In late 1906, William James gave a series of lectures on the topic of a newly coalesced philosophical approach that had come to be known as “pragmatism.” His second lecture was titled “What Pragmatism Means.” It starts with a story that illustrates what you might call the “pragmatic temperament.” I try to have that temperament myself.
I am, by nature and upbringing, dogmatic, but I fell in among bad companions earlier in my life – Lisp and Smalltalk programmers, certain philosophers of science, and the American Pragmatist philosophers. They made me better at my job of a software consultant.
Something that really struck me, way back when, was part of the Introduction to Richard Rorty’s Consequences of Pragmatism. I offer it to you, with a little light commentary.
An occasional controversy in science is whether some theoretical “entity” is really real, or just a mathematical/modeling convenience. Ian Hacking has an interesting and eminently pragmatic answer that goes under the name “entity realism.” I believe him.
Human beans love thinking in binary oppositions. That is often way too crude for serious understanding and problem-solving. I offer a complex visual metaphor that might help you and others push against the binary reflex.
Sometimes the answer to “is X true or false?” can only be a shrug. The answer might be unknowable, or perhaps unknowable without an impractical amount of work. Jaina seven-valued logic offers an interesting perspective on (or alternative to) the problem.
A Zettelkasten is a particular sort of hypertext document as well as a technique for creating it. My aim in this post is to give you an understanding of a Zettelkasten document – its parts and its whole – and, more importantly, show something of what it’s like to work with a Zettelkasten. A Zettelkasten will appeal to some people much more than to others, and I’d like you to be able to predict where you’d fall on that spectrum. Presenting vignettes of my own work (lightly fictionalized) is the means I’ve chosen.
Comparisons of the Zettelkasten to what I earlier called a “wiki traditional” hypertext document will come in a later post.
Back in 2002, I published an article about how people learn “tacit knowledge,” using as an example how students of veterinary medicine learn a diagnostic category.
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage from that example over the years (in speeches and such), and I’d like to update the article, because there were some aspects I missed back then.
What does it mean to be a good Christian? How do you decide whether something someone made is art or not art? If you say you’re practicing Agile software development, and I say you’re not – that you’re missing the point – where do we go from there?
The answer to the last question, in my experience, is: nowhere, and fast. But we don’t have that problem with questions like “is that tree an elm?” or “is light a particle or a wave?” Why not?
A little lesson from Wikipedia.
(Note: fear not. The second installment in the hypertext series is coming along. It’s long.)
Hypertext documents vary a good deal, so statements beginning “Hypertext is…” are likely to obscure more than they reveal. In three posts, I’ll discuss the dominant style (“wiki traditional”), one that flips the emphasis (“Zettelkasten”), and how well two metaphors (“garden” and “rhizome”) work for each. My premise is that if you understand what you’re doing when you write a particular kind of hypertext, you’ll do it better.