Steve, As a partial endorsement of your argument, I was trained as a comparative psychologist (comparing between species) and an ethologist (the European branch of animal behavior that showed we could treat behaviors as evolved phenomenon in the same way we treat anatomy). I was specifically trained in these as two separate, but related traditions. When I arrived at at U.C. Davis, which has (or at least had) the premier graduate training program in Animal Behavior in the country, and as I started attending more of the Animal Behavior Society national conferences, I noticed a disturbing trend:
There was a conscious attempt to create a generic study of animal behavior in which everyone did basically the same thing from the same perspective (though with variation in species studied and behavior focused on). I kept trying to explain to people, most forcibly to the grad students, as I thought I had a chance with them, that this was bad. They were trading in several hard-won and highly-specialized tool kits (those of comparative psych, ethology, behavioral ecology, biological anthropology, etc.) for a 101 piece toolkit from Walmart. If they were trying to encourage collaboration, I would have been all for it, but instead they were trying to create a shared language by destroying the uniqueness of the distinct approaches. Yuck! Anyway, just an endorsement of your project from a very different context, Eric On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 08:26 PM, Steve Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > siddharth wrote: >> >> you're right about the language issue - even a basic word in the >> complexity debate- eg. 'modeling'- is interpreted/understood slightly >> differently in architecture..its easier when they mean things totally >> different, like your example- its really tricky when they mean things >> almost the same, yet not - these micro-shifts in meaning make things, >> well, complex-er! >> thanks! > >For what it is worth, I've been working with Dr. Deana Pennington of UNM >on this very topic... a joint UNM/Santa Fe Complex proposal to the NSF >was just declined, but had it been funded, we would have been extending >work done on a related NSF grant just ending this month on the topic of >"the Science of Collaboration". Central to this work is the notion >that each discipline (and subdiscipline and individual) has a >distinct >but complementary set of concept and terms that they use to understand >and share their work. One of the tools to be developed is a >collaborative tool for eliciting and resolving the terms and concepts >across cross-disciplinary teams and projects. > >We are still seeking funding and opportunities to continue this work and >it is an obvious project to carry forth at the Santa Fe Complex (in >collaboration with UNM, etc.) if possible. > >We (Santa Fe Complex) just hosted a workshop for this team on Agent >Based and Cellular Automata Modeling. It did not address the problem >of language directly but indirectly did by providing a variety of >practitioners with a common working vocabulary (to whit, NetLogo) for >expressing and exploring simulations. Of course, within the context >of this course, we immediately encountered terminology conflicts (when >is a "patch" a "cell"? etc.) > >Seconding the spirit of Nick's point, it is this very ambiguity that >provides the expressiveness and the leverage. If you constrained >everyone to a controlled vocabulary, you would have nothing more useful >than an efficient bureaucracy within a fascist government. Things >would generally be unambiguous, but rarely useful! > >- Steve > > >============================================================ >FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > > > Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State University Altoona, PA 16601
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
