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EM in support of Radical Empiricism

  • The RE+EM response to the challenges of a rationalistic outlook on computing can be contrasted with / related to responses suggested by the readings of Heidegger and Maturana reported by Winograd and Flores.
    ... see James/EM as providing a more primitive foundation for computing. Controversial nature of such a claim: Graham Bird's comments: "the 'speechlessness' of sensations" [D4] / solipsism / the religious apologist (See "Changing the epistemological and psychological subject: William James's psychology without borders", Marianne Janack, Metaphilosophy, Vol. 35, no 1-2, pp. 160-177, 2004).
  • Matters arising: Why Radical Empiricism? What's so special about the link between EM and RE?
  • How EM can be seen as helpful in endorsing WJ's perspective - by capitalising on the unprecedented power to generate experiences in a controlled imaginative manner that computing technology affords.
    • Communication before and beyond words: JAL paper discussion - semantics of definitions; Gooding-style construal discussion; support for conjunctive relations; elaborating the idea of reality made in experience "subjectivity and objectivity are affairs not of what an experience is aboriginally made of, but of its classification" [C5]; the "Experiential Framework for Learning"; quality of the medium within which definitive scripts are realised; immediacy and the relevance of present context

  • Pluralism - concurrent design and the railway model: Agent-oriented modelling and commonsense concurrency; LSD construal: "But how the experiences ever get themselves made, or why their characters and relations are just such as appear, we can not begin to understand" [C4]; contrast with formal treatment and its limitations; ambiguity in perspective and presumption; negotiating inconsistency and conflict in pursuit of conceptual integrity: "Dyaks of Borneo" [C2]; "[for the transcendentalist] conception disintegrates experience utterly" [B5]
  • Formality and informality - rethinking programming: a walk around heapsort; mathematics from formal and informal perspectives; Newtonian variables, proof presentation; from Alloy specification to the human mathematician's apprehension; (re)classification of experience; the experimental paradox
  • Lived experience: "intuition" - direct apprehension and the importance of intuition in software development (Peter Naur); "the separation of [experience] into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition - the addition, to a concrete piece of it, of other sets of experiences, in connection with which severally its use or function may be of two different kinds [C1]"; "chaos of incommensurable relations that we cannot straighten out ... " [C4]; "... We have to abstract groups of them, and handle these separately if we are to talk of them at all.": varieties of object-orientation [%cadence]