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
<[hidden email]> 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
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Eric Charles
Professional Student and
Assistant
Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA
16601
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College