of the Thibault reading through writing. It
turned out to be kind of long.
Reading Thibault and Jay's work, I have a different take than Ana. First, both
authors use "level" and "scale" somewhat interchangeably. Both Jay and
Thibault, for example, use the phrase "higher-scale levels" or "higher scalar
level". Second, I'd like it to be noted that I appreciate their work -- but
there are problems that arise with "scale" and "level", I think, and with them
the need to be more precise with meanings and language. What I wish to sort
out is being clear about distinctions in the meanings and uses of levels,
scales, space, time, locality, and the pace at which processes occur. Doing so
is not for the object of separating and reducing these terms as a final result,
but instead, to understand better the relations between these theoretical
categories. The process of separating-in-order-to-recombine is to combine with
greater relational explicitness and clarity, and this is the form of the
'epistemological game' I wish to play. I think the point behind describing
behavior along many levels and scales is not of necessity -- not unless we
specify that the epistemological game we are playing is one of descriptive
richness, or descriptive complexity. Otherwise, a little like Vygotsky and
others, we can and do describe many kinds of human behavior with simple
mediation, schemas, scripts, etc. But upon doing so, we find that there are
happenings left unexplained. To explain the unexplained, to expand the
boundary of rationality, (which I take as the general game of theory creation)
we then attempt more elaborate theories and theories of greater generality -- a
good example is Yrjo's expanded model -- and what Jay and Paul Thibault
propose, I think, is (1) that Edelman's theory of upward causation is
incomplete, partially because (2) memory serves to break down the adiabatic and
intransitive principles, and (3) that the elaboration beyond the theory of "how
a brain makes a mind" can be structured by the notions of level and scale, (4)
that the inclusion of downward causation requires analysis beyond the
individual organism, and (5) that structures on one scale are not the same as
another, i.e. there is no self-similarity in scales of human behavior when
memory is involved. This all seems reasonable, except that the analysis is
implied to stop at dyadic interactions. This is not reasonable when triadic,
quartic, and so on, are within the realm of possibility, and offer interactions
that cannot be reduced to the dyadic. A conversation on xmca serves to make
the counter-example.
Here is how I think of scale. For example, as conventionally defined, the
temporal dimension, time, allows us to examine social and technical happenings
and sort them according to their characteristic behaviors along this dimension.
The dimension of time, as carried over from physical science, is continuous --
it can be measured at any non-integer value (depending upon the scale used).
Scale offers additional dimensions, being "a series or scheme of rank or order"
and can also be continuous, although it is often not. In complex systems it is
often continuous, and fractional scales often appear -- see for example the
slopes of the graphs that appear in my paper of the xmca discussion archives
(summer 99, I think). But we tend to quantize for convenience: scales of time
for day to day activity includes values of seconds, minutes, hours, days and so
on, and for social behavior we use the scale values of microgenetic,
ontogenetic, mesogenetic, and phylogenetic. Small time scale behavior occurs
microgenetically, and at the other extreme, large time scale behavior occurs
phylogenetically. There are also spatial scales, from the sub-atomic, atomic,
macroscopic, solar system, etc., or alternatively of the nanometer,
micrometer... meter... kilometer, etc. The categories, or values of scale,
often overlap -- their boundaries are not highly specified -- and as Jay
describes, there are links (violations of the adiabatic principle) across the
boundaries of these categories, between the processes that are contained within
these categories. And yet the four categories social scale can not be
considered complete. For example, biological and physical processes, from
neuronal activity to evolutionary movement, and from optical-atomic-molecular
to planet evolution are also implicated in social happenings, having been
necessary for the social behavior to occur some way or other (like there being
a livable Earth for people to interact on), but they are mostly left from
consideration.
Enter levels, and for Thibault, hierarchy. Like Ana, I think Thibault seems to
imply that scalar hierarchical levels below any other considered in the
hierarchy constitute it, and levels above constrain it. There are ultimate
problems with this too, as although molecules, for example, can be considered
to constitute the wall and a human body, the intermolecular forces are, on an
atomic spatial scale, what keep a human body from moving through a wall, and
hence constrain motion at a macroscopic spatial scale. Now, for the problem of
how a wall can constrain and shape a human's movement, which is a problem
addressed by Leont'ev and Barker, we really don't care about the intermolecular
forces. The point that I wish to make is thatit is useful to carefully
consider whether the interactions among levels are asymmetric, and these
considerations are best served by specific examples. With the use of 'levels'
instead of 'scale' comes the implication of asymmetric and hierarchical control
and this is one thing I am interested in examining in further detail. It makes
sense to me, to start with the notion of scale, unassuming of asymmetry, and
then, if necessary, build in the asymmetry more explicitly.
In consideration of the points made in Jay's paper, space as physicists think
of it, comprises three dimensions, and time a fourth, for mapping human
interactions. I'd like to suggest that the notions of interaction levels
(scales) constitutes, if you wish to take meaning as the fifth dimension, then
interactions scales constitute the sixth and perhaps several other higher
dimensions. As an example again, xmca makes possible interactions across a
global network of people. One way, but just one way, to characterize xmca
interactions is with a sociometric analysis -- people can be more distant from
each other, characterized by how frequently they interact with each other --
there are dimensions of social interaction frequency. Three dimensional space
has, until the advent of telecommunications, been a constraint, defining a
locality of interactions. Communications networks extend the notion of
locality to near general relativistic scales -- essentially by how fast
communications from one person can reach another with little or no perturbation
to their interactions -- almost the speed of light. For example, I can pick up
the phone and call someone in Boston and have a conversation almost as if we
were in the same room, but less so for someone who lives down under, for whom
the lag due to satellite communications might become bothersome. By the way,
this strategy of extending to a generalized n-dimensional space is essentially
the same as taken by quantum theorists, who brought in hilbert space (an
infinity of dimensions) as an epistemological form with which to do their work.
I think point # 5 from the first paragraph might be considered counter to the
self-similarity across time-scales that I have found from a mathematical
analysis of xmca postings. But perhaps not. Eva's link maps provide a way of
representing interactions across time, and what they indicate is that
interactions among authors postings rarely link across long-time scales, but
rather have much shorter links, on the order of days. The lengths of the links
have not been quantified, however, and so a distribution is not yet available.
Perhaps a great deal of the interactions on xmca are on a small time scale, and
so for this system, the adiabatic principle holds. It gives me pause, because,
if so, it would be useful to consider the bounds of heterochronic generality.
It's not to make the point that Jay is wrong, because I think he is not wrong
for a great many things. In fact the xmca analysis takes for granted the
heterochrony that has been necessary to form together a global network of
people who share various understandings of activity theory, and it is somewhere
between the theoretical and empirical work that there is a large gap in our
understanding.
bb
=====
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Aug 01 2001 - 01:00:54 PDT