[Fis] Fwd: Scientific publication: Response

[Rafael Capurro]

Dear Mark,

thanks for your wonderful video response.
Coming from the hermeneutic tradition (incl. Luhmann) I could not resist to
'translate' your concept of constraint into 'pre-understanding'.
And... yes, conference papers are mostly boring particularly if they are 
read.
The constraint 'conference bar' is often a much more illuminating occasion
for creativity.
Thanks again
Rafael
> Dear FIS Colleagues,
>
> Thank you very much for your comments. I've made a video response
> which can be found here: https://youtu.be/r8T2ssGAius
>
> The video mostly concerns Loet's comment about selection and
> codification and references Sergej's point about "shared objects" (and
> its relation to activity theory). Shared objects are extremely
> important, but Francisco is right - Loet's point about codification
> goes the heart of the matter.
>
> In responding to Loet (and to some extent Sergej) I draw attention to
> the nature of teaching and its distinction with communication. This
> means standing back from Luhmann's binary model of communication,
> which he saw as a contingency-reduction process in the selection of
> meaning. Instead I suggest looking at communication as a process of
> the revealing and coordination of constraints. In Loet's work, I think
> this is probably the same as redundancy... Both Ashby and Von Foerster
> are powerful reference points for a deeper understanding - notably Von
> Foerster's paper "On self organising systems and their environments"
> (see http://e1020.pbworks.com/f/fulltext.pdf) and Ashby's late work on
> "constraint analysis" which was somewhat obscured in the hype around
> second-order cybernetics. Ashby's notebooks are the best place to
> start: http://www.rossashby.info/journal/index/index.html#constraint -
> he later called this "cylindrance".
>
> I agree with Moises about new ways of thinking about accrediting
> intellectual contributions. Uber is very interesting .... but it
> remains centralized (with a company making huge profits in
> California). What if it was peer-to-peer, or the record of
> contributions was 'ownerless'. There is a lot of work going on at the
> moment with regard to 'decentralise the web' (see
> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/tim-berners-lee-reclaim-the-web). I
> think this provides an valuable indicator of where we might look for
> richer mechanisms of ascribing credit for intellectual work. I'm not
> sure about Berners-Lee's Linked Data, but maybe http://ipfs.io has
> potential. I think these technologies present the best chance of
> transforming our market-oriented logic - so, Joseph, there is hope!
>
> As for the history, I'm no historian unfortunately... but we could do
> with some proper historical analysis of scientific communication,
> status and power over the centuries. The parallels between the 16/17
> centuries and our own time are compelling. I predict that our
> universities will one day be transformed in their approach to
> education to as great an extent that the Cambridge curriculum which
> Bacon so harshly criticised in 1605 (The advancement of Learning -
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Advancement_of_Learning) was
> transformed by 1700.
>
> I work for a medical faculty in Liverpool, and today I am at the Royal
> College of Physicians in London, which was founded in 1518 (see
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_College_of_Physicians) They have
> an extraordinary archive here, which raises more questions about how
> scientists before the Royal Society communicated with one another. We
> ought to get a better grip of the historical shift that occurred in
> the 1660s so that we have a better understanding of what kind of shift
> to expect in the years to come. As a side comment, I recommend looking
> at T.S. Eliot's analysis of the transformation that occurred in poetry
> in the same period - what he called a "dissociation of sensibility".
>
> Best wishes and many thanks for your comments,
>
> Mark
>
> --
> Dr. Mark William Johnson
> Institute of Learning and Teaching
> Faculty of Health and Life Sciences
> University of Liverpool
>
> Phone: 07786 064505
> Email: johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com
> Blog: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com
>
>


-- 
Prof.em. Dr. Rafael Capurro
Hochschule der Medien (HdM), Stuttgart, Germany
Capurro Fiek Foundation for Information Ethics (http://www.capurro-fiek-foundation.org)
Distinguished Researcher at the African Centre of Excellence for Information Ethics (ACEIE), Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Chair, International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE) (http://icie.zkm.de)
Editor in Chief, International Review of Information Ethics (IRIE) (http://www.i-r-i-e.net)
Postal Address: Redtenbacherstr. 9, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany
E-Mail: rafael at capurro.de
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