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Progress, of sorts
It’s been a while since I last shared an update here. Life has a way of throwing curveballs, and the past several months have been particularly challenging for me. Towards the end of 2023 and well into 2024, I found myself needing to step away from my dissertation work. Personal matters demanded my attention, and as much as I tried to stay connected to my research, I realized I was running on empty. It was a tough period—waking up in tears without fully understanding why—but sometimes we need to pause, even when we’re passionate about our work. Now, as we approach the latter half of 2024, I’m gradually finding my way back. Picking up where I left off hasn’t been easy, but I’ve made some progress and wanted to share what’s been happening on my dissertation journey since my last post. Thank you for your patience, and for sticking with me through this time. Here’s where I am now.
2021
I embarked on this dissertation in September 2021. I had a plan. Two plans, in fact. I had my original problem statement which I had used to explain to my professor what I wanted to understand. And I had my research proposal, which had been officially approved. I had also an idea of how to solve the problem, and had laid down foundations for this in my research master thesis.
- The original problem as I explained it to my professor in 2018
- Thesis
- Research proposal
- Radboud version of research proposal
But it did not happen like that. My professor asked me not to stick to my plan too tightly ( “they always change anyway”), stop reading so much, do some thinking of my own, and suggested I’d read Janet Bavelas, a psychologist who spent her life working on interactive communication. I learned a a lot from that, and from the writings of her mentor Paul Watzlawick but eventually I felt I was losing the thread to my dissertation. I created a presentation for my professor, to illustrate the original problem, through the ‘eyes’ of my current insights, so we might re-establish direction. And so we did.
2022
During the remainder of 2022, I searched for the source of the notion of commitment: where did it come from and why did it appear?
- In speech act theory, Bart Geurts takes his initial idea of commitment from Robert Brandom.
- In cybernetics, the notion of commitment is foundational to second-order feedback loops, as developed by Stafford Beer in the Viable System model, a framework for understanding the structure and and dynamics of complex organisation.
- In IT proces design, the notion of commitment comes via Jan Dietz from Winograd & Flores. But neither Brandom nor Winograd & Flores nor Stafford Beer came up with these ideas themselves.
It seems that, other than zeitgeist, the connecting figure may have been philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. He and his brother IT professor Stuart, together with philosopher John Searle and economist Ann Markussen were doctoral advisers to Fernando Flores when he came to Berkeley University after his three years in prison. Previously, Flores has been minister of Finance om Chili under Allende. In that position, he previously brought in Stafford Beer from the UK to work on a new system for the Chilean economy and hence was familiar with his way of thinking. I have spoken to both Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores ; and it turns out that a) Flores is the sole source of the term in Winograd & Flores’ books and b) Flores’ notion of commitment came from . Given that he debate between McDowell, Brandom and Dreyfus from mid-1990s to mid-2010s involved serious discussion on the notion of commitment, Brandom must have been familiar with Dreyfus’ views.
2023
I then asked myself where the notion of intention in speech acts came from?
Intention did not come from Austin
I found that intention in Austin’s writings intentions is not a prominent feature at all. That centrality of intention should be credited to John Searle, as he himself emphasized in interviews. I also discovered that speech act theory was perhaps no more than a happy discovery that Austin did whilst inventing himself a new academic career. He based his approach on the principles of war-time intelligence-gathering field work that he directed as an officer during the second world war. He sent out officers, and later his students, out on meticulous fact find missions and then discussed the results an academic meeting afterwards; a practice which he and Gilbert Ryle developed into the infamous Oxford Tutorial system.
I became very frustrated, then amused by how childish these great philosophers behave at times. And how differently they style themselves.
Language, reality and intention
All this made me wonder about the connection between using language and acting in the world. What was the rightful place of speaker intention and commitment generated with the audience? And what was the connection between them? This became my project for 2023. It occurred to me that intention and commitment are both notions that connect us to reality, intention by guiding our actions, and commitment by allowing us to give and ask each other for reasons, to call each other out. I needed to know how acts of language, or indeed any acts, are related to the objective world. It seemed to me that language, as an activity, has two kinds of functions:
- Representational: Language represents the world by describing states of affairs , e.g. “the sky is blue today”. This is true if the sky is blue today, on a coherence or correspondence view of truth.
- Performative: Language acts on the world, changing social realities by creating commitments and obligations (e.g., contracts, promises). This is correct if the felicity conditions of the speech act are met, such “I promise to pay you back”.
Conditions can be attached to either function, built either on truth or intention or both. For instance: “I hereby pronounce you man and wife” is both representational (describes the new state of affairs) and performative (enacts the marriage, provided I have the authority to do so). This way of thinking suggests that if we specify all possible conditions for both the representational and performative function of language, we will specify the function of language itself, and that all that is left to do is to understand representation and performance interact and perhaps how context influences their application. But I worried. The notion of ‘truth’ in representation assumes an objective reality that can be accurately described, which is philosophically contentious. Similarly, ‘intention’ in performative acts presupposes a clear link between mental states and actions, which is also debatable.
I wanted to build my dissertation on solid ground, so I tried to find out how I could find, or, if necessary, build a theory of language without being dependent on the notions of truth and intention, mainstream though these are.
Down the rabbit hole
I spent many hours building a mental picture of how and why philosophers constructed theories around truth and intentions and actions and how it all connect to either objective or subjective reality. My reasoning was that if I could understand better what these theories set out to achieve, I might understand better how to do without them. But I found myself going down a rabbit hole, for three reasons:
- I simply did not believe that whether reality is objective or not, has much bearing on how we, or any other organism in the universe, perceive that reality with our specific senses.
- I could not see any justification of postulating an invisible element like intention, and then presume it to be the cause of all action, without having any idea on how we share intentions
- Many philosophical theories attribute the ability to discern truth, or to have intentions, exclusively to humans. That seemed to me to be simply wrong. Yes, we human have a wonderful cognitive apparatus. But that that apparatus has not developed by itself, not are its cognitive components unique across creation.
Of course, I will not deny that we humans seem to be preoccupied with truth. In every police series, there is a witness who will break down after being forced to contradict himself. But it does not follow language was made for the purpose of truth.
Relevance theory
I then tried to imagine how I might construct my own theory of language use. Were there any other notions that might help me? I looked at Relevance theory, by Sperber and Wilson (1986). This is a highly influential cognitive approach to communication that builds on Grice’s idea of implicatures but shifts the focus towards cognitive efficiency. The core principle is that human cognition is geared towards maximizing relevance, which is defined by the balance between cognitive effort and contextual effects. The theory posits that during communication, individuals aim to convey information that is worth the listener’s cognitive effort, making it optimally relevant to them. It is improvement on Grice’s implicatures because it allows for dynamic, context dependent interpretation of meaning rather than relying on fixed maxims, which in some cases leads to better interpretations of implicatures (“There is a lion in the garden”), indirect requests (“Can you pass the salad”) and ambiguities (“He fixed the date”). Relevance theory also addresses the issue of the need for limiting cognitive effort, as we cannot process all context quickly enough. Relevance theory has no need of objective truth or falsity. It also has no need for a common communicative goal between interlocutors, other than that of understanding and being understood (Sperber and Wilson, 1995, p. 276), but it does rely on intentions. The theory hinges on the communicator’s ability to make their intentions clear and the audience’s ability to infer these intentions. This inferential process is crucial for achieving effective communication and understanding, maximizing and optimizing relevance and includes relevance guided comprehension heuristic for efficient processing.
I had originally dismissed this theory, because my professor said that “people who know say this is not a good theory”, and I tend to believe him. On revisiting the theory, I could see that indeed there are several serious objections against it, one methodological and one from what I take to be the nature of linguistic communication. The methodological objection is simply that the term relevance is too broad, so that it comes to define even itself. No empirical predictions can be derived from it. This is a serious objection, that to some extent also applies to the theory that I am developing. I will come back to that in the next paragraph. The other objection strikes at the heart of the matter: do we communicate just to convey information? Sperber and Wilson do not explicitly claim this, but they do claim that cognition is aimed at improving’s knowledge of the world through information processing (Sperber and Wilson, 1995, 47). Basically they claim that the world contains lots of information about things that are important to you, such as survival, friends, and social success. As a cognitive agent, you seek to obtain that information. In communication, you try to get information relevant to your goals as efficiently as possible. But there seems to be something missing. If communication is a source of information, then the relevance theory should apply to all other forms of interaction. And how are the goals of cognition established, maintained, prioritized? Relevance Theory has no satisfactory answer to these questions.The problem of course, is that no one else has a good theory either. As Chemero (2009) notes, “Every book written by a philosopher begins with an argument that the competing approaches are hopeless. Yet, for some reason, we persist. Somehow we’re only convinced by the philosophical arguments that everyone else’s approaches are hopeless” (p. 20).
Explanatory gap
At this stage, I began to formulate my own theory, or rather, a synthesis of theories to provide a general framework for my proposal on the interpretation of speech acts. Due to extensive methodological criticism of relevance theory, I started to question the methodological foundation needed for my dissertation. Despite extensive reading, I found no consensus on research methods in philosophical research, similar to searching for a needle in a haystack. This issue extends beyond philosophy to other disciplines since research paradigms are philosophically derived (see Caelli et al., 2003; Mkansi & Acheampong, 2012; Sefotho, 2015).
This lack of organization in such a critical academic discipline as philosophy made me uneasy. I invested considerable time verifying the scarcity of research on this topic. After consulting several philosophers, including former tutors, I found no assistance. It appeared that within the many theoretical niches in the philosophy of language, there were no comprehensive theories on the nature of language itself—a bus going nowhere, so to speak. In the adjacent field of philosophy of mind, grand theories about cognition in relation to language exist, but they are often broad and merely descriptive, failing to provide explanatory power – the bus is defective . The following illustration depicts the challenging situation faced by a philosopher of language attempting to make progress:
Philosopher of language waiting for the bus to understanding Obviously, an elderly and lone PhD student like myself cannot do much about this situation. It would require a combination of Kant and Taylor to sort things out. I have now decided that I will construct my dissertation properly, by identifying and following a research methodology, then identifying approaches and theories and placing them in a methodological context as far as I am able, ignoring the mess. As if I were writing a dissertation in an applied discipline. Obviously, that is not something that can be done “right” or on any kind of scale. Publishers have a very hard time just labelling philosophical publications into their correct discipline. But I can try to work systematically myself, remembering all the time that things will not fit neatly. So I revisited the setup of my dissertation, following Bloomberg, 2023. That means I still need to find a place for much of the work I have done in the past two years, i.e. make it part of the revised structure.
I have now decided that I will construct my dissertation properly, by identifying and following a research methodology, then identifying approaches and theories and placing them in a methodological context as far as I am able, ignoring the mess. As if I were writing a dissertation in an applied discipline. Obviously, that is not something that can be done “right” or on any kind of scale. Publishers have a very hard time just labelling philosophical publications into their correct discipline. But I can try to work systematically myself, remembering all the time that things will not fit neatly, but without attempting to disguise the mess, so to speak. So I revisited the setup of my dissertation, following Bloomberg, 2023. That means I stil need to find a place for much of the work I have done in the past two years, i.e. make it part of the revised structure.
2024
For about 6 months, I had to take a break. Too much going on elsewhere in my life. I was exhausted and disheartened and woke up every day crying without knowing exactly why. This started end of 2023 and continue up to the summer of 2024, when I picked things up again.
The links below refer to the site where my dissertation-in-progress is located: https://publish.obsidian.md/theartofmisunderstanding
Drop me an email for the password.- I have now completed the second draft of the first, introductory chapter, which sets the scene for the rest. It is here. I have also completed most of the keyword explanations for that chapter.
- I am currently working on the field study (chapter 4). I was nearing the end with the setup, but I have run into a conceptual problem with social organisations. Basically, philosophy and the real world have grown too far apart. Will talk about this soon with the accounting-philosopher-professor, which will be fun.
- My chapter 2, literature study, is empty, but it is not: I have a wealth of material which I will not use for the most part, because I selected most of my approaches already in the introductory chapter. Otherwise this dissertation would have exploded (might still)
- My chapter 3 (framework) will contain all the models I created myself. Not just what my professor calls the Wertwyn pyramid (it was already in my master’s thesis, but it has grown), but also the badminton model of communication (inspired by my husband’s weekly game). An introduction to the ideas is here, part of chapter 1. Below is what the model looks like in real life: to-and-fro, expectation-to-action
Biography
- Bloomberg, L. D. (2023). Completing your qualitative dissertation: A road map from beginning to end (5th ed.). Sage.
- Caelli, K., Ray, L., & Mill, J. (2003). ‘Clear as Mud’: Toward Greater Clarity in Generic Qualitative Research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2(2), 1–13. https://doi.org/10/gcd42d
- Chemero, A. (2009). Radical Embodied Cognitive Science.
- Mkansi, M., & Acheampong, E. A. (2012). Research Philosophy Debates and Classifications: Students’ Dilemma. Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods, 10(2), pp132‑140-pp132‑140.
- Sefotho, M. M. (2015). A Researcher’s Dilemma: Philosophy in Crafting Dissertations and Theses. Journal of Social Sciences, 42(1–2), 23–36. https://doi.org/10/gjhx
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Beyond the Fringe – Oxford philosophy
Over the last twelve months, as a sort of sideline, I have immersed myself in the era of analytic philosophy, roughly from 1920 to 1960. In a previous post, you might remember me raving about ‘Metaphysical Animals‘, a book that I found thoroughly fascinating. I even recommended it to my professor, who did not like it, finding it overly anecdotal. Well, gossipy. Women about women, I suppose. But I adored it and recommended it to his wife 🙂 However, a new book was announced, that he and I both pre-ordered: ‘A Terribly Serious Adventure’ by Nikhil Krishan, and which has now been published. An outstanding read—I am currently on my second run-through. I find myself understanding concepts better by linking them to their historical origins and the individuals who lived during these times. It is similar to my first encounter with Geert Mak’s ‘In Europe‘ video production, which seamlessly tied together numerous knowledge threads in a way that finally made sense to me.
‘The Women Are Up to Something,’ by Benjamin Libscomb, deals with the same four women as Metaphysical Animals, but is considerably more philosophical in character, more like Krishan’s book. It delves deep into the philosophical views that these women philosophers developed, over a period of half a century, as a result of the stifling atmosphere at Oxford Philosophy during and after the war. It is fascinating to read how much one was not allowed to do or think if one wanted to be an Oxford philosopher. I am on my third reading now. And there is another one still to go: the new book on J.L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer by Mark Row. I developed a bit of dislike for Austin, but as I read more and more, I have found out that there are many others who, even at the time, thought that he was more of a teacher and a methodologist, and not really much of a philosopher at all. Thank you, Vincent van der Lubbe for bringing these books to my attention.
It is the connection with my own history that makes this so interesting for me. It is almost like therapy. I went up in 1981 to Corpus Christi (the entrance on Merten Street is shown in the picture that accompanies this post – oh Nostalgia, Husband and I are also watching Inspector Morse again), which had only begun to admit women three years prior. Little did I know that what I would be taught would come straight from that analytic philosophy history. Not just its contents, but also its style, which included how we were taught, spoken to, and discouraged or encouraged. During those years, I developed a habit of rationality that took me many years to soften. I was also quite lonely. I believe most undergraduates were. We lived in a frenzy, attempting to compress all of life into three 8-week terms, give or take 0th week and 9th week. Money was tight, especially if, like me, you were on a full grant during term time but had no additional sources of support. Our tutors did not connect with us much; mine were nearly robotic in their interactions with other humans—not a smile, not a joke, not even an anecdote in those many one-on-one or one-on-two tutorials. The British stiff upper lip, which we all adopted wherever we came from, did the rest.
‘The Women are Up to Something’ tells of a great sketch that was done in the 1960’s on Oxford Philosophy. It is so funny. But the amazing thing is that the general public would find it funny, because it requires quite a bit of familiarity with Oxford philosophical ideas.This is what Lipscombe says about the sketch, on pages 208-209:
In 1960, Oxford Revue alums Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore teamed up with Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook of the Cambridge Footlights and mounted a wildly successful revue, titled Beyond the Fringe. It became one of the most influential theatrical productions of the postwar era, breaking a path for other satirical, sometimes absurdist, comedies like Monty Python’s Flying Circus. One of the sketches in Beyond the Fringe was a send-up of Oxford linguistic philosophy.
The cast were clearly familiar with a lot of mid-century philosophical jargon, tossing off allusions to Ayer’s “sense data,” Ryle’s “category mistakes,” and Wittgenstein’s “language games.” They or their friends had been in lectures or tutorials with Austin, Hare, and others. Drawing on familiar caricatures of eccentric don behaviour, Miller slouched and loped around the stage while Bennett twisted his arms over and behind his head in a picture of self-forgetfulness. But the cutting genius of the sketch is in its dialogue. The laugh lines reveal what a mixed audience in a West End theatre in 1961 knew or thought it knew about Oxford philosophy. That it could work at all as a West End comedy tells a great deal about the absorption of linguistic philosophy into the wider cultural consciousness.Early in the sketch, Bennett raises the question of the role of philosophers in society: “I mean, other people have jobs to do, don’t they?” Miller earnestly suggests that he will give an “example from real life” of the kind of statement that people fall into making if not chastened by philosophical analysis: “There’s too much Tuesday in my beetroot salad.” Bennett warmly calls this “a classic.” (A bit later, he adds in a suspicious tone that Miller seems “very fond of real life.”) Bennett dismisses Plato and Aristotle as mere “paraphilosophers” (like paratroops, because they have “their feet off the ground”). Why? Because they ask “entirely irrelevant” questions: “about life, about death.”
The sketch concludes with an anecdote from Bennett, proving the relevance of philosophy for life. He was in a shop that morning, he says:Bennett: And there was a shop assistant there who was having an argument with a customer. The shop assistant said “yes.” And the customer said, “what do you mean, ‘yes’?” And the shop assistant said, “I mean, ‘yes’.”
Miller: Ah, this is very exciting indeed.Bennett calls this “a splendid example” of “two very ordinary people . . . asking each other what are in essence philosophical questions . . . where I as a philosopher could help them.” Miller asks, “Did you?” To which Bennett replies sadly, “No. They were in rather a hurry.”
This is the video. I have added the transcript from the internet archive below, because the sound quality is not great and these chaps do a fine job of speaking around several hot potatoes.
I hope you enjoyed this. I also took from these books some new thoughts, or rather, I discovered that there was quite a bit of thought that I—and an entire generation—missed out on, but now can begin to reconstruct. The idea that assertions might be templates for action, and not truth bearers, for instance. But that is for another time and another post.
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There and Back again
Suddenly, I find myself at the end of the first month of a new year, jolting awake. What happened? Well, I was off work for a blessed six weeks from the end of November, so I might spend that time writing on my dissertation. Like all grand quests, things never go entirely as planned, but I did make some very interesting discoveries that I would like to share. And yes, you Tolkien fans, you have correctly identified the title of this blog. We watched the movie yet again at Christmas. Wonderful.
First, I discovered that Austin’s speech act theory is not a theory in the traditional sense, which kind of shocked me. Rather, it is more of a field guide for studying language in a natural setting. This led me to question the validity of subsequent speech act theories. Now you might wonder, “Why is this important?” Well, Austin is supposed to be the grand inventor of the Speech Act theory. Except that he was not, and that what he invented was not speech act theory.
These are bold statements. In the philosophy of language, they are akin to saying that one plus one does not equal two. So I need to explain myself. First off, you might recall that I read at Oxford and hence have a feel for the place. I sort of know how they think because I know how it feels. Of course, I was there at the beginning of the 1980s, whereas Austin made his mark just after World War II. But that only means I caught the effects of what he started. And what did he start? Well, this is actually documented, but I did not know about it until I read metaphysical animals, which is about four women philosophers: Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley. During WWII, they were undergraduates while “the men” were away, the men being the newfangled breed of “analytical philosophers.” When they came back, there was a kind of power struggle, which the men won but only at great cost to the philosophical debate. Austin, who wasn’t always a language philosopher, decided to become a language field researcher, which is similar to a biology field worker, as an analytic-style response to philosophical ideas that he thought, were too vague and wordy. He even phrased it as a conscious choice between publishing and teaching. So he established a novel kind of research-and-teaching tradition, modelled on his intelligence unit during the war and barring all women because apparently he did not like them much. He became a kind of Wittgenstein counterforce (those two did not appreciate each other at all), although he was never considered on a par. Wittgenstein, of course, was at Cambridge at the time, and rarely came up to Oxford, or if he did, only at the personal invitation of Anscombe.
Source: existential comics There is a lot of archived material on Austin, some of which I can’t access online but which piqued my interest. I quite lost myself in the newspapers from that time about how these great philosophers behaved, especially toward one another. It is like reading a tabloid—very gossipy. Mostly, they were not very nice people, these analytic philosophers, not a at all. Anyway, I have promised myself to go up to Oxford this summer and visit the Balliol College archives, which hold Austin’s personal papers. It seems that he was enamoured of a particular scholar, also at Balliol, and I suspect he got his “speech act” ideas from there, via German scholars such as Adolph Reinach who first discovered them but called them “social facts.”
I think the research tradition that Austin established has much to commend it, not least because he helped sever the connection between language and truth. However, it does not amount to a theory, let alone a speech act theory; and he did not think so himself. So in that light, it is a bit strange to have studied other speech act theories, like Searle’s or Bach’s which base themselves on Austin’s “theory.”
Reading about Austin and his time also gave me insights into why philosophy was conducted at the time and how philosophy of language was conducted. It seems very much a case of haphazard social connections and who-knows-who-to-influence-someone else. I discovered (yes, Husband, thanks to you if only I had listened earlier 🙂 a set of interviews by Brian Magee in the 1980s. Wonderful. These give a feel for the kind of people these philosophers were. Observe the difference between Searle and Bernard Williams in these interviews—they are worlds apart. Searle is insecure (he lashes out at Williams at future interviews, complaining about Williams’ good connections with the British Royal Family, which, as an American, he can only dream of). Williams observes from an enormous distance and is ever the gentleman. Both speak of the same thing: what to make of language and the new ideas that were coming out of Oxford. In the end, I think that Searle’s “solution,” to bring “intention” into speech act theory, is a mistake, and one I intend to correct if I can.
Second, I realised that there is currently no model for language interaction. Without a model to work with, I decided to develop my own. This model draws on the work of Bicchieri, who studied norms, the ISO norm for dialogue annotation (Bunt), the ViolEx 2.0 psychological model for expectation update, and the theories I examined for my master’s thesis. With my new model, I try to find a way to connect theory and practice. In real life, people use language to say what they mean and what they want to say, but it can be hard to figure out exactly what they mean or what they want to say. My model incorporates elements of normativity and expectations, which help explain the context in which a speaker’s words are spoken. My model also considers the role of the listener. Listening is an active process, and the person who is listening must be able to understand and respond to what is being said. In my model, this is done through an expectation update, which helps to bring clarity to the conversation.
Having to create a model means that I have to decide what modelling language to use. I have decided on BPMN, which focuses on modelling (business) processes. I am not sure I am sufficiently proficient in it, and I am also applying it to very different processes than those for which it was invented. But never mind. I am going to check in with a specialist to make sure I have not made any stupid mistakes.
Below is my model of a standard interaction proces. I will need to extend 5 layers to 7, more about that in a separate post. The horizontal lanes are called “swim lanes”. The idea is that every lane is where it happens for a particular actor. I have made it a little complicated by dividing a single human in two parts, i.e. the part where mental processes take place and another part, where the internal representations of the outside world live.
I am still working on the processes “manage communication” and “manage expectations.” The “manage communication” process is about what happens during an interaction. Not just the speech exchange, but also everything that is necessary to manage the conversation: greeting, feedback, correction, etc.
“Managing expectations” is about what happens in the head of the listener when he/she receives a communication. It is matched against what is expected, desirable, etc., and then a response is formed.
What is important—and you might find this obvious, but it took me a lot of time to realise this—is to see that there is no interaction until the listener decides there is one. It is also the listener who decides the initial direction of the conversation. Much like playing badminton (yes, thank you, Husband): having a shuttlecock thrown at you means nothing. Return it and there is the game.
What is next? Well, I have already discussed the model with my supervising professor, and he cannot find anything wrong with it. Mind you, that is no guarantee that he won’t find anything wrong later on, when I detail the details. Also, it is worrying that he found it “impressive,” because that might mean that he simply does not understand this way of conveying information. But for now, it is encouraging. So I will continue to detail the model. And then take out the bit that I need for my field research. I have documented my approach in my new dissertation-online. It is very much a work in progress, but if you like, you can have a look here on this page. Mail me for the password if you don’t have it. There is quite a bit on how I plan to use the ISO norm for dialogue interaction to investigate specialists’ understanding of other norms. Of interest only to methodologists, but I know you are amongst my followers 🙂
Now I return to earth for a few days. My husband celebrates a birthday, the family is coming over, and the country needs saving (the dayjob). So, until next time…
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New ideas: a partial answer (part 2)
In the past year, I have been thinking and reading, and trying to find out what other people have said on the subject that I wish to expand. I think I am now embarking on a different phase: pulling out all the ideas – like weeds 🙂 – and drawing them together into a narrative.
I have started on my dissertation “proper”. That is, I have set up the outline and am now in the process of filling in the blanks. You can check my progress if you like, but this comes with a warning. Some of the ideas should not be spread to security officers before I interview them, because it would render the interview useless. So, if you think you might be a candidate for interview on the meaning and implication of ISO norms on security, do not read my dissertation-in-creation. I trust you. Really. My dissertation-in-progress is on https://publish.obsidian.md/theartofmisunderstanding. It will ask you for a one-time password. If you want it, write to me, although you might guess it :-). The landing page will refer you to my progress page, and there you can see what I am working on at any particular moment. There is quite a bit of tooling behind the dissertation-writing process. I use Obsidian in combination with Zotero. If you are interested, ask me, or check out a showcase like this one. Also, videos by Brian Jenks are worth checking out. He uses Obsidian as an extended memory to manage his ADHD and has excellent structure and tips.
Meanwhile, my general progress report: I had a lot of fun finding out that the theory of speech acts which is at the basis of my research, has somehow escaped into the real world without language philosophers knowing about it. In fact, the ideas that have “got out there” are not just about language but about cognition and interaction in general—again, without philosophers being aware of it. I find this very amusing. On the one hand, you have these philosophers who are very seriously trying to work out what it all means, and then, on the other hand, normal, practical people borrow these ideas, and put them into practice, sometimes with astonishing success, but without any theoretical foundation whatsoever. And never shall the two meet ..
What kind of ideas? Well, the ideas about feedback being necessary to interaction. That particular idea originally came from biology, from two philosophers called Maturana and Varela, giving rise to such concepts as a PDCA cycle (Plan-do-check-act). The blanket term is “cybernetics”, and the underlying popular theory is known as “system theory”, which derives from autopoiesis. I was first introduced to this theory during my research master, and blogged about it here. The idea is that any system, whether a cell, an animal, or an organisation, will try to keep itself alive whilst engaging with the environment to increase its chances of survival. I am sure you find this idea, well, simple. This is how we commonly think. But we did not always think that way. It is something we learned to do, as a society, in the past 100 years, or even not much beyond 50 years.
The point is, this feedback-notion is an important philosophical idea which is rooted in a specific theory. Would you believe—this is for the IT people in my audience—that the agile and lean ways of thinking are derived from this, without any further theoretical grounding? I checked this extensively, and also talked about it with the Dutch cybernetics society. So, it appears that the philosophical ideas from the first half of the 20th century just went viral, and people tried them for practical purposes, adopting them if they seemed to work, and then of course went on from there to create more practices. Without there being any proper feedback loop to improve the initial theories. Incredible. How does anyone, philosopher or practical person, image we learn from this?
Did I intuit this before? Well, I did notice there was something going on, but I was not sure what exactly. I had previously noticed that frameworks like ArchiMate – a framework for describing organisational and IT structure—are, in spite of their claims, not derived from philosophy of language, just from practical application. Which is ok, but I do find the pretense of “scientific evidence” quite amazing in the absence of a proper theory and proper validation. And yet, the authors of Archimate tried—the same cannot be said of business concepts like “lean” and “agile” which are totally devoid of any theoretical basis whatsoever, and derive their strength from our natural tendency to work in small tribes, which we share with our chimp and bonobo ancestors. Which – for those of you that are agile-believers – does not necessarily mean the agile theory is wrong. Just that it caters to our cognitive disabilities as animals and apes rather than to any grand business theory ….
I had also noticed, in the work of Jan Dietz and his DEMO method for analysing business IT, that Dietz incorporated a notion of speech acts and commitment which went way beyond what was understood at the time and certainly had not found its way into other IT business or architecture thinking. That fascinated me. How did he manage this? So I interviewed Jan Dietz (a pleasant occasion at a café in Leiden) and found that indeed he had understood something that philosophers had not understood at the time. He told me wonderful stories about how his method saw the light, and what happened on his first projects. With respect to my search into the notion of “commitment” in his work, he referred me to the work of Winograd and Flores (1986). Both men are now nearing 80, but still very much part of the world, and, important to me, turned out to be willing to answer my questions.
Terry Winograd is the inventor of the Google search engine and the initial driving force behind the idea of artificial intelligence. I wrote to him, but as I expected, his particular expertise was not language and normativity but IT. That language bit, he said in a private message to me, had come from his co-author, Fernanda Flores, whom he was still seeing regularly.
Fernando Flores is a person in his own right: a former minister of Finance in Chili, a philosopher, and a successful businessman; his communication advice costs about a million per piece. However, there was nothing in Flores’ writings that explained where he got his ideas from, so I wrote to him and managed to obtain an interview via Zoom. Amazing! We spoke for almost two hours. The idea of “speaking = acting = incurring commitment” is at the basis of the new Chilean plan-economy in the early 1970s, at the instigation of Flores himself. His communication-with-commitment ideas were shaped by Stafford Beer, the father of organisational management, who took Maturana’s original theory and applied it – without his consent – not to biological cells, but to organisations, i.e., treating businesses as living organisms. Flores himself spent years in jail after the right-wing coup—being visited by, yes, Maturana, amongst others. Cybernetics became associated with communism, which did not help its academic stature much. I recall being at school, as a teenager, at the time that all of this happened, and not understanding much. My parents were very right-wing, and I was told that anything to do with communism and socialism was bad. I remember getting a geography essay on Chili back with my teacher remarking that “I might have invested more effort”. Quite! Well, here is my karma, after all. There is a great book on this; see Medina, E. (2011). Cybernetic revolutionaries: Technology and politics in Allende’s Chile. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
I also found that psychologist Watzlawick’s ideas about communication, which I blogged on before and liked very much, stem from the very same cybernetic tradition, the idea that our social connections form a system within which we interact-much like a living system that strives for survival and expansion and interaction. The idea is, do not just look at the message. Look at the whole context. By the time I had found all of these cybernetic applications of a single under-developed philosophical idea about the connection between speech acts and commitment, I was getting quite excited. I wondered what had gone wrong with cybernetics and why the connection to philosophy had been lost? So I searched high and low and eventually came across a book by Novikov, which shows the entire area of application of cybernetic theory.
If, from the picture above, you get the idea that artificial intelligence is also not rooted in philosophical theory, you would be quite right. AI is all practice and practical application without any theoretical basis in language or philosophy whatsoever. But don’t tell anyone, because no one wants to know. Everyone wants funding and an audience.
Right. So now the only thing I have to do is to connect cybernetics back to its philosophical roots 🙂 and then, for language understanding, reconnect it to philosophical moral theory and cognition. Not exactly simple to do, but needs must, as they say. The problem, is that there is no system or consistency to the application of cybernetics to its operational fields. It literately escaped from the philosophical laboratory. So I would have to start either from the original theory of cybernetics from its inception by mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener (1948) and work my way forward. Or I should posit my own theory and try to fit practical results from real life applications of the theory into my new theory. It will have to be the latter as I am not a historian, but it is daunting nevertheless.
I am leaving you to ponder over my new insights into cybernetics, but also with a book suggestion for which I thank both Husband and my friend Teja. Two female philosophers have written a book about four courageous women philosophers at Oxford at the time of the 2nd world war: Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley. See the review in the Guardian. (Dutch people: do not read the NRC review because it is pretentious clap-trap, sorry to say, just order it from here.) Anyway, such a great book! Finally, I understand why my many questions were not answered when I was there (at the time I blamed myself). The main pleasure comes from knowing why and under what conditions the important analytical theories were produced, as well as how the great philosophers interacted and how any other ideas were excluded. Lots of insightful gossip about horrible men and passionate quests for understanding. I love it. I’m halfway through the audiobook now. I am going to write to the authors when I finish, to thank them for putting analytical philosophy and my own Oxford experience into perspective for me. It is a delightful read, highly recommended.
My next journey is into agency, the connection between roles and norms and understanding. I will keep you posted.
PS. Did you see my post on LinkedIn about my son graduating in Law and moving to philosophy? For those of you that know us personally, you know we went to hell and back. So grateful it all ended well. I thank all of you that liked and/or commented. The young need our encouragement, as we left them so many problems to solve that we could not.
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New ideas, part 1: the puzzle
I promised (so many times before ) to tell you in more detail what my PhD is about, what puzzle I want to solve, and how. Today I will start. I’ll have to do it in instalments since I’ll have to gather my thoughts as I write. Also, I have to find a way not to bore you to death with philosophical jargon and references. You will tell me, I am sure 🙂
The puzzle
Have you ever witnessed a discussion between security experts? I have, many times. To their credit, they don’t argue when there is an emergency. In a crisis, all security professionals transform into firefighters, rolling out their hoses and putting everything on the line to save whatever must be saved. But other times, you’ll hear them argue about how important it is (not) to put a certain policy or measure in place, or how exactly it should be done, and they’ll practically behead each other. Often, the discussion is about the meaning of a particular regulation. And that surprised me. Because those regulations are supposed to be written by experts for experts.
Aside: forgive me for saying "they". The discussions I was privy to involved me as a security expert too. I was part of what I witnessed. If there is any guilt to be shared, then I am equally at fault. However, I don't think there is any guilt. As my dissertation will eventually show, there is an explanation which does not have anything to do with being argumentative, or lacking knowledge, or, heaven forbid, any psychological cause. In fact, these men (there are lamentably few women in this profession) are quite right to argue. But that will take me years to prove, so let's start.
I will cast the puzzle in terms of a dialogue. The reason for that will be come clear later (and not in this post). Illustrated with a picture:
A somewhat one-sided dialogue What you see here, are regulators, such as an ISO committee, sitting together high up somewhere, working on the text of a new standard or regulation. This is a highly structured and monitored process, with many reviews and voting. The experts themselves are selected from the member countries.
When they are finished, the standard or regulation gets published, i.e., becomes a book or a paper. These are then made available to the experts below. The experts need these standards, either to conform to (the standard is mandatory) or as a best practice. As you can see in the picture, there is not much interaction between the regulator (the “speaker” in this dialogue) and the security experts (the “hearers” or “listeners”). The conversation is a bit one-sided, so to speak. Note that this “broadcasting” model is like the Herald proclaiming the King’s wishes-more of that below.
An example
Excerpt from the ISO 27002 Two different readings of the same text
Suppose we open up one of these standards and we read the text, as shown below. It is about utility programs. These are intended for the exclusive use of IT-personal because you can do a lot of damage with them. However, such programs are sometimes given over to or appropriated by end-users.
Let’s now assume that this text can be read in two different ways. These are polar opposites, but they also serve as a good illustration of the types of discussions security experts might have. The first reading is by a security expert who has a lot of expertise:
Reading from expertise The second reading is by a security expert who has much experience:
Reading from experience Why multiple interpretations?
I’m guessing that you don’t have to know much about security to see that these two ways of looking at it will lead to very different actions. And that’s the whole point. Standards and rules are put in place to make sure that the right safety steps are taken, to take the guesswork out of security implementation.
So what are we to make of multiple interpretations? Is the text unclear? Are those readers, the security experts, unable to comprehend the text through a lack of knowledge or experience? This is highly unlikely, given that we are dealing with experts on both sides of the dialogue. But I admit, in the beginning, I thought so too. So much so that I stepped up my training and qualified for CISM. But it made no difference.
Unfortunately, this is the standard picture with a standard solution to go with it: knowledge and training. The regulators should learn to write more clearly, concisely, and engagingly. The security experts should be better qualified and better trained. Needless to say, neither intervention helps. Regulators can write perfectly well, and security experts are, well, experts 🙂
Other interpretations: the security experts’ worry
One possibility is that the security expert in the second reading is concerned about what will happen when he informs users that they can no longer use their utility programs. The interesting thing is (also something I will come back to in the future) that this worry seems to influence the way he or she reads the text almost before he reads it. Split second.
The Security Expert worry Other interpretations: the regulators’ worry
On the side of the regulators, there is also something going on. Regulators work to specifications. If no one asks them to create a standard, they are out of a job. So it is not in their interest to produce a standard that cannot be lived up to in practice. Also, if they disagree amongst themselves, there is a tendency to use abstract language to circumvent the disagreement. Again, they cannot show themselves to disagree amongst themselves, because this would inevitably erode their credibility. I don’t know this, of course, for certain, but there is quite a bit of research on how such consensus processes work. So here we have the regulator’s worry
The Regulators worry If this regulator’s worry affects text clarity, I wonder how I might detect this in text. As part of my research master, I took a course in computational linguistics. I suppose I could ask the professor if she could point me in the right direction.
Lack of feedback
Another point of interest is how standards and regulations are communicated. We still use the old way of the Herald proclaiming what the King wants. No answer is needed or even welcome. The Herald leaves after the message is sent out. There isn’t much difference between this and putting standards and regulations in a book, newspaper, or online. The problem with not being able to react is that misunderstandings cannot be cleared up. The problem with not being able to check reactions is that the effect of the proclamation is uncertain. I wonder why we modern humans still use this model, as it is so obviously defective, but we do.
Next
You’ve probably noticed that so far I’ve only told you what the problem is and what some of its features are. In the next post, I’ll try to explain how I think the puzzle can be solved. In several steps.
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Resist!
Spring is here, and so are all of its delights. My small garden is full of roses I have planted over the years. I used to order one every year from a specialist rose farm. Some of them survived, others did not. The ones that survived are spectacular. I feed them, Husband prunes them, and they are just everywhere around the house. Even our grocery delivery person comments on them. My biggest success and my biggest failure is no longer with us. Husband had to kill it, alas. It was a Kiftsgate Rambling White Rose. Have a look at the original here. It is gigantic, encapsulating three trees.
Kiftsgate RIP “Kiftsgate” quickly covered our small patio in the back garden and attracted a million bumble bees. For a couple of years. But it just kept growing. And growing. I suppose the worst thing about this rose were its thorns and its stems turning to rock-hard wood. Of course, the disclaimer said “not for small gardens”. Which is sound advice if your back garden is only about 5 x 5m like mine. But I sort of overlooked that in my enthusiasm. Well, it is gone. Somehow “Kiftsgate” inspired our honey suckle into a growing spurt, covering the patio, so all is well.
Another delight that really is not a delight and hence must be resisted, is hay fever. It was staved off by the rainy weather but now all grasses seem to have bloomed at once. It is terrible. The Dutch hay-fever-radar sites colour a deep red, which is the worst there is. I have good hay fever pills now, keeping me from the worst, but this years is really quite extraordinary. I have to cover my eyes in vaseline and preferably stay indoors with all of my air-cleaning equipment turned on. And the tiredness! Even Husband complains, although he does not have a sneeze in his non-allergic body. Son, however, is still in denial, buying hay fever tablets off the counter, just this once … Well, hay fever is a predictable reaction. Once you pass a certain threshold of pollen, and start reacting, that is it. For years. But I suppose what amuses me most is his denial. He is so like me :-). Like: if I don’t wear my glasses, no one can see me (that was my favourite at his age). Anyway, the hay fever will be gone by July.
We live quite near Paleis Het Loo, which is the palace where Queens Emma and Wilhelmina and young Juliana lived before the war. It is being restyled – a many-years project which is already overextended. We walk the outer grounds every night. The coming week I will visit it properly, on the inside, with Husband and my good once-red-haired friend who has just come out of chemotherapy and a friend. Anyway, as they were also restructuring the landscape around the palace, putting in what looks like wild-flower areas, I just could not resist. I adore poppies. They are wild and beautiful and resilient. So I ordered a pile of seeds ( a few thousands) and threw them about on the newly prepared fields. Son did his bit as well. So far, only few have come up. So then we planted about 40 poppy plants which were sent to by the nursery I bought my seeds from (thank you!). And I have ordered more seeds. And more. In a few years, the whole place should be incandescent with poppies, I have decided. It will be my heritage. Much nicer than money or material things.
Strictly forbidden to mow the lawn There are lots of other wild flowers on those fields surrounding Paleis Het Loo. I know because we have been using this app called “obsidentify” to get to know flora and fauna. It is quite remarkable. Like playing Pokemon but for the elderly. Much easier to use than my old Flora. At some point, I will use it to find edible greens and mushrooms. But already I am enjoying being able to identify plants and flowers and trees. Amazing what I remember from early childhood – I must have had a great interest in nature, because I can still identify so many plants off the top of my head; fortunately, with the obsidentify-app, I now have the means to check and find new ones. For instance, the yellow plants (weeds) growing in my front garden are called “stinkende gouwe”, i.e. “smelly gold”. I now have much fewer qualms about pulling them up.
Another disruptive thing I did was to have my hair cut. It had grown long throughout the Corona years when I did not dare to go to the hairdresser, so I just left it – well, Husband cut it for me to one length once. It grew way down my back, getting heavier and hotter every day. But I had this idea that with long hair I would turn into this patient, wise woman, such as below (the third woman from the left). The wild wise woman. Something my sister Sigrid is becoming in her amazing priest training, which is nearly finished now.
The original painting is by Walter Crane, a Masque for the Four Seasons, depicting the Maiden, the Mother, The Wise Woman and the Crone. But alas, it is not for me, the long hair or the temperament! So I went to my old hairdresser who was amazed to see me – she thought I had gone elsewhere until they saw the length of my hair. Very amusing. Even more amusing is that my curls have returned. After 10+ years! Really tight curls that won’t be tamed. Which makes a mockery of the sleek, stylish hairdo I had selected, but who cares? I regard those re-emerging curls als evidence of my inner rebel – yes , the theme of this blog.
The decision to cut off my hair came at the end of a lovely holiday. We usually take one during the first or the second week of May. I don’t like to be home on my birthday because it is Remembrance day, and also because May is such a wonderful month. Spring, not yet hot, there is no pollen, everything a lush green and flowers everywhere. We rented a wonderful little house at the edge of a wood near the beach. Son came over on his bike because we were near Leiden where he lives, and we celebrated both our birthdays. We also did a lot of walking and photography and walking along the shore. One day we went to the Keukenhof. I had always wanted to go, and now I had turned 60 I felt I had a right 🙂 Husband was a true sport and came along without grumbling. Took a million pictures, but one will have to do for this post.
The holiday marked the beginning of my return to health. If you remember my last post, things were pretty bleak on that front – my worst CFS flare up in years. But I should have remembered, just when I start to cry that I just cannot go on, things always get better. I had ordered a pile of supplements which might counteract the CFS bad-fuel problem, the anaerobic metabolism that causes my muscles to behave like they have run a marathon. The science is all here, in a PostScript. Anyway, I have been taking these supplements for two months now, and they are really making a difference. I don’t have more energy, but most of the aches and brain fog and stiffness have gone. Husband says I seem to get stronger. Great. I aim to be a super fit pensioner. That is still seven years away, so I might make the deadline :-).
Whilst on holiday, I took some time to think about work. Normally I don’t, because there is not much I can change, but I was experiencing some kind of inner revolt which was bothering me.
- Revolt against our political system, which I feel has been eradicating the social fabric of our society for the past 20-odd years. In civil service (the day job), such changes become more and more visible in the way we deal with the public and vice versa. I loathe neo-liberalism beyond anything I can put into words.
- Revolt also against my day-job, which is about (information) security. I had been researching the threat landscape, both at work and for my PhD. It looks as if citizens are becoming squashed between criminal organisations and governments, neither of which can be defended against. So what is there for little me to do against all that?
A bit bleak, eh? But there is nothing for it, other than to look the monsters squarely in the face, take a deep breath, and do what I can in my own little world. Or so I resolved. I must find some more colleagues to pass on my experience and knowledge on. That is a much better idea than running around, trying to save the world by myself. Meanwhile, I keep an eye on the lottery, but I never win. Well, as they say, lucky in love unlucky in gambling, which is fine with me.
Another thing that was worrying me is whether we should move house. We have very steep stairs, so if we become old and feeble, we won’t be able to make it upstairs. We had the stairs measured for one of these chair-lifts, and it will fit! Well, you would have to duck your head a little, but it fits. So that is one problem less. Time to revamp the place, coz it is a while since we did any painting. We will need help this time around. So Husband and I have decided to save up a bit before we start. We will start on the study. Husband has already made a maquette to scale. Exciting.
Catching snowflakes The PhD is also back on track. My professor advised me to stop reading and start thinking. Which turned out to be very hard advice to follow – whenever I think up something, I am inclined to check if someone else has thought of it, and what they said, and how they developed the thought, etc. And this habit was making me feel as if I was catching snowflakes. It is strange, somehow just thinking does not feel like work whereas reading does. It is the Protestant Work Ethics lurking inside me; I suppose. Anyway, I have been “just thinking” for over a month now (with a bit of reading on the side, I will admit), and things are progressing again. I have developed a mini theory which I am expanding on. I have also run into some interesting contacts.
- A German guy who is introducing companies to autopoiesis. The thing is, it seems to work and they are ecstatic, but no one seems to worry about why it works. Autopoiesis is about living cells. Organisations are not.
- Some interesting IT guys, external contractors, approached me. They have developed a new way of approaching problems, which is a bottom-up empowering style, rather than the traditional top down “blue” design thinking. I like them and their style very much, but for now I cannot make much sense of what they are doing: it seems to be a pot-pourri of original thoughts, sound scientific theory, well-thought out personal style and agile-style hypes. Must find out more. The conversation continues.
- Then there is this interesting guy, a business architect like me, but much more the suave boardroom type. He is clever, well read, and a self-styled philosophy with fixed ideas about language, the type of ideas that many people in the IT business have – they think that either language has a fixed meaning (being comprised of words) or that meanings come from intentions. If I can explain my ideas to him and get him to understand, that would mean that I have achieved sufficient clarity myself.
- Also talked to two security professors now. Both want to help me. One is offering to co-author my literature research on security professionals. Not too much work for him, but it would validate the paper, as I am a philosophy researcher, not a security one, despite the day job. So sharing authorship seemed ok to me. My professor agreed. Better to be generous.
I am a bit hesitant, but in my next post I will try to outline some of the ideas I have been working on. Must start somewhere, so I will start with you.
PS
I have signed up for the reading challenge on Goodreads. A 100 books this year. I am heavily into “noir detectives”, and I don’t read, I listen. All the time. I have also been listing to some other stuff. This one: the Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber (anthropologist) and David Wengrow (archeologist). It is “is a reimagining of the history of humanity, based on new discoveries in the worlds of anthropology and archeology. According to the authors, new findings challenge what we thought we knew about hierarchies, inequality, property, and the state”. David Graeber, who died unexpectedly last year, was actually kicked out of Harvard for his anarchistic ideas, so that sparked my attention. A whopping 24 hours listening, but a fascinating book! The book is very detailed, so I will repeat the experience at some point. Recommended. For my Dutch friends, there is a Dutch translation: “het begin van alles”.
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One of those days
Make that one of those months. Some things are not going the way I want them to. At all. So if you are in the mood for some complaining, do read on. It is all self-centred drivel, but that comes with the privilege of hosting your own blog. Where to start? Well, there are a couple of things in my life that are not moving forward how I had hoped: The PhD. The job. The health. The future house.
Let’s take that list backwards. The Future house is a concept. It might be the house I am living in. The idea is, that we need to look making the house elderly-proof, if we want to stay here like forever, or even 20 years. Or we need to move. In either case, we need to do something. My husband is considerably older than I am, and my health (next paragraph) is not great in some respects. So we must not leave decisions until too late. Start some long overdue maintenance on the house and check if a stairlift can be fitted at some point. Or look seriously for another house. We slanted towards the latter (because a wonderful option came along), but recently, with the housing market and the uncertainty introduced by the war in Ukraine, it looks like we will stay put. But we have not decided definitely on anything, and I hate that. I want to know where I am going.
Chronic fatigue syndrome is defined as six months or more of persistent fatigue that disrupts life and doesn’t get better with rest. Photograph: Dominic McKenzie/The Observer. Taken from the Guardian. Health – now I know where I am going with that. Nowhere. If I am lucky and careful and diligent, I might well keep my CFS at bay. I am getting more pains and more minor impediments, but slowly. Sometimes I hate the way I have to live – no room for adventure of even straying from my schedule. Only feeling energetic in the morning or after a glass of wine in the evening to get the blood flowing again (I get colder as the day progresses). Two weeks ago, my son came over, and we spent three late nights in the kitchen, just talking and not even that late. It took me a week to feel ok again.
Next I got corona. I am just getting out of that now. I know I should be grateful, only a mild case, coz of all the vaccines and boosters. Also, I feel bad about complaining because one of my dearest friends got diagnosed with something aggressive. I cannot stand to lose him and desperately hope I won’t. Meanwhile, I just want my old energy and flexibility back. From when I was 45. Ain’t going to happen. But sometimes I forget.
Work was truly terrible the first few months of this year. So bad that I seriously considered changing jobs. So I opened up my LinkedIn Profile and wrote some emails. Since then, I am bombarded with jobs, some very attractive and all very well paying. But I am no longer sure that I want to change jobs at all. I managed to change some things at work, my colleagues are helping, and I am wondering what the point is of changing just 7 years before I get pensioned off. Is that sensible of just cowardly? I don’t know. Mind you, I hardly have time to think about it, because it is a madhouse out there. The social and political climate is such that we are bombarded with questions about security – and just answering those questions seems to take more time than actually doing the work.
The PhD got off to a false start. There, I have said it. There was some delay after I finished my research master, which I did not quite understand, wrote about it a bit in a previous post, here. Then, after this winter, I felt was not really making much progress. Also, I could not make sense of what my supervisor was asking me to do: to research general misunderstandings, which are only vaguely connected to my research topic. However, that caused me to do a lot of work which I now know will not go into my PhD research. Hence also the form for collecting misunderstandings on this site, which I will take down soon, because it is far too general for my purposes.
Anyway, I finally figured out that my supervisor might not remember or perhaps had never fully understood the details of the problem I want to solve. So I created a presentation with lots of pictures and used that in the next meeting to talk him through it. It worked, which was a great relief. He even talked to another professor about it (who was doing his own second PhD in our faculty and turned out to be a great guy with lots of interesting ideas). At my supervisor’s suggestion, I wrote up my presentation as a problem description with a bit context. It was difficult, because I had to digest a lot of academic articles on IT security and then summarise them to be understandable to a general public. The connection to cyberwar and the war in Ukraine did not help, as the gift from my stepfather (2nd generation camp syndrome) got in the way pretty badly until I decided to watch no more television to avoid images. But I completed it. My supervisor said my text was perfectly understandable, so mission accomplished. I thought.
Other than that, neither my supervisor nor I seem to have much idea yet about how I am going to find other academics to support my research. This is required , but as my research involves or touches several other disciplines, this is also requires careful thinking. These other academics will want to their pound of flesh, corresponding to their own academic interests, so inevitably they will interfere with my work, steering me in other directions, wanting more or less detail, etc. I must admit, I am worried about this. I have now experimented with telling my research story to people from various disciplines, and every time it takes a great deal of time and effort to explain what the problem is and how I want to tackle it.
There are quite a few disciplines touching on my research question, but it is difficult to find someone to talk to. Philosophers tend not to be interested in real-world problems, that is not their job. In Psychology, there is so much useless research, it is extremely difficult to find what you are looking for, alone find a kindred spirit. The IT world still thinks of words and data as components of a logical language, i.e. that everything can be programmed or otherwise made predictable. In IT security, there is virtually no academic tradition, nor much natural inclination to look beyond itself. I believe that “business” or “management” is an academic field nowadays, but from what I can see, it is merely an industry of hypes and market opportunities (I might have to eat my words, but this is how it looks to me at the moment). I am not familiar with linguistics or communication as academic disciplines, but I am touching upon those as well, and I have no academic connections there.
I was not going to worry about this, thinking these problems would solve themselves as I went along, but then I had an unpleasant experience. I asked an IT security professor at my university to validate a few pages of text, in which I had tried to explain the context of my research- the very text I had created following the presentation to my supervisor. I just wanted him to check that I had not written nonsense, as I am knowledgeable but don’t have an academic degree in Information Science. Did not exist when I grew up 🙂 But for some reason – perhaps in haste – this professor read my text as if it were my research proposal, and then proceeded to hate it, even correcting the odd spelling mistake in the process. This was expressed by scribbling across my document, making remarks as they occurred to him, without even waiting to read the next sentence, as if I were a nine-year-old being graded for a school project. My husband shook his head upon hearing this, and said it should have been perfectly clear this was not a research proposal, it did not tick any of the boxes, and also I had said it was not. But it happened anyway. My supervisor, however, said it was my fault for doing this by mail. I should have arranged a face-to-face meeting, and this is how I should make contact in the future. Yes. Of course. I agree. But even if I made a communication mistake, there is a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that this is not ok. Academic professors probably think this normal behaviour, but I hope I do not act in this condescending manner when, in my day job, I am asked for help or advice.
Chimps grooming The trouble is, I might be making an implicit and possibly unfair comparison between two worlds: one I know well, where these things don’t go wrong because I the rules so well; and the academic environment which I don’t know well enough, so I have to be extra careful. Which I will do in the future. It is just more good old stakeholder management, which in this bright and clear academic world I naively had hoped to do without – endless grooming for the sake of building beneficial relationships. I know how to do it, but I hate it. There are days where I don’t mind too much, thinking that this is how the world works. Other days, I get nauseated listening to these academics thanking each other profusely for their interesting talks, just before baring their teeth and going for the kill. I detest articles that seem to be written for the sole purpose of putting someone else down. The problem is, I am much too vulnerable myself. If anyone says something purposely scathing to me, particularly if it is about something I have done my very best for, it may take me days, even weeks, to get over it. Not a very efficient way to be, I concur. A character trait which renders me totally unsuited to an academic career. But an academic career is not what I want. I want to understand something more than I do now, and if possible, share that understanding to make things better. The rest is not so important. There. This thought helps. It quietens me down.
I have just read back what I have written so far. I suppose I just wanted to say to myself that it is ok, sometimes, to lose heart. For a few minutes, that is all. It is allowed. And also, perhaps, that sometimes I might take a break. Watch a silly movie with Husband, which he lovingly selects for me from the 6+or 12+ range because I cannot handle anything more adult. Bake a cake. Plant herbs. Slow down. Complain. Drink chai. Commiserate with my few remaining girlfriends and lovely, wise, nearly priest sister who I am proud of. Natter with my son about every topic under the sun. Fondly remember some people I have lost. Reconnect with some friends that seem to drift away. Listen to my favourite noir detectives. Take mini breaks. Enjoy the wood fire at night, again courtesy of Husband. Wait for my Sunday mails on blogs that I really like. “Life is like a box of chocolates”, says Forrest Gump in the movie that we are watching, “you never know what is inside”.
I will leave you with this hopeful ending – the temporary end of my complaining. I wish you a box of chocolates too.
PS (The next day) This is perhaps some weird reverse psychology I am subjecting myself too, but this morning I woke up thinking I should kick myself into action and take charge. Nobody is going to do it for me. So I checked out on what other Dutch universities are researching on information security. Found two very interesting top professors who are interested in governance and behaviour, and who do or supervise actual research. I wrote to both of them, not bombarding them with information, but explaining I need advice on how to integrate my IT security literature study in a language philosophy dissertation, and would they be prepared to talk to me about this? Yes, I have taken my supervisor’s advice to go for a face-to-face meeting. Has to be a digital meeting, though. I cannot manage the travelling, well, not much. First, see if they respond. And if not, there is an entire world out there.
PPS (a week later) I periodically check for new CFS research. A useful perk of my studies, because I can access all the medical journals too. I came across into a whole new line of thinking that seems to fit my condition exactly. The hypothesis CFS patients cannot burn carbs (well) and therefore their starving cells switch to whatever fuel is at hand. Which is ineffective (tiredness), depletes some important amino acids (long recovery) and saddles the muscles with lactic acid (pain). Exactly, that is how it feels. The same is found in healthy people after intensive exercise. The medical articles are difficult to read, but there is a beautiful write up here. Some comments make for an interesting read – people get angry because the article describes how they feel without providing a solution. But I think these researchers are well underway to solve the mystery – perhaps another 5 years? Here is hoping ..
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A quiet moment
Quiet moments – I don’t get many of these. So I am savouring the moment. It won’t last – by tomorrow morning, or probably as I prepare to go to sleep, things will have moved again at great speed. But for now, things are quiet. After the weekend and after having completed another 2 1/2 week stretch on my research project, and just before I go back the day job. Bliss.
Speaking of the day job, I came back to it in the second week of January from my gloriously long leave. There were hundreds of mails, and more pouring in. Most were either requests for knowledge or attempts to involve me in some project. Hmm. I worked late in order to get rid of them. Must find a way to prevent that from happening again. Or perhaps, as a colleague suggested, come a back a day early and not tell anyone 🙂
Source: dilbert.com Between those, this is my own very secret project: trying to make the Dutch Tax office, or even better, the country, a safe(r) place. In terms of digital information, that is. You probably think that this would be an impossible task for me by my lonesome, and you would be right. But still I try. I will be pensioned off in 2742 days from now and I would love to look back at that point and think that I made a small contribution. Or at least have not made things much worse. So much work, so little time. I will return to it tomorrow. For today is my official old-crone-leave day which I spend on academic things.
Today was my 3-weekly meeting with my supervisor. I send him status reports a few days beforehand, but I think I may be sending them in too late, because I think he had not been able to read it all. Mind you, I speak to him more frequently than I ever did before, so perhaps it does not matter. Or perhaps the way I present my information does not resonate (lots of diagrams). Or he is simply too busy. Anyway, most of our talk today went to repeating and explaining what I had been doing, and when the ideas are new, I always find it difficult to express myself. I think he wants me to start collecting hard evidence, and so do I, but I need, must have the general picture in my head before I can start. We are agreed on the kind of work that needs to be done: locate those bits – traces; I suppose – people put in our conversation which are not about information, but about the relationship with the audience. It is just that I need a framework to start investigating – just noting that a conversation is “face-to-face” simply is not enough.
So what did I find by the way of theoretical framework? Well, I ran into this guy called Watzlawick who was inspired by Bateson (who invented the double-bind) and in his turn inspired Janet Bavelas who spent her life trying to prove that Watzlawick was right – with some tweaks and alterations. I spent nearly 3 weeks dissecting his 1967 book, and it taught me a lot, apart from what Bavelas is on about, which I still need to investigate further. The basic idea is this:
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-sides_model What I like about it, it that preserves both the relationship side (what I or you must do, believe, think, avoid whatever) and the factual information side (he calls that “digital” because it its on-off character). In fact, according to Watzlawick, many misunderstanding and disagreements come from misreading the most important side – the relationship side (he calls that “analog”) or confusing the two. Did you know that when reading out a simple list of words, we automatically check if they are appropriate to our audience? Hence, we are much slower in reading out words we think are offensive to whoever is listening. Not mind blowing, just to show that both sides of the message count.
Why is it important? Well, it had not occurred to me that there may be a common base to conflict and misunderstanding from getting tangled up and confusing the relationship and the informative side of a conversation. Experienced negotiators know this, of course, but I did not :-). I seem to recall that such styles play a role in business communication ( see: thinking in colours) and in autism. Must investigate.
There is also a nice bit on paradoxical communication – not my subject, but still fun:
“You sure write good!” (Watzlawick et al, 1967) There was one other thought that hit me: misunderstandings are something you cannot agree upon between you. The misunderstanding would instantly disappear. You could agree in retrospect that there was a misunderstanding, but not at the time it is happening. Which is weird. It also means that you could be wrong about the nature of the misunderstanding you had with someone, even if you are both agreed on it. Which I suppose could also be true of disagreements.
If you feel like it, start sending in misunderstandings. I created an English and a Dutch form on the opening screen of this site, under the heading “misunderstandings“. There is some stuff about not putting in private information, but that is obligatory these days – you understand, I am sure.
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Truth and meaning
I had intended to dive straight into my PhD, follow my research proposal, complete it, etc. But for some reason my professor insisted on delivering cautionary tales. About how a phd never turns out according to its initial proposal (even if he thought it was very good on another occasion). About how in my particular case and quest, I would have to look at other disciplines beside philosophy. About how I might as well take six years and never publish anything as long as I enjoyed myself. Well … I think I understand what he meant – rephrased his sentences several times and rechecked – but I am not at all sure why he said these things, other than that he appeared to want me to slow down. So I thought I’d think about it a little bit first.
Without throwing my research proposal at you (although it is here if you want to read it), I must admit that it is far more complex to explain why something does not happen (understanding) than why it does happen. Because, in order to explain what does not happen, you have to understand exactly what it is that does not happen that could have happened. A bit like why it takes much longer not to find something in your pocket. So, I embarked on some thinking-by-myself, in the wild, so to speak.
I had been worrying about two publications (well, books-n-papers) in my day-job field (information technology), and it would not leave me alone. So I decided to investigate further.
Ogden & Richards, meaning triangle One is on Archimate. That is a open-source modelling language used by digital architects to make blueprints of business environments. It was developed primarily by Mark Lankhorst, but there were some other researchers involved in connecting up Archimate with the theoretical background, including philosophy of language, in this paper: Arbab et al (2015). Actually, the claim they make is not so terribly large, it seems. They refer back to the meaning triangle proposed by Morris (1946) which really is not by Morris at all, but goes back to Ogden & Morris (1923). Basically, it says that there is a relationship between things in the outside world and our thoughts, and that we connect they two using symbols. They then use symbols (in a modelling language) and thought/reference (the meaning of those symbols, presumably as expressed or understood by the modellers. Presto: meaningful diagrams. To be honest, there is not really very much philosophy of language in this theory. I have written to one of the researchers to ask if this claim should not simply be taken out – as it eats no bread, as they say.
The other theory is by Jan Dietz and colleagues, called DEMO. It is a modelling and design language, which was conceived in the early 90s and still going strong. It claims ( Ettema & Dietz, 2009) to be firmly rooted in philosophy of language, as opposed to Archimate, because it is based on a more-modern-than-Searle conception of speech acts, as advocated by Habermas, which envisages speech acts not just as information carriers but as coordination devices. Sounds much like Brandom’s normative inferentialism. Habermas’ insight into speech acts was not so different from the currently mainstream idea: speech acts are not just for passing on information. Speech acts also have a social component related to the speaker/hearer’s role – as a human being, as a member of one or more groups. It turns out, Brandom and Habermas met and agreed on much but also disagreed vehemently. I collected papers on the Brandom-Habermas debate, but there was no quick way in – and quite a few philosophers professed not to understand it either. Must be some fine point of philosophy, which I will return to if I must. But for the moment, I cannot imagine this controversy – which many philosophers profess not to understand – would have any impact on the conception of DEMO.
I must admit that I spent a happy evening tracing back all the theoretical components that are supposed to make up DEMO, and were fitted with big Greek letters accordingly. It had a distinct shopping spree feel to it – a stack of theories from everywhere, incorporated because they seemed to fit, a sort of build-your-own-theoretical-foundations-toolkit. Not in a million years would I be allowed to construct a theory on such a basis. But, I find DEMO interesting because it seems to explain how an organisation can help itself to new facts, truth, whatever you want to call them. Which is exactly what we do in speech acts, when we talk to each other. So I have written to ask what DEMO’s attachment is to Habermas. I personally think, there is none. Brandom would do just as well. Or even Grice, as nothing seems to be said about the motivation to coordinate actions. The point is, I think that in creating DEMO its authors may have understood specific felicity conditions for speech acts, and I want to find out how and what and where, because such notions may point to conditions for avoid misunderstanding, even in a highly stylised environment such as a business. Also, the fact that DEMO thinks of language in terms of coordination and collaboration rather than information exchange is still quite revolutionary, even though it was developed nearly 30 years ago. I want to know where the ideas came from.
I was happy to receive a reply on both counts – invitations to talk further. Great. Meanwhile a ideas has been brewing in my head. Might it be the case that modelling languages like Archimate and DEMO are in fact natural language-extensions? They are not mathematical languages, I am quite sure of that. They are not natural languages, they are made with a specific purpose in mind. Their elementary concepts constitute an elementary grammar plus the idea that whatever we want to happen (be it a process, a decision, an action or whatever) can be expressed in that grammar – i.e. stripping additional meanings, context etc down to a bare, model-able minimum.
The other side of the problem is the relationship between computer commands and “truth”. I need to find the right academic sources, but I am pretty sure none exist. I crossed checked with Husband coz he has actually written machine code where I hovered just above in my RPGII. Code simply instructs the processor to load two values, compare them and then take some action defined by you. There is no truth to it in any philosophical sense, other than whatever comes out of the comparison and taken as a starting point for action.
Just to make sure I don’t miss anything obvious, I have also been reading up on philosophical truth in all its variations. I found that that Habermas was a staunch supporter of the consensus theory of truth: whatever a specified group believes to be true, is true. There are other theories – correspondence, coherence, constructivist, pragmatic; and then there are the so-deflationary theories which say that truth is not a property of statements. I was surprised to learn that Strawson (1949) had proposed a performative theory of truth which characterised truth as a property of the speaker’s intentions, in response to Tarski who invented the concept of a object language to solve the liar’s paradox. Sounds like an early beginning of speech act theory to me!
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Think first
An open door, yes: always a good idea, to think first. And yes, thinking is what philosophers do. Or they think about what others have thought. Or both. But that is not the kind of thinking that I mean.
I am in search of a documentation and retrieval system for my thoughts and notes and everything that goes into future publications, phd, whatever. I suppose having spent most of my working life in information science, I have a penchant for organising (although this does not extend to my very large, ever messy desk).
The problem is, Philosophia must have the largest number of digital illiterates of any discipline. The modus operandi does not seem to have changed in thousands of years: reading books and holding forth. Ok, so the reading may be on a computer and the holding forth via zoom – but that is as far as innovation has touched philosophy. In fact, philosophers seem to think that because their thinking led to the Computer (see Aristotle introducing it below), they are under no obligation to do anything with it. That is for the people. Somewhat like how the policy makers in the Hague look upon us civil servants to do the actual work (sorry, the day job crept in again).
source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/aristotle-computer/518697/ During the ReMa journey, I tried various systems of organising what I learned. Some of these I have documented here, and I introduced the idea of using tools here.
Mindmaps
I started off making mind maps. This is something I really like doing, and I found it worked well with short essays of the type that we were set during year-long skills seminar. One of my professors once saw one of my maps and professed total admiration – how had I done that? I did not have the heart to tell him that children get taught this at school nowadays, and that there are many many people who are much better at creative mind mapping than I am. Which I love coz I love infographics – see here. But the problem with mind maps is that they become incomprehensible when they get larger. So much so, that I would find a really nice mind map of some complicated problem on my hard drive, and think: “now where did I get this from” ? Only to remember a while after that I had made it myself – some weeks before. Ok, so not a good memory aid, that much is clear.
Zotero and Calibre
I had a look at my citation manager, Zotero. Which is a nifty program, and getting better all the time. It can do a lot (see here) but beyond storing articles in different collection, it cannot help me much. This is because all of its features, like tagging and grouping and linking are the level of the individual paper, whereas I want to organise the text content. Calibre is not an option either – it is wonderful for organising ebooks, but it cannot even handle papers properly.
Mediawiki
Next I started to create my very own Wikipedia. The software that created Wikipedia is called mediawiki, and I managed to install in a subdomain to this blog. I then spent an inordinate amount of time tweaking the installation and teaching myself how to use it, how to create boxes, use colours, deploy pre-programmed templates and generally make my DIY wiki look pretty and interesting. Then I went to fill it. I spent a long time thinking about the categories (Mediawiki-speak) I would organise my information, and eventually came up with this: Philosophers – Positions – Arguments – Topics – Definitions. These two features of mediawiki really helped: hotlinking to another page and relating any page to one or more categories. I started pouring stuff into my wiki, but gradually slowed down. The problem was that wiki-pages are great to make – once you have finished with the material you want organise and you know exactly how. By the time I have worked out all of that, it is time to move to the next paper. I concluded I needed something that would help me create an organising system on the fly.
Atlas.Ti
Next my love affair with Atlas.TI. I got the idea from architectural modelling in my day job. I even used archimate once to model autopoietic enactivism. Atlas.Ti is much more flexible than archimate, it is really quite wonderful. I got it for next to nothing in the student webshop, and later found out that the university distributes it for free. I also bought a competing program, MAXQDA plus. Both programs help you to annotate texts and then organise the labels into a scheme for easy retrieval and analysis. The philosophy behind them is different – there is a good article here, explaining how MAXQDA is based on qualitive content analysis, whereas Atlas.TI works allows you to find patterns in a text, using your own codingin system – more akin to grounded theory. Atlas.TI seemed to fulfill all my needs – for a while. I was so happy with it, I even bought an upgrade to the version 9 because I could not wait for the university to supply one for free (which of course by now they have done). Below you can see how it works. You annotate a paper through codes. Codes can be reused across a project – this project contains 135 papers.
You can then use the codes to create network diagrams, like so:
I have done some really nice analyses with this tool – for a presentation in my ReMa course in Amsterdam on advanced language and logic I worked out how my professor’s articles are related to various concepts he has investigated, and also for the last Philosophy of Mind seminar, when I investigated how various philosophers used different words for common ground. I also used the Atlas.TI network diagrams in my research logbook, which really looked wonderful. The only problem was that after a few months, I could not longer read the complicated diagrams I had made myself – well, not without rereading the entire paper, which sort of defeats the point. The other problem was that Atlas.Ti is not really geared toward the kind of use I make of it, nor do they plan to. The autocoding feature (which allows for automatic coding throughout a large set of documents) does not work in reverse. That means that your coding system has to be ready from before you start reading the papers. Ough. Same problem as with mediawiki. The other problem is that it cannot handle more than say 50 documents or books in any one project at one time, and you cannot interrelated projects or their codings systems. So alas. I wrote to Atlas.Ti. a couple of times, hoping to hear that they would build in the features I need, but they won’t – text annotation is not their core business. Pity.
Hypernomicon
Yet another search for philosopher’s tooling yielded a surprising result: one philosopher actually created his own tooling to dealing with philosophical research: organising and retrieving philosophical statements, knowledge, insight. Quite impressive, a philosopher-cum-programmer. The software impressed me as well. Until I tried to use it. I watched all of the instruction videos several times (there is no manual), but was not able to distill a workflow that was right for me, and the look-and-feel of the program felt awkward. Also, I did not like the manual zotero integration much. But my main worry was with becoming dependent on the author. Yes yes, the database is all readable XML, but I am not a modern programmer – I just manage procedural language programming (only in my sleep as it is a long time ago that I actually did any programming), and I positively loathe the object-oriented stuff. So what would I do with bunch of XML files? Too many worries. I needed something else.
Obsidian, my second brain
I had seen references to Obsidian before, but ignored them. Mainly because I did not know what markdown is, so I could not image why anyone would be interested in organising a bunch of markdown files, however prettily. But as it turns out, markdown is just plain text plus. Since its inception, many different versions have appeared, but they are all html-convertable and will be readable als txt files forever. Obsidian gives me all of the advantages of mediawiki without the disadvantages. It is fast and flexible. It integrates with zotero. I can link and tag notes and files. I can edit files on my PC and on my mobile devices, using icloud. The only thing that is missing is being able to publish to website (other than the paid version). But that will come, I am sure.
I started out with a work problem – a huge text that needed cutting up, the ISO27002 guidelines. This I needed to do anyway, so it seemed a good place to start. And yes, I was able to deconstruct the document and then put it back together again, although the learning curve was a bit steep – as it always is with these things. I will write up a post on the configuration(s) I arrived at and publish it on the thinking tools page, at some point. See below a snapshot of my folder structure, and a graph based on the word enacted.
Obsidian has a great online support community and extensive documentation. There are many plugins. It also integrates with Zotero. Cannot wait for the new Zotero release! Anyway, I think Obsidian may be it for me. The hierarchical tagging system is particularly helpful, because of another problem which I will describe next.
Towards a metamodel or a taxonomy of philosophy
Actually, there are not that many who tried. There are a few lone papers. This one is the best I came across: Grenon, P., Smith, B. Foundations of an ontology of philosophy. Synthese 182, 185–204 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9658-x. It did not receive much attention. But I thought I’d try and model the ontology component they recommended in UML (nice reason to update my visio license), as a data model.
The problem is in the centre part. Grenon and Smith assume two things:
a) concept, proposition, argument, theory and method are disjunct
b) the philosopher’s workflow is like so: think a concept, propose whether it is true or not, supply argumentation, and then develop a theory using a method.
Unfortunately, philosophers are agreed on neither. They are not even agreed on the meaning of terms like concept or theory.And there is the addition problem of nesting – ad infinitum. I was a miserable when I saw this. And then I thought: who cares that philosophers don’t agree on their definitions or way of working. This is about my work, and I can define terms and workflows in whatever way I want. And I do want, because I need to store and retrieve.
So I decided to organise philosophers into single authors, groups and main fields (branches). I also have terms, topics, theories and approaches. See the image below. For my folders, I use the Johnny.decimal numbering system (which I have also started using at home and at the office). Folders and some notes are displayed on the left. I use aliases for my notes (at the top, with the metadata) so I can refer to them in different ways (with or without capitals, etc). I use a hierarchical tagging system, shown on the right.
I have already harvested my best essays in this system and am now in the progress of harvesting whatever may be useful from my diy wikipedia before I close it down forever. Let’s hope Obsidian will support me through the next few years, but I am hopeful. I also enjoy watching the videos Tall guy Jenks makes. He is a self-proclaimed ADHD sufferer, and he says the only way he can live and work is by outsourcing his information management as much as possible. Wow. I suppose the same is true of me, but with me coz of a not-so-young-anymore memory and too many things to do in a day.
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