Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 21:30:44 -0700

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Mr. Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496

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Subject:	Semiotics, Alignment and High Tech
	First impressions and comments on knowledge management project

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Dear Rod:

Though I have more reading to do before I am confident that I have an adequate preliminary understanding of what your project is, I think I have enough sense for it to make a first response, and I will go ahead and articulate my first impression as a way of helping me to get it into focus. If anything in what I say seems dogmatic don't take it that way: if it seems that way it will be due to the fact that it is sometimes easier to express things in a curt dogmatic form than to take the trouble to add the cautionary qualifications.
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Okay, then, let me say that, in my view, the best way to go about making good use of Peirce's ideas is to start from the fact that what he is primarily concerned with is the nature of scientific research as that appears from the point of view of the scientific researcher. His work is chiefly a contribution to the logic of research. Now the enterprise of knowledge management is not primarily research oriented, though research (in some form) is obviously going to be an important aspect of it. So to apply Peirce's ideas profitably compensations have to be made which reflect the difference between the aims of the researcher as such and the aims of someone who, to be sure, may do research and make use of research results but nevertheless is not primarily concerned with doing this but rather with the integration of knowledge into practical activity and with making practical activity more intelligent generally. In other words, knowledge management requires -- perhaps IS -- a logic of practice rather than a logic of research.
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Peirce himself did mention in a late manuscript that he was interested in developing a logic of practice that would involve taking due account of the difference it makes to shift from research to practice, but so far as I am aware he never did get around to doing that. I think it can be done -- but is it worth doing? It is possible that a conception of the nature of scientific thinking would be so different from what a good account of a logic of practice would be that it would be more misleading than helpful to try to derive the latter from the former by way of qualifications of it. For example, in the early part of the 17th Century, Descartes put forth a model of scientific reasoning (in his Discourse on Method) which, whatever merit it might have had for theoretical inquiry in some areas (it was actually derived by reflection on Descartes' experience as a mathematician), would when extended to practical reasoning result in an inability to take effective action at all because of a near lunatic concern to avoid making a mistake.
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I mention this because I think you should always be suspicious of any attempts to import logicians' ways of thinking of things into the context of practical thinking. At best they may capture something of interest about purely theoretical reasoning, but they rarely show any insight into the realities of practical reasoning and its tasks, and I have usually found them to be unusually poor in practical reasoning, tending toward fanaticism and useless exaggeration. Peirce was, in my opinion, an exception to this -- though you should of course take this with a grain of salt! -- not because I think his logic can be applied to practical reasoning in a straightforward way, but because I think Peirce understood better than anybody else both that theoretical thinking must be grounded experientially, in a way that involves essential connection with practice, or it is just no good, while at the same time understanding that there is nevertheless a real difference between theoretical and practical thinking that must be respected or else both theory and practice will suffer from corruption. Let me cite one reason for the difference which Peirce himself thought especially important which might help in seeing what I am getting at.
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In scientific research in its uncompromised form there can be no deadlines which compel researchers to make a decision at a given time about what to accept or not accept as a research conclusion. Acceptance must be something that either occurs or does not occur of its own accord in virtue of experience or experientially conditioned reflection on the subjectmatter in some way, directly or indirectly. That is, the time must come when one just finds oneself convinced enough that something which one thinks to be so or which is claimed to be so really IS so to be willing to make use of that conclusion as a premise or presupposition in one's own further thinking about the subject-matter: it is the USE of that research conclusion as a premise or presupposition that constitutes acceptance. (Something is not accepted in science because someone says "I accept this" or "This is acceptable.") If that does not occur then acceptance has not occurred and there is nothing to do but move on with something else for the time being, but one cannot legitimately say, as it were, "Time's up; I'll just choose this to be a fact, though I am not really convinced of it." You can see what that would do -- indeed sometimes does do, one suspects, given the way scientific research is often funded -- namely, make the conclusion an arbitrary function of whatever considerations were compelling the decision rather than something compelled by experience of the subject matter.
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In practical life, on the other hand, conclusions must be arrived at as regards what to do while it is still "timely" to do so, as we say: right now, perhaps, or by next Friday or by the end of the month, and so forth. Timeliness is thus a major and constant factor to be taken into account in all accounts of practical thinking, whereas it does not enter into the logic of research at all -- or it shouldn't --
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And of course many of the attempts to augment thinking with computer assistance are based in part at least on the recognized importance of being able to make a decision -- arrive at a conclusion -- in a timely way. This has important implications because of the way it compromises the assumption of truth, for example, as becomes obvious in the case of, say, courtroom decision making. (People often get unnecessarily agitated about such decisions because they think of them as truth claims, which they cannot possibly be.) This doesn't mean that truth is not important in practical affairs but only that it factors into the process in a different way than it does in research activity.
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One of the things which especially interests me about your project is the opportunity it might provide to find out what other differences must be recognized in adapting Peirce's ideas for a logic of practice.
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The reason for thinking that it would be profitable to begin with Peirce's account of the logic of research and arrive at the logic of practice by discovering what modifications have to be made in it is that Peirce conceived the logic of research as essentially connected to practice to begin with, so that it is not a matter of adopting a theory that requires us to add the relationship to practice, since working out that relationship was one of his central concerns in almost all of his work.
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That is in fact what "pragmatism" originally referred to, in his usage (which was the original usage, by the way), namely, a methodological maxim stressing the necessity for understanding the practical import of theoretical ideas. Yet he remained quite clear on the fact that the logic of practice nevertheless is not merely a special case of the logic of research, nor vice versa, much less identical with it. Of course you have to satisfy yourself that his conceptions are indeed promising enough to be worth the effort to work them out in that way, but I think you might find it so.
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One reason for thinking you will find them congenial is that, unlike most philosophers of science, Peirce was process rather than product oriented, as you are. (In fact, some of the disagreement which you seem to have with some of your colleagues about knowledge management is apparently rooted in this difference: some of them tend to get caught up in what I think of as a librarial or archival conception of knowledge, and I notice in your notes an uneasiness about what they are urging whenever this becomes evident.) In any case, Peirce did not think of science as a body of achieved knowledge, a collection of results, but rather as a form of life to which a scientific researcher is committed, and he regarded all questions about science in the way they naturally appear to the researcher, as distinct from the way they might appear to someone interested primarily in making use of the funded results of research. The latter is a legitimate concern in its own right, but it can be misleading as a way of thinking about what science is.
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The present distance between philosophers of science and scientists is embarrassingly great -- embarrassing to me, at least as a professional philosopher -- and I think it is based precisely on this difference between a product orientation and a process orientation. Mutual contempt on both sides is frequently close to the surface, and the reason is that the agenda for philosophy of science from the mid-30's on was set by people who regarded the sciences as productive of knowledge in much the same sense in which a sausage machine is productive of sausages, the main problem being to determine whether or not sausages are actually being produced, though with major disagreements on how to tell a sausage from a non-sausage. This is basically a librarian's or a university administrator's way of thinking about science, rather than the way scientists themselves think of what they do -- until they get administrative ambitions, at least.
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I'll come back to that in a minute, but I want to say first that when you mentioned the idea of "knowledge management" in your message I was reassured by your immediate remark letting me know that you were aware that this might make it sound like a shuck, as indeed it frequently is.
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I don't mean to condemn the use of the phrase in connection with your project. I am uneasy with it and think there should be a better descriptive label that doesn't have the many misleading associations which "knowledge", "know", and the other cognates of that term have, but I can't immediately suggest a label that will do what is wanted any better than that one does, lame though it may be.
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One reason I am especially suspicious of it, though, is that in the university context it is sometimes used to refer primarily to concern with expertise in the acquisition and sale of intellectual property, at present patent rights but with a clear movement in the direction of copyright as well. You have nothing like that in mind, of course, but notice how easily the idea of knowledge management can take on that meaning, where the management of knowledge regards knowledge as a commodity item whose producers are to be managed in a profitable way -- hence the idea of the university as a knowledge factory -- not knowledge management as an augmentation of intelligence, which is what you are of course concerned with. Given the way the universities are presently tending, you are going to want to be on the alert for confusion about your enterprise arising from that source, I think. Doug Engelbart is thoroughly process oriented and if he nevertheless still feels it necessary to talk in terms of knowledge there is bound to be good reason for doing so; for he would otherwise have abandoned it long ago. But it may be that perverse usages, such as by university administrators, as well as by commercial con artists, will finally compel you to abandon it in self-defense.
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Let me suggest, in any case, that it is a mistake to put much time in on trying to arrive at a suitable definition of knowledge. You won't be able to do this no matter how much time you devote to it because the basic use of the term "knowledge" is to refer to static results or products of inquiry whereas what you are trying to do is rather to think in terms of an unending process in which distinctions between what is known and what is in question are just ad hoc functional distinctions marking what is settled (what is not in question) at a given time and what is relevant but is not settled, with the former providing the basis for continuity in the ongoing pursuit of settlement of the latter. This is such a different perspective than the one that regards knowledge as a product that you are bound to fail in trying to come up with a definition of "knowledge" that satisfies you because the word itself really belongs to a different paradigm than you are trying to develop.
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Taking the scientific model of the inquiry process first -- which, as I said, cannot simply be transposed to your model but might provide some clues to developing it -- the working scientist rarely has occasion to talk about what he or she knows or about what is known other than in a context in which there is some question about what is being taken for granted in a given inquiry. Anything taken for granted might be referred to as "known," but in practice what that means is simply that it is presently taken for granted and thus not worth much discussion, unless there is some concrete reason for not taking it for granted. What is worth discussing and thinking about is what is questionable. The inquirer does not live in a world overtly structured by "knowledge", which provides infrastructure for it but for that very reason is invisible, as it were, but rather in a world which is overtly structured by questions, ideas, things observed, and means or instruments of observation. Talk about knowledge is usually reserved for attempts (often misguided) to communicate with outsiders who are result-oriented rather than inquiry-oriented. Regarded communicationally, a working scientist lives in a world of problems commonly recognized in understanding the subject-matter, of claims made or makeable (which are regarded as preposterous, plausible, tenable, compelling, trivial, important, pertinent, etc.) and of questions about their acceptance or acceptability, and is governed by communicational norms which are derived from the conditions which must be realized if the members of the research community are going to stay in sufficient agreement with one another as regards acceptance of claims made to continue as a research community.
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I won't go into them here, but these commonly accepted norms are at their most obvious and rigid in respect to professional publication, but in addition to the norms governing formal publication -- which have a very special status -- there are other and more flexible norms governing informal communication of all sorts, ranging from those governing the presentation of papers at conferences to the way people talk to one another at the cafeteria or in the halls. But that only scratches the surface; for there are norms commonly recognized in connection with laboratory work and field observation, and so forth, that insure that proper records are kept so that all activity that involves interaction with the subject-matter is integrated into the communicational relationship as well. Thus if people get sloppy about routine reports and treatment of instruments, their professional communication becomes increasingly inexact and even misleading since it becomes increasingly unclear to others precisely what one has observed or done, and, in consequence, less and less agreement about results is achieved and the centrally important process of making research claims which aim at being commonly accepted becomes less and less effective until that particular scientific community just dissolves. What holds the community together as a community of inquiry is conformity to communicational norms which function primarily to maintain a constant though ever changing focus on a common object of interest. When the communication becomes so inexact that no one knows for sure what anyone is actually referring to or what, exactly, they are saying about it, then what binds them together as a community is gone: that binding factor is the subject matter itself as accessed in common in professional communication.
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My point is that if we regard science as a process of inquiry then we can understand it as essentially communicational in character, not in the sense that scientists are doing nothing but writing up reports and arguing with others about them -- which they are not -- but in the sense that all inquiry activity, including observational and experimental activity, is regulated by reference to what is required in order to maintain communicational effectiveness. Now the archiving of results in a way that is based on the aim of making clear their functional significance in ongoing research is clearly desirable, but it is only one of many factors that are to be understood in an adequate and comprehensive understanding of the ongoing process of scientific inquiry considered as a communicational process.
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All of this to be able to formulate the following question: Is it plausible to try to construe management of human enterprises generally as process which is similar in some important respects to the process of scientific research? If so, then there is reason to think that management in general can indeed become far more intelligent than it typically is at present because by far the most effective thinking that has yet been devised is that which has developed in the hard sciences. If we could learn from that without making the mistake of thinking that we can simply adopt research thinking into management thinking without serious qualification then we might indeed have reason to be optimistic about the augmentation of human intelligence on a truly major scale. It has not been done yet, but it certainly seems worth a try. If so then, in my view, a reasonably accurate understanding of scientific research practice is the clue to follow up, and that is where I think Peirce is especially helpful.
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As regards "semiotics": the term "semiotic" was just Peirce's term for logic in the extended sense in which he developed it. His reason for calling it that was that he wanted to establish logic itself as a science, and a science must have a publicly observable subject matter. It won't do simply to say that logic is about thought. What is thought? Is thought public? Peirce's idea was that, for logical purposes, thought is literally IN signs in the sense in which my present thought, say, is in the inscribed marks on your screen or your printout of the present message. It is not hidden in my head: you are literally looking at it right now. It is wherever that message is, ready to reveal itself when it is read by someone. Of course it is a relational property of those marks on the screen or the paper, but what it is related to is or must be observable, too, for if it were not then how could you possibly have any confidence that you understand what those marks mean? The meaning would simply be your own hallucination. The point is that Peirce was trying to establish that thought need not be regarded as hidden "in the head" and did not think that the identification of it with neurons was the way to establish that thought is public. Thought is public whenever it is communicated, and there is finally no point in even positing thought except with implicit reference to it as something communicated or communicable. Thus calling logic "semiotic" was a kind of compact way of saying that thought is a property of meaningful public entities, not a mysterious activity "in the head" or even "in the nervous system".
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Now what he developed under this heading included not only all of the stuff one would normally associate with logic but also an extraordinarily supple battery of distinction sets for describing the elements of public thought in ways that made the various kinds of meaning and significance that things can have as clear as possible. Sometimes people think of his semiotic in terms of that special analytical apparatus, not realizing that it really just refers to his logic in general, and I have seen some impressive uses of it. It has a remarkably wide range of possible application. For example, there is a fellow in Sao Paulo who wrote a book on the Indian raga musical tradition, which has been the subject of extensive scholarly commentary in India itself for many centuries -- and happens to be a special passion of mine as a listener though I have no performance skills -- using Peirce's descriptive analytical apparatus as his organizational basis, and he does what I regard as an exemplary job in doing it, managing to cover the entire tradition of extant interpretation of that music tradition itself in a way that I doubt anyone has even approximated to before. He does this with a very unobtrusive use of technical jargon, recognizing that the jargon serves no useful purpose except insofar as it marks precise distinctions drawn that have to be drawn to understand the subject matter.
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Can semiotic in that special sense be of any use in management theory? Perhaps, but I wouldn't regard this as important at its present stage of development.
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What is pertinent at this point is not special doctrines about various kinds of meaning and interpretation, though one wants to develop that sort of sophistication in due time, but rather the development of a sound basic and overall perspective on the task of management theory, and that seems to me to be clearly in a formative stage with a lot of work on fundamentals still to be done. I believe your hopes for it are well invested for the long run, and I am greatly interested in following its fortunes, perhaps even aiding in any way that seems helpful.
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But what you are doing is really quite ambitious and you shouldn't allow the slowness of development to discourage you.
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What you and others -- Doug Engelbart is of course the master visionary here, as you would probably agree -- are trying to do is what the great 17th Century thinkers prematurely attempted to do but couldn't possibly do because the scientific traditions were not yet sufficiently developed to make it possible to perceive what this actually involved, and the clue to it lies there, I think.
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But I think that the essential ideas can all be perceived now if one can catch them from the right perspective, which is that of communication as a process. It is , of course, the development and deployment of computation that has made it possible to begin to bring the latter -- the communicational porches -- into perspective. I won't say for the first time because I think Peirce somehow grasped that perspective long ago. But for more ordinary mortals like myself the development of communication that the computer has brought about has been the enabling factor. But I've not attempted to say much about the overall form of that process here but only wanted to indicate something of the way in which I think about these matters myself, for what it is worth.
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Let me conclude this message by explaining that I am especially interested in the approach you are taking because of my own development work, which is interestingly similar to your own in some respects -- which I find remarkable especially because we start from such different places and different initial motives. Let me describe mine a bit and perhaps you will see what I mean.
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I've been managing a listserver based discussion forum for Peirce ("PEIRCE-L") for some seven years now, and, more recently, set up a gateway website for Peirce, which I have stocked with a substantial amount of resources thus far, both on-site and by linkage, but nothing compared to what it could be, much less what I want it ultimately to be, which is the place where everyone goes first to access anything or anybody in connection with Peirce. Or to put it more accurately, what I have been aiming at from the beginning is to develop a vigorous and genuine Peirce telecommunity using the listserver-based forum and the website as the initial basis for building such a community. Telecommunities don't just come into existence, or at least not yet, they have to be developed. Of course there has to be a real basis for it in people's interests -- one can't create it out of nothing -- but it is quite clear that the basis for a vigorous telecommunity focused around an interest in Peirce's ideas is there. What is lacking is the initial organization work required in order to give it enough unity for it to become autonomous.
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What is the use in doing such a thing? The idea is not to promote his philosophy -- I don't think of it that way, at least -- but rather to make what I believe to be an extraordinarily valuable intellectual resource available in the way it should be made available and, beyond that, to create a world-wide intellectual community on the basis of common interest in exploiting that resource for whatever it is worth. I won't go into why his work has been so inaccessible to all but a favored few (myself included) -- and still is largely so -- but just say that what got me into networking to begin with was the realization that it would be possible to make his work available properly, for the first time, using the internet, and realizing this, I felt strongly obligated to set myself to doing whatever had to be done to accomplish it. It has gone agonizingly slow thus far, with no assistance and with many frustrations, in part because I have had to work on it in my extra time, mostly, and I have found that everything you try to do with computers takes about ten times as long as you think it will, if you are lucky.
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But I retired from teaching at the end of May -- I still retain my institutional base at the university as an emeritus professor -- and now have, for the first time, enough free time to do the sort of development work required. Moreover, by a stroke of good luck, my department just hired in a new chairman who is coming in both with a computer of suitable power and a full-time computer technician who will be employed directly by the department, so that we can maintain our own connections independent of the central academic computing people, whom I have found to be so unreliable that I had to abandon some plans altogether because I couldn't get an adequate technical base for it. This fellow seems definitely sympathetic with my plans, though.
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So the upshot is that I want to start making moves this Fall both to develop the website further by adding interactive communicational facilities to it, and to integrate the listserver based discussion forum with the website. Now this sort of integration is of more than merely technical interest, since the point to it is to try to lay the groundwork for a genuine and vigorous telecommunity which is bound together by a common relation to the website as a resource. The binding of people and resources is given in the fact that people using the resource will themselves be functioning as part of the resources insofar as this involves mutual communication with others who are using the resources, too. Indeed, for some, the resources will probably consist wholly of the people accessible there, rather than the documents, though the documents have a grounding role to play, especially those by Peirce himself, which provide his own rather special input into the ongoing intellectual processes occurring there or in connection with it.
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I didn't express that as well as I wanted to -- I'm trying to say this too briefly in a message already overly long -- but what I am trying to indicate to you in a brief space is a connection between my interest in the problem of integration of persons and documents in an intellectual community unified by communication and your own concern with what you call developing a "knowledge space". I'll stop at this point, though, because I have gone on long enough in the present message. I'll perhaps be able to get back to you with something more substantive -- and perhaps more helpfully critical -- after doing more reading, following the leads you've provided -- which, by the way, I find extremely impressive as an instrument which I have been able to make use of to understand what you are doing and which I take to be an illustration of your work toward the development of the knowledge management system you are concerned with.
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Best regards,

Texas Tech University
Dept of Philosophy

Joe Ransdell

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Joseph Ransdell ransdell@door.net Joseph.Ransdell@ttu.edu 806 742-3275 Home: 806 797-2592 http://www.door.net/arisbe (Peirce Gateway website) http://www.door.net/arisbe/homepage/ransdell.htm

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Post Script

Nothing in the present message is confidential and you can record or distribute it or any part of it in any way you see fit. If I do have anything confidential to convey I will always do so in a special message. There is thus no need to get any special permissions from me as regards quotation or use of anything I communicate to you -- except of course where I have explicitly indicated to the contrary.