1.3 not to use old
tools for new problems, scholarship requires a cybersage, digital
humanities projects, critical programming studies, plan of the
dissertation
schedule
2.1 modernism
and postmodernism, regressive subjectivity, Heideggers America,
inventing the posthuman
4 1 3 (+) [-6+]mCQKshneiderman-direct_manipulation (491) 20131019c 0 -2+ progress/2013/10/notes_for_shneiderman-direct_manipulation.html Xerox Star office automation user interface examples of direct manipulation, graphical versus command driven. (491) Designers of advanced office automation systems have used direct manipulation principles. The Xerox Star offers sophisticated text formating options, graphics, multiple fonts, and a rapid, high-resolution, cursor-based user interface.
4 1 3 (+) [-6+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (44) 20131010i 0 -3+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Designers of object-oriented languages, knowledge representation, database design, network designers involved in ontological research. (44) To make this concrete, consider the exploding interest, both theoretical and practical, in the development of object-oriented languages. Even if not advertised as such, this turn of events has led computer science squarely into the business of doing research in ontology. (44) coding up the details of task-specific domains is the job of usersof object-oriented languages, not their designers.
4 1 3 (+) [-6+]mCQKstroustrup-design_and_evolution_of_cpp (iii) 20131001 0 -7+ progress/2013/10/notes_for_stroustrup-design_and_evolution_of_cpp.html Purports to be philosophical in sense of explaining design and evolution of C++, immediately dispelling notion of technological determinism by appealing to social context and iterative development. (iii) Traditional books about programming and programming languages explain whata language is and how to use it. However, many people are also curious about whya language is the way it is and how it came to be that way. . . . It explains how C++ evolved from its first design to the language in use today. It describes the key problems, design aims, language ideas, and constraints that shaped C++, and how they changed over time.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKbork-journal 20140625 20140625b 6 -29+ journal_2014.html Watch lost Steve Jobs interview by Cringley and think it belongs in scope of dissertation analysis; the whole thing could be injected into chapter four. Note quasi scientific confirmation that fantasy tone generator was real. Jobs describes once in an epoch blue boxing pranks inspiring computer design philosophy. Built terminal and Apple one as two projects with Wozniak. Good description of printed circuit board whose affordances permitted daring experiments, funded by their microbus and other object back. Ambitions for Apple two color graphics by Woz and supplying software hobbyists ready to program units by Jobs. Fantastic booth at West Coast Computer Fair where it debuted after retired Markele joined could also be place to play a game that can be thought in a special way at the point all copyrights expire for the content supplying its run time engine. Recall the tapoc software can regulate appearance or concealment of programmed quotation by adjusting its relevance. Jobs suggests everyone in the country learns to program because like going to law school it teaches you to think; views computer science as a liberal art, taking a course learning to program. Blinded by graphical user interface over networked desktops made obvious all computers would use such interfaces. Discusses mistakes companies use trying to replicate past successes at larger scale by emphasizing process over content; group of employees largely from HP missed content understanding produced Lisa, which was mismatch for image of company selling affordable units. Macintosh team on mission from God to save Apple reinventing everything from manufacturing with automated facility. Spent four years building one targeted at 2500 instead of desired 1000 dollars, better than failure Gates notes of IBM OS/2 project. Claims Scully has disease of mistakenly thinking ninety percent of great projects are inspiring idea, failing to consider thousands of concepts that must be kept together to get what you want, the low cost, high performance, artistically designed humanist machine. Passionate teamwork like polishing rocks getting beautiful stones from ordinary materials. Difference between average and best software is fifty to one where ten to twenty to one for most other things, making self policing pockets of A players rejecting all lower talents. Do not have to baby egos of people who know they are really good, so saying their work is shit a corrective gesture because the work is not good enough for the goals of the team. Interviewer wants to know how and why desktop publishing chosen, which became killer app, a term used by Gates. Claims Macintosh team also envisioned networked office ahead of its time when desktop publishing should have been adequate focus, leading to departure in 1985 for which Jobs blames Scully and second guesses his wisdom in hiring him, unable to run a two billion dollar company handle contraction of PC marketplace though good business survival sense from working at Pepsi. Apple on glideslope to die that is not reversible at time of interview because Apple stood still watching Microsoft catch up, its differentiation eroding, its research and development efforts failing to understand how to move things forward and create new products. Claims Microsoft orbit benefited from Saturn five booster IBM working together to create new opportunities for themselves, now dominating PC space by transferring programs initially developed for Macintosh. The problem with Microsoft is they have no taste in a big way, not thinking of original ideas or bringing much culture into their product like proportionally spaced fonts from corporate fine arts appreciation; they make third rate products with no spirit, they are very pedestrian, making spiritless customers, perhaps implying making the species dumber concluding Microsoft is just McDonalds, though a nod to Misa is deserved for deeper analysis of this stereotypical metaphor base. Declares software infiltrating everything we do, giving example of MCI billing software beating AT&T initiatives as perspective of big person of projective city. Mentions perfecting use of object oriented technology allowing Apple to build software ten times faster. Computer metamorphizing into communication device prediction matching Gates; asserts the web will be seen as the defining technology, social moment for computing. Remembers example of human on bicycle beating condor in bodily efficiency transporting itself as inspiration, feeling himself at exactly the right place to nudge vector of human progress in the right direction. Shameless about stealing great ideas; liberal arts air attitude brought in by Macintosh team members who were the best in their fields besides being computer scientists: musicians, artists, hippies. Remembering the sixties happened in the early seventies, we can decide not to have left the happening of the eighties. Believes people who want spirit of artists rather than kings can be put into products, products people will admit they love, which they would not say about ordinary consumer objects.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKfuller-software_studies (209) 20130923h 0 -8+ progress/2011/10/notes_for_fuller-software_studies.html Perl: intentional engagement with modernism and postmodernism by Wall in programming language design, intended to allow more degrees of freedom; relevant to critical code studies and critical programming. (209) Programming with Perl emphasizes material conditions, which evokes how N. Katherine Hayles, in Writing Machines, stresses materiality in relation to writing. (210) In the lecture, Perl, the first postmodern computer language, Larry Wall is keen to point out that modernist culture was based on or rather than and, something he says that postmodern culture reverses. (210-211) In claiming AND has higher precedence than OR does, Wall is focusing on the eclecticism of Perl and how algorithms can be expressed in multiple ways that express the style of the programmer. . . . The suggestion is that Perl is not only useful on a practical level but that it also holds the potential to reveal some of the contradictions and antagonisms associated with the production of software.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKgolumbia-cultural_logic_of_computation (86-87) 20131031c 0 -15+ progress/2013/08/notes_for_golumbia-cultural_logic_of_computation.html Weaver Machine Translation of Languages ignore prior linguistics and begins with his own private memorandum on translation; compare to Burks, Goldstine, von Neumann claim that it would take us too far afield to start from first principles. (86-87) In a pathbreaking 1955 volume, Machine Translation of Languages(Locke and Booth 1955), Weaverand the editors completely avoid all discussion of prior analysis of language and formal systems, as if these fields had simply appeared ex nihilowith the development of computers. . . . Like some computationalists today, Weaver locates himself in a specifically Christian eschatological tradition, and posits computers as a redemptive technology that can put human beings back into the prelapsarian harmony from which we have fallen. (87) In an historical introduction provided by the editors, the history of MT begins abruptly in 1946, as if questions of the formal nature of language had never been addressed before. . . . The book itself begins with Weaverƒs famous, (until-them) privately circulated memorandum of 1949, here published as Translation, and was circulated among many computer scientists of the time who dissented from its conclusions even then. (88-89) The most famous part of Weaverƒs memorandum suggests that MT is a project similar to cryptanalysis, one of the other primary uses for wartime computing. . . . Neither Enigma nor the Bombe could translate; instead, they performed properly algorithmic operations on strings of codes, so that human interpreters could have access to the underlying natural language.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKkernighan_ritchie-c_programming_language (ix) 20131001 0 -5+ progress/2013/10/notes_for_kernighan_ritchie-c_programming_language.html Economy of expression, modern flow control and data structures, rich set of operators key features of C. (ix) C is a general-purpose programming language which features economy of expression, modern flow control and data structures, and a rich set of operators. . . . its absence of restrictions and its generality make it more convenient and effective for many tasks than supposedly more powerful languages.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKshneiderman-direct_manipulation (489) 20131019a 0 -8+ progress/2013/10/notes_for_shneiderman-direct_manipulation.html Video games easy to learn by analogy when commands are physical actions, and lessons from games can be transferred to office applications; compare to Gee. (489) Because their fields of action are abstractions of reality, these games are easily understood learning is by analogy. (490) The commands are physical actions, such as button presses, joystick motions, or know rotations, whose results appear immediately on the screen. . . . Error messages are unnecessary because the results of actions are so obvious and easily reversed. These principles can be applied to office automation, personal computing, and other interactive environments. (490) Game players compete with the system, but application-system users apparently prefer a strong internal locus of control, which gives them the sense of being in charge.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKshneiderman-direct_manipulation (491) 20131019b 0 -5+ progress/2013/10/notes_for_shneiderman-direct_manipulation.html Driving automobile as quintessence of direct manipulation. (491) Driving an automobile is my favorite example of direct manipulation. . . . Imagine trying to turn by issuing a LEFT 30 DEGREES command and then issuing another command to check your position, but this is the operational level of many office automation tools today.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKshneiderman-direct_manipulation (492) 20131019d 0 -6+ progress/2013/10/notes_for_shneiderman-direct_manipulation.html Further examples of Hatfield WYSIWYG, Nelson virtuality. (492) What you see is what you get, is a phrase used by Don Hatfield of IBM and others to describe the general approach. . . . The display should indicate a complete image of what the current status is, what errors have occurred, and what actions are appropriate, according to Thimbleby. Another imaginative observer of interactive system designs, Ted Nelson, has noticed user excitement over interfaces constructed by what he calls the principle of virtuality - a representation of reality that can be manipulated.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKshneiderman-direct_manipulation (492) 20131019e 0 -3+ progress/2013/10/notes_for_shneiderman-direct_manipulation.html Problem solving and learning depend on suitable representation, such as Papert Logo mathematical microworld. (492) Another perspective on direct manipulation comes from psychology literature on problem solving. It shows that suitable representation of problems are crucial to solution finding and to learning. (493) Papertƒs Logo language creates a mathematical microworld in which the principles of geometry are visible.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKshneiderman-direct_manipulation (494) 20131019g 0 -7+ progress/2013/10/notes_for_shneiderman-direct_manipulation.html Syntactic/semantic model of user behavior based on kinds of knowledge in long-term memory: syntactic volatile, acquired through rote memorization, semantic memorable, acquired through explanation, analogy, example, hierarchically structured in matrix of concepts. (494) My own understanding of direct manipulation was facilitated by considering the syntactic/semantic model of user behavior. (494) The basic idea is that there are two kinds of knowledge in long-term memory: syntactic and semantic. (494) This knowledge is arbitrary and therefore acquired by rote memorization. Syntactic knowledge is volatile in memory and easily forgotten unless frequently used. (494) The concepts or functionality semantic knowledge are hierarchically structured from low-level functions to higher level concepts. (495) Semantic knowledge, which is acquired through general explanation, analogy, and example, is easily anchored to familiar concepts and is therefore stable in memory. The command formulation process in the syntactic/semantic model proceeds from the userƒs perception of the task in the high-level problem domain to the decomposition into multiple, lower level semantic operations and the conversion into a set of commands.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKshneiderman-direct_manipulation (495) 20131019h 0 -3+ progress/2013/10/notes_for_shneiderman-direct_manipulation.html Training manuals should be written based on semantic learning principles. (495) The syntactic/semantic model suggests that training manuals should be written from the more familiar, high-level, problem domain viewpoint. The titles of sections should describe problem domain operations that the user deals with regularly. Then the details of the commands used to accomplish the task can be presented, and finally, the actual syntax can be shown.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKshneiderman-direct_manipulation (495) 20131019i 0 -7+ progress/2013/10/notes_for_shneiderman-direct_manipulation.html Semantic learning explains success of direct manipulation versus difficulty of mathematics and programming. (495) The success of direct manipulation is understandable in the context of the syntactic/semantic model. The object of interest is displayed so that actions are directly in the high-level problem domain. There is little need for decomposition into multiple commands with a complex syntactic form. On the contrary, each command produces a comprehensible action in the problem domain that is immediately visible. The closeness of the problem domain to the command action reduces operator problem-solving load and stress. (495) Since mathematics and programming require abstract thinking, they are difficult for children, and a greater effort must be made to link the symbolic representation to the actual object. Direct manipulation is an attempt to bring activity to the concrete operational stage or even to the preoperational stage, thus making some tasks easier for children and adults.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKshneiderman-direct_manipulation (496) 20131019j 0 -4+ progress/2013/10/notes_for_shneiderman-direct_manipulation.html Trick is appropriate representation of reality, especially when no physical parallel. (496) The trick in creating a direct manipulation system is to come up with an appropriate representation or model of reality. (497) It is possible to apply direct manipulation to environments for which there is no obvious physical parallel. (497) Direct manipulation has the power to attract users because it is comprehensible, natural, rapid, and even enjoyable. If actions are simple, reversibility ensured, and retention easy, then anxiety recedes and satisfaction flows in.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (vii-viii) 20131010 0 -5+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Claims to be a computer scientist turned philosopher, working in language research. (vii-viii) Having spent more than twenty-five years working in the trenches of practicing computer science, in a long-term effort to develop an empirically responsible theory of computation, I had never met such a logically pure entity, never met such a lapidary individual thing. . . . By and large, or so at least my experience suggests, the world is an unruly place much messier than reigning ontological and scientific myths would lead one to suspect.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (viii) 20131108 0 -3+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Conception of object in science and analytic philosophy resembles manicured garden more so than grimy ice flow taught from decades programming. (viii) And for better or worse but mostly, I believe, for worse the conception of objectƒ that has been enshrined in present-day science and analytic philosophy, with its presumptive underlying precision and clarity, is more reminiscent of fastidiously cropped hedge rows, carefully weeded rose gardens, and individually labeled decorative trees, then it is of the endless and rough arctic plain, or of a million-ton iceberg midwifed with a deafening crack and splintering spray from a grimy 10,000-year-old ice flow. (ix) Neither discovered, nor in any simple sense merely constructed, gardens, in order to to be gardens, must be cared for, tended even loved. What more could one ask for, by way of ontological moral?
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (3) 20131010a 0 -4+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Introduces philosophy of presence operating in middle distance between naive realism and pure constructivism. (3) This book introduces a new metaphysics a philosophy of presencethat aims to steer a path between the Scylla of na ve realism and the Charybdis of pure constructivism. (3-4) Fundamental to the view is a claim that objects, properties, practice, and politics indeed everything ontological live in what is called the middle distance: an intermediate realm between a proximal though ultimately ineffable connection, reminiscent of the familiar physical bumping and shoving of the world, and a more remote disconnection, a form of unbridgeable separation that lies at the root of abstraction and of the partial (and painful) subject-object divide. No sense attends to the idea of complete connection or complete disconnection; limit idealizations are outmoded. Yet an essential interplay of patterns of partial connection and partial disconnection restless figures of separation and engagement is shown to under lie a single notion taken to unify representation and ontology: that of a subjectƒs registrationof the world.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (5) 20131108a 0 -13+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Criteria for theory of computation are empirical and conceptual, doing justice to contemporary computational practice and providing foundation to cognitivism, computation in the wild. (5) For more than twenty-five years I have been striving to develop an adequate and comprehensive theory of computation, one able to meet two essential criteria: 1. Empirical: It must do justice to computational practice (e.g., be capable of explaining Microsoft Word including for reasons that will emerge, the program itself, its construction, maintenance, and use); and 2. Conceptual: It must provide a tenable foundation for the computational theory of mind the thesis, sometimes known as cognitivism, that underlies artificial intelligence and cognitive science. (6) By the same token, I reject all proposals that assume that computation can be defined. By my lights, an adequate theory must make a substantive empirical claim about what I call computation in the wild: that eruptive body of practices, techniques, networks, machines, and behavior that has so palpably revolutionized late-twentieth-century life. (6-7) In my view, that is, cognitivism holds that people manifest, or exemplify, or are, or can be explained by, or can be illuminatingly understood in terms of, whatever properties it is that characterize some identifiable species of the genus exemplified by computation-in-the-wild. . . . The cognitive revolution is fueled, both directly and indirectly, by an embodied and enthusiastically endorsed, but as-yet largely tacit, intuition based on many years of practical computational experience. (8) Not only do these writers make a hypothetical statement about people, that they are physical, formal, or explicit symbol manipulators, respectively; they do so by making a hypothetical statement about computers, that they are in some essential or illuminating way characterizable in the same way.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (8) 20131010b 0 -11+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html No construal of computation meets either the empirical or conceptual criterion. (8) That, then, constitutes what I will call the computational project: to formulate a true and satisfying theory of computation that honors these two criteria. Needless to say, neither criterion is easy to meet. Elsewhere, I report on a study of half a dozen reigning construals of computation, with reference to both criteria---formal symbol manipulation, automata theory, information processing, digital state machines, recursion theory, Turing machines, the theory of effective computability, complexity theory, the assumptions underlying programming language semantics, and the like and argue, in brief, that each fails on both counts. (9-11) The most celebrated difficulties have to do with semantics. It is widely recognized that computation is in one way or another a symbolic or representational or information-based or semantical i.e., as philosophers would say, an intentional phenomenon. . . . The only compelling reason to suppose that we (or minds or intelligence) might be computers stems from the fact that we, too, deal with representations, symbols, meaning, information, and the like.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (22-23) 20131010c 0 -5+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Difference between computer science and philosophy texts; this is the former. (22-23) This book may look like philosophy, but do not be fooled. . . . I was less interested, this time around, in developing watertight arguments than in introducing a new territory a territory that I believe is worth exploring on its own merit.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (27-28) 20131010d 0 -11+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Questions for philosophy of computing, if the overall term survives. (27-28) The first set of ontological problems that a theorist of computation encounters has to do with the nature of computation itself with the kind and character of the workaday entities of professional computational practice. What are programs, for example, really: and how do they different from data structures? What is an implementation level? What is an abstraction boundary? What is the relation between hardwareand software(the mind/body problem for machines)? In what ways are interpreters, compilers, and emulatorsalike, and in what ways different? Are virtual machinesphysical or abstract? What exactly is state? What are the identity conditions on functions, algorithms, programs,andimplementations? What is the difference between an effectand a side effect? How do computer, computation,and computabilityrelate?
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (33-34) 20130905 0 -11+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Binary models of semantics misses tripartite program, process, subject matter domains such that emphasis on one pair or the other generates different sets of philosophical problems. (33-34) Unfortunately, in my opinion, the uncritical attempt to fit computation into this [linguistic/abstract] typology has obscured, rather than illuminated, the true nature of the computational situation. The fundamental problem stems from the fact that the paradigmatic computational situation involves at least three types of entity, not just two. The situation is caricatured in figure 1-1, which discriminates among: (i) a program, of the sort that might be edited with a text editor; (ii) the processor computationto which that program gives rise, upon being executed; and (iii) some (often external) domainor subject matterthat the computation is about. Three objects naturally give rise to three binary relations, of which I will take two to be of primary importance: the program-processrelation, labeled ƒ ƒ in the diagram; and the process-subject matterrelation, labeled ƒ ƒ. (34) If you adopt the simple binary model, you are forced either to ignore or to elide one of these distinctions, and (usually) thereby to conflate two of the three fundamental types of entity. In cognitive science and the philosophy of mind and more generally, I think, in disciplines surrounding computer science it is the distinction between program and process that is elided. This leads people to adopt two very familiar views: (i) that computation is fundamentally syntactic (like manipulation of structures that are in some essential sense like written tokens); and that it can therefore be adequately characterized using concepts that were developed for written languages, such as a simple type/token distinction, a notion of (lexical) constituent, etc.; and (ii) that ƒsemanticsƒ refers to the relation between computation (the conflation of program and process) and the world in which that computation is embedded. Theoretical computer science, however, takes the opposite tack: it focuses on the program-process relation , not so much eliding as setting aside the process-subject matter relation. As a result, computer scientists view programs, not processes, as syntactic, but treat computation itself abstractly; and, more seriously, take the word ƒsemanticsƒ to refer to the program-process relation ( ), not to that between process and subject matter ( ). (35) The fact that cognitive science treats computations not just as concrete but as syntactic has misled a generation of philosophers into thinking that all standard architectures von Neumann machines, Lisp, just about everything except connectionist networks involve the explicit manipulation of formal symbols.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (35-36) 20131010e 0 -2+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Eliding programs and process prevents noticing ontological shift towards more intrinsically dynamic ontologies, in addition to Chun sourcery. (35-36) Perhaps the most unfortunate consequence of the adoption of the traditional binary semantic model, however, has been in outsidersƒ tendency to elide programand process, and thereby to miss an extraordinarily important ontological shift in focus at the heart of computer science. This is a very deeply entrenched change away from treating the world in terms of static entities instantiating properties and standing in relation, and towards a view that is much more intrinsically dynamic and active.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (37) 20131010f 0 -6+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Example of critical programming studies done by Smith on 2-Lisp. (37) In 1981, as something of a design exercise, I developed a programming language called 2-Lisp, with the explicit aim of exhibiting within the context of a programming language a degree of semantical clarity about these very semantical issues. More particularly, I identified two different semantical relationships: one, approximately in the diagram, between external expressions and internal computational structures that I called impressions (i.e., using the word ƒimpressionƒ to designate processingredients); and another, approximately , between those impressions and such external, Platonic entities as sets, numbers, and functions. (38-40) First [moral], all three domains relevant to a computation program, process, and semantic domain (task domain, domain of interpretation)--must be recognized by an adequate theory of computation as first class realms in their own right. Moreover, they should also be classified with properties they actually exhibit, rather than classified metaphorically, with properties lifted from a merely analogous domain.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (40-41) 20131010g 0 -7+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Type-coercive style like Heideggerian breakdow views representational objects only becoming visible contextually in contestation: relate to early versus late binding (Rosenberg)? (40-41) It was soon clear that what was wanted, even if I did not at the time know how to provide it, was a way of allowing distinctions to be made on the fly, as appropriate to the circumstances, in something of a type-coercive style and also, tellingly, in a manner reminiscent of Heideggerian breakdown. Representational objects needed to become visible only when the use of them ceased to be transparent. Reason, moreover, argued against the conceit of ever being able to make allnecessary distinctions in advance i.e., against the presumption that the original designer could foresee the finest-grain distinction anyone would ever need, and thus supply the rest through a series of partitions or equivalence classes. Rather, what was required was a sense of identity that would support dynamic, on-the-fly problem-specifc or task-specific differentiation including differentiation according to distinctions that had not even been imagined at a prior, safe, detached, design time. (41) It was sobering, moreover, to encounter this moral (which many social theorists would argue for in much more complex settings) even in such simple arithmetic cases as essential arithmetic calculation allegedly the paradigmatic case of formal symbol manipulation construal of computation.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (42) 20131010h 0 -2+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Nature of ontology itself at stake in study of representational nature of computation. (42) The representational nature of computation implies something very strong: that it is not just the ontology of computation that is at stake; it is the nature of ontology itself. (44) Rather, I am concerned with the more general ontological assumptions that control the categories in terms of which these details are formulated (categories like object, property, relation, and wave); and higher-order properties of those properties, having for example to do with issues of negation, parameterization, instantiation, etc.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (44-45) 20131108b 0 -5+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Computer scientists wrapped up in metaphysical questions about mereology, object identity, type/token distinctions, identity criteria, and so on because it is really the task of users to explore details of task-specific domains. (44-45) As a result, computer scientists have ended up having to face all sorts of unabashedly metaphysical questions: about the nature of mereology(part/whole relations); about whether or not object identity within a system crosses different levels of abstraction or implementation, relevant to questions of theoretic reduction; about the nature of type/token distinctions; about individuation criteria, including the establishing of identity, for example in self-organizing systems; about the nature of parameterization; about the similarities and differences among sets, classes, and types; and so on and so forth. Nor are object-oriented system designers the only people involved in these issues; currently they are just the most visible. The same questions have been under investigation for decades by developers of knowledge representation schemes, data base designers, people worrying about strongly typed languages, and the rest. More recently they have been taken up anew by network designers wrestling with the relations among identifiers, names, references, locations, handles, etc., on the World Wide Web.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (45) 20131010j 0 -4+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Failure of traditional ontological categories. (45) Perhaps the most interesting thing about this ontological effort, moreover, has been the ways in which it has failed. The problem is that, upon encounter with real-world problems, it is hard for practitioners to avoid realizing that such traditional ontological categories as discrete countable objects, clear and precise categories, and other products of received ontological myth, are both too brittle and too restrictive. (47) In part, it is increasingly recognized not only that the represented categories have context-dependent meanings, but that the question of what the categories are can only be answered dynamically, within the settings in which the computational systems are deployed. This presses for a kind of representational flexibility that current object-oriented systems lack.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (48 footnote 24) 20131010k 0 -3+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Example of EMACS as supporting multiple simultaneous takes on character buffer. (48 footnote 24) Note that EMACS, a popular text and programming editor, derives much of its power from supporting multiple simultaneous takes on the string of characters in its buffer, in just the way suggested in the text. One command can view the buffer as a Lisp program definition; another, as a linear sequence of characters; another, as bracketed or parenthesized region. In order to support these multiple simultaneous views, EMACS in effect lets go of its parse of the buffer after every single keystroke, and re-parses all over again the next time a key is struck possibly with respect to a wholly different grammar.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (50) 20131010l 0 -2+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Inscription error of ontological assumptions onto computational systems, then reading back as if empirical discoveries. (50) It is a phenomenon that I will in general call an inscription error: a tendency for a theorist or observer, first, to write or project or impose or inscribe a set of ontological assumptions onto a computational system (onto the system itself, onto the task domain, onto the relation between the two, and so forth), and then, second, to read those assumptions or their consequences back off the system, as if that constituted an independent empirical discovery or theoretical result. (53) The justification for assigning different kinds of content to a system, that is, is vulnerable to the ways in which we (perhaps unwittingly) individuate the system itself.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (53) 20131010m 0 -4+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Inscription error example of Coke can collecting robot. (53) A similar example is provided by analyses of conditions under which a system is able to reidentify a given object as being the same as one it saw before, rather than being a new one of the same type e.g., the sort of argument that would be used to support the conclusion that the system is capable of particular, not just generic, reference. Again, this is worth going through slowly, because the moral only emerges from the details.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (66) 20131010n 0 -6+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Argument for critical programming studies: actually build and modify, not just understand how to build. (66) But it want to assert something stronger: that it is intellectually essential not just that we understandhow to build them, but that we actuallybuild and modify and use them because of the fact that, in so building and modifying and using, we become enmeshed with them in a participatory fashion, in a way that both transcends and also grounds the representational attitudes we bear towards them. (67) The point is easier to see in our case. How wetake the world to be to consist of objects, properties, and relations, or of other things, or whatever cannot depend on how we take our minds or brainsto be, since most of us do not take our minds or brains to be any way at all. (68) Somehow or other and this I take to be the most important and difficult task facing the cognitive sciences it must be possible to have determinate representational content, i.e., for there to be a fact of the matter as to how the world is represented, without that analysis depending on anyway of taking the internal structures in the mind that does the analysis.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (72) 20131010o 0 -14+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Cannot avoid materiality and locatedness of code, nor importance of participatory engagement, physical embodiment, after investigating computation in the wild. (72) First, it turns out that issues of physical embodiment are essential. . . . It is a theory of the flow of effect, in other words and as such, even though it is not so advertised, is probably the best candidate yet for a scientific theory of causality. (72-73) Second, fitting in which this essential materiality and locatedness is perhaps the most ramifying consequence of investigating computation in the wild: the recognition that computers are inextricably involved in their subject matters. . . . Experience, in any intuitively recognizable form, is too passive or receptive a category to do justice to the sorts of activity that computers engender. . . . In the end one can only conclude that any semantical theory adequate to practice will have to be a full-blooded theory of participatory engagement, not just of reasoning or representation, or even of perception, action, and experience.
4 1 3 (+) [-4+]mCQKsmith-on_the_origin_of_objects (73-74) 20131010p 0 -7+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_smith-on_the_origin_of_objects.html Computation is not a subject matter, so no philosophies of computing: replace with social construction of intentional artifacts. (73-74) For present purposes, however, both these results pale in importance compared with a third and final lesson: Computation is not a subject matter. . . . Computers turn out in the end to be rather like cars: objects of inestimable social and political and economic and personal importance, but not the focus of enduring scientific or intellectual inquiry. (75) Rather, what computers are, I now believe, and what the considerable and impressive body of practice associated with them amounts to, is neither more nor less than the full-fledged social construction and development of intentional artifacts. That means that the range of experience and skills that have been developed within computer science remarkably complex and far-reaching, if still inadequately articulated is best understood as practical, synthetic, raw material for no less than full theories of semantics and ontology.
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