Communicate
PhD

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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