What does it add to this discussion about Watt's governor to observe that
the historical development of science is itself supplanting all such
'ingenious' contrivances which imitate manual labour with unique
manipulations of the forces of nature, with quite uninteresting PLCs
(Programmable Logical Controllers) which any programmer can make to do
anything, and which operate on quite explicitly symbolic systems?
Andy
At 15:29 23/06/2000 +0100, you wrote:
>23 june 2000
>from peter jones
>dear colleagues
>apologies for the rapid fire postings. i thought a good way to pursue the
>issues raised about dialectics and about the relation between dialectics and
>the interactionist, system dynamical approach outlined and advocated by jay
>could be to go back to the argument over watt's governor in the embodied mind
>paper. jay's discussion (posting 14 june) laid out an 'interactionist'
take on
>the governor and very nicely identified points of contact as well as crucial
>differences in principle with the ilyenkov-inspired treatment in the
paper. jay
>argued that a key difference involves the question of 'representation' and
>argued that his system dynamical approach would dispense with the idea of
>representation altogether. here i quote directly the relevant section:
>'It is just that in the non-representationalist lingo we would not say
that the
>symbolic artifact
>has a direct correspondence to anything, that it represents or symbolizes an
>action or a thing; we would say that a chain of correspondence is built by
>human and nonhuman actors (the drawing, the steel) materially (i.e. eye-,
>brain-, and hand- wise) interacting through time in ways that are at root
>(i.e. by an iteration of this argument) a-theoretical and not
symbol-mediated.
>That is, we are saying that a symbol is not something
>different from a tool, it is a special case of a tool, and not metaphorically
>either it is not the idea of the symbol that mediates behavior, it is the
>material form itself. The twist, and the miracle, the new emergent phenomenon
>that makes it seem like symbols have a reality of their own (whether Ideal as
>in Plato, or mental as in Descartes, or even social-ideal as it seems for
>Ilyenkov) arises from what can happen in a complex dynamical material system
>that has multiple levels of organization and an awesome number of possible
ways
>of connecting events on one level (receptor-photon interactions) with
events on
>much higher levels (turning the drawing right-side up).'
>i will try to argue that this treatment is an instance of what engels
refers to
>(see directly preceding post) as a 'conflict of the results of discovery with
>preconceived modes of thinking'. gulp. ok, so let's start with a couple of
>simple points of clarification. 1) jay argues that 'it is not the idea of the
>symbol that mediates behaviour': a slight, but crucial slip may be in
evidence
>here. the claim (in the paper) is not that it is 'the idea of the symbol that
>mediates behaviour' but either 'the idea mediates behaviour' or 'the symbol
>mediates behaviour'; that is, it is the idea of the governor that 'mediates'
>(indeed motivates) watt's behaviour as designer, and that idea is given a
>particular form, eg as a drawing; the drawing is a symbol which 'mediates'
>behaviour. 2) jay attributes to ilyenkov (and others) the idea that 'symbols
>have a reality of their own'. rather ambiguous. ilyenkov is surely saying
that
>symbols have a reality, ie they are real, they are really part of the
system of
>human activity or, to put it another way, symbolic qualities are a
distinct and
>irreducible dimension of the whole (dialectical) process. but he is not
saying
>(of course) that there is a 'reality' (a 'world') of symbols independent of
>human activity. so now let us get on to more substantive issues.
>the system dynamical approach,as discussed by jay, appears to have been
>(relatively) successfully applied to certain types of phenomena (what jay i
>think calls 'self organizing systems') perhaps including some of the cases of
>bodily movement and so on which thelen and smith look at. the problem arises,
>it seems to me, when the general results of such studies are uncritically
>extended and projected onto other domains (and here is the issue of the
>'limits' of this kind of approach, an issue brought up in andy's earlier
>posting). jay argues against saying that 'the symbolic artifact has a direct
>correspondence to anything, that it represents or symbolizes an action or a
>thing' and prefers to say that 'a chain of correspondence is built by
human and
>nonhuman actors ... materially ... interacting through time'; on this view a
>symbol 'is not different from a tool, it is a special case of a tool'. It is,
>he claims, 'the material form itself '(of the symbol) that does the
mediating.
>And therefore, we have a chain of material correspondences between actors
>(humans and tools) within which it is impossible (and would be wrong) to
>identify some things as representations or symbols of others. this does sound
>very materialist (with a small m!). clearly, there are advantages for science
>and philosophy in trying to capture the samenesses between human (seemingly)
>purposeful activity and other organic and inorganic processes. but there are
>clearly disadvantages in trying to see a particular process through the frame
>of a qualitatively different phenomenon, which i feel is happening here.
jay's
>solution seems so neatly to get rid of the very difficult philosphical issues
>that have always surrounded the investigation of human thinking. but it does
>not so much get rid of them (in the sense of resolve them) as make them
vanish
>by terminological sleight of hand. (jay, i'm sorry but i think your
solution to
>these problems is positively orwellian!). in place of the concept of symbolic
>mediation, jay prefers to talk of a chain of actors interacting
materially. if
>we bear this in mind and look at the dynamic system in question - namely the
>whole process of R&D (with testing and implementation) of watt's governor
- we
>will find plenty of 'actors' interacting materially. certainly, the
functioning
>of the governor itself is explicable entirely in such terms since the
relations
>between its working parts and raw material never at any stage require us to
>postulate non material (or symbolic) entities or properties, the whole thing
>coming down to the relevant physical, mechanical, chemical etc processes at
>work in the thing. the governor is also, obviously, a tool and its
functioning
>as such within the whole process of manufacture is also entirely
explicable in
>terms of the material interactions between it and the other relevant 'actors'
>within the system. but now consider the design of the governor, let us say
the
>detailed technical diagram of the artefact. jay argues that it is the
'material
>form itself' that has the mediating function here. now, ilyenkov too would
want
>to say (as noted earlier) that it is this diagram, this object, (and not the
>idea of it) which is the symbol (by virtue of its role within the system).
but
>by virtue of what properties of the diagram does it perform its function
here?
>the diagram is paper and ink (ie material): but the diagram does what it does
>within the system not at all by virtue of the material propeties of paper and
>ink. we could completely alter the 'material' of the design (put it onto
cloth,
>draw it on a blackboard with chalk, sculpt it in metal or clay) and this
would
>create quite different chains of material correspondence, in jay's terms,
while
>altering nothing (or at least nothing essential) in the functioning of the
>design artefact within the whole process. and this is obviously not true
of any
>of the other tools (non human actors) within the system. so that if we
replace
>the functioning metal governor by a paper model (scaled down to 100th
size) it
>ain't gonna work - those chains of correspondence will be quite different
(and
>break down). the design does what it does not by virtue of the material
chains
>of correspondence between material bodies. its role and nature is not
>capturable by natural scientific investigation (although it is capturable by
>science). so now we have two different kinds of tool: one, like the governor
>itself, which works through chains of correspondence interacting materially,
>and one, like the design for the governor, which works through chains of
>correspondence having nothing to do with the material properties and
effects of
>its 'material form'. of course, we can still prefer not to use the term
>'symbol' for the second kind of tool but we must distinguish them not out of
>some outmoded philosophical prejudice but because the actions of the two
types
>of 'tool' are different and indeed exactly opposite (what is true of the
first
>kind cannot be true of the second, and vice versa). in order to understand
our
>whole dynamic system, then, we need to understand it as a process of
>interaction which involves the transformation of opposites (of material into
>ideal and vice versa), ie dialectics. without the generation and
functioning of
>such symbolic forms, human practice could not exist; goal-directed action is
>impossible without a goal but to have a goal means to have one thing
within the
>system which functions as the 'form' of another thing, without having
anything
>materially in common with it (and whose action within the system is therefore
>not due to the material chains of correspondence jay describes). how this
>works is a question for scientific investigation (infromed by dialectical
>thinking which as engels puts it 'offers the analogue for, and thereby the
>method of explaining, the evolutionary processes occuring in nature,
>interconnections in general, and transitions from one field of
investigation to
>another'. ) from this point of view, jay's solution attempts simply to
suppress
>the paradoxical (dialectical) nature of the activity process by a theoretical
>reduction modelled on other forms of self-organization.
>anyway, enough!!! jay - over to you???
>all the best
>P
>
>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Jul 01 2000 - 01:00:42 PDT