Didier Space

Philosophy in the Gallery – Public Language

It was the last evening of the Philosophy in the gallery seminar organised at the Tate Modern by Nigel Warburton.

We talked again about the way Wittgenstein interprets language.  For him, there is no such thing as a private language.  Language is first and foremost something that we have in common and that mostly exist outside us.  He says that if one person had a private language, it wouldn’t be intelligible even to the person himself. It is more like a convention that exist beyond us and between us that allows us to bring meaning to our subjective experience.

This is very close to the idea of memes:  these ideas, concepts, beliefs that live on us like viruses.  We allow them to live, reproduce, evolve and they have a life, in a sense, beyond our own, serving more our species than individuals.   It is also very compatible with new theory of consciousness based on advanced in neurobiology where language seems to play a key role in allowing the notion of concepts and memorisation. 

Food for thoughts….  At least, Wittgenstein seems to be achieving his objective of making us think for ourselves…. 

And then again, we had the chance to go through the Museum trying to reflect on the themes we talked about in the context of Art. 
Family resemblance: What do surrealists have in common?
Aspect Dawning:  Try to make your own impression of a work before knowing what the artist intended and then compare.
Language:  Our imperfection in communicating is above all a blessing in disguise.  It allows us to reinterpret things in an infinite number of ways.  This is true for all mode of communication:  By putting the work of artists in different contexts, a museum can plays a key role in allowing us to make new connections and develop new meanings.

A big thanks to Nigel and the Tate for a wonderful experience!  It is definitively a seminar I would recommend  (and those who know me know that I don’t give compliment easily…)

Philosophy in the Gallery – Private Sensations

Third evening of the Philosophy in the gallery event organised at the Tate Modern by Nigel Warburton.

That evening we explored the notion of language and how it relates to our inner sensations.  Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of the beetle in the box to tell us that we have no way of knowing for sure that what we describe as our sensation will be felt the same by another person. Nor can we know for sure where that sensation comes from:  from our internal state or from the evocation of the word related to the sensation.  We can talk about the beetle in our box but we can never be entirely sure of what is in the box of another person, if it is the same or not.

That makes us pretty lonely in a sense.  But also the language becomes a bridge, something however imperfect that allows us not only to assume some understanding about each others but also to bring meaning in ourselves.  And as a bridge it may have a life on its own.

It seems that all what we build - our concepts, ideas, our culture, our civilisation, our arts - rely on communication and that at the same time, according to Wittgenstein, our ways to communicate are all but precise, full of misunderstanding.
We are on shaky ground indeed. 
That gives to me a new interpretation of the Tower of Babel metaphor.  We build our collective meanings, our lives, our civilisations from a set of assumption, beliefs and values.  As we grow, we reinforce and clarify those and the tower rise.  But the foundations were never that solid:  our collective understanding was really much built on vagueness, the collective effort brings clarity to that misunderstanding and the edifice collapse from our own making… setting the ground for a new construct.

After our talk, we went to see the work that Susan Hiller has done for the Freud Museum: a series of boxes shelving various objects grouped in some kind of cryptic order (to me).  The whole presentation was for me an evocation of memories, private collection and personal associations… all things very private that may be different for each of us but were still very real to me and to others present.  There may still be commonalities in our perceptions after all.

I was also struck that we went to see an exhibition that I assumed was related to Freud and his work in some way while the concept that we discussed earlier were going so far away from the psychoanalytical approach itself.

SoL - Rationality & Decision

SoL - Decision Group – Meeting 21 Sept 06

As I looked at the academic literature around decision, I was struck by how much is related to a rational approach of decision making.

Most of the science of modern decision making is based on the statistical models developed back in the 18th century, based on a Newtonian view of the world and has given rise to many of the tools that we found in practice in organisations today. 

More recently, many experiments have shown that we, human, do not always take decision in the optimum way described in the rational models and that indeed, we tend to have consistent biases in decision-making.    This has lead to adjustments in rational models to take into account our human tendencies.

Even more recently, there has been interesting attempts to develop models that attempt to incorporate the simplicity and power of our human decision-making process as well as take more of the decision-maker point of view in their approach.

This was just a first attempt to review some of what we know about decision making but it raises already some interesting questions:

• Behind all the biases that we have and all the way we can be influenced, what is the basis of our human decision-making process?  How does it work in our brain?  What evolutionary advantages does it give us?
• Is there a bias in the research in so far that they are based, by definition, on problems that have verifiable answers?  What is the efficiency of the human decision-making process in situation of total uncertainty?  How would we assess that?
• We know that in organisation, decision-makers tend to rely at least partially on a more intuitive process to make complex choices under time and information constraint.  How does this reality fit with the academic research?  How effective is that process? How can we build and improve on it?

You can find the presentation from the meeting here

SoL - Definition for Decision (or Decision for definition?)

At SoL, we are interested in developing our understanding and improve decision making in organisation.  On September 20th, we met and discuss what could be a definition for decision. True, it is probably impossible (and meaningless) to arrive at a completely clear definition, but could we find a way to frame our research and our conversation?  Could we decide on a model that will drive our discussion forward?

The first conclusion that we reach is that thinking of decision in term of noun may not be the way forward; instead we should focus on the action of decision making.  Nominalising seems to focus the conversation on definition and argument around it.  Focusing on the process of decision making represents more the reality in organisation and seems, subjectively, to be more open and to mobilise our curiosity more towards investigation.   

It was also suggested that we use, at least as a starting point, Piaget’s definition of decision making.  I haven’t been able to find yet direct reference to it but it seems that he sees four fundamental stages: Perception, Implication, Conclusion and Action.  The key for us was that all decision making starts with a perception (internal & external) and end with an action (without action there is no decision-making).  Using that model, what line of research, what questions do we want to answer?

Finally, we briefly discussed (or at least I presented… but since it is my presentation and my blog…) the notion of context and problem-type.  Decision-making happens in relation to something, internally or externally.  That is, for me, it depends on a situation or problem that we perceive and try to (re)act to.  And we may also use different decision making processes depending on the type of situation we face.  For example, choice under certainty and under uncertainty may lead to fundamentally different decision making approach.  What are the characteristics of situations that human and organisation are facing and what do they tell us about our decision making process?

The presentation from the meeting can be found here .

Philosophy in the Gallery - Aspect Seeing

It was the second evening of the Philosophy in the Gallery organised at the Tate Modern by Nigel Warburton.

This time, we talk about how we see things a certain way and often take it for granted.  Wittgenstein talks about Aspect seeing – how we tend to see things only a certain way and Aspect Dawning – The moment we realise a new perception.

I do not know if there were an intentional link but it reminds me very much of the Mental Models in the Fifth Discipline (Peter Senge) and the perception biases that we found in the decision literature.

We then went to the Rothko room at Tate Modern and started a discussion on what we could relate it to.  For those who don’t know the paintings they are variation of dark red squares exposed in a single room with low lightning.

For me, those paintings remind me of calmness, inner peace and the room is a good place for meditation.  I was surprised to learn that Rothko wanted to represent something much more violent and had much darker views about the inner life.  It was quite disturbing to find out such differences in interpretation.

And again, I could not but make the connection with the way that we interpret our inner world.  For a long time, thanks to Freud, Nietzsche and others, we developed a scary image of what lies inside us.  It has been the dominant psychological paradigm of most of the past century.  But now, another way of looking at our psyche may be slowly taking over, one which is gentler, more hopeful and see possibility for exploration and change.

Perhaps, Rothko by painting his vision of his struggle painted also something that is more like a window to our inner world and now, we are left to interpret it the way we choose, not necessarily in the way he wanted.  As a society too, we develop collective mental models that will influence the way we see things and that we change as our models change.

Philosophy in the Gallery - Family Resemblance

During the Philosophy in the Gallery seminar, we have the chance of discovering Wittgenstein’s ideas in the context of Art. Nigel Warburton introduced us to some key concepts that we then discuss in relation with some exhibits at the Tate Modern. In the fist session, we talked about the notion of Family Resemblance.

We use very easily words that represent things and concept, like for example games. But when we pose and think, it becomes very hard to define what precisely constitute a game, what is its essence. Wittgenstein is saying, for what I understand that concepts are difficult to define in term of necessary and sufficient conditions. It is more that we can comprehend a pattern of resemblance, recognise some characteristics that they usually have but not always. It is very much like the physical traits that family members share that make us know they belong to the same family but that are not always quite there, all the time.

Wittgenstein wanted to draw our attention on how we can get stuck in the language we use, assuming that it is very specific when, in fact, it is more a convention that may not be shared by everyone. Hence the idea that most of the problems that we face are in fact problems of language: related to how we define things and imply meanings that are not necessarily universally shared, nor represent any kind of definitive reality. This echoes very much the type of challenges that I found in the situation I work on.

The flip side of that is that, by using language the way we do, by defining things with inappropriate certainty and misplacing family resemblances, we are also able to define things and move on. If we get stuck by assuming too much about our definitions, we also can also get stuck because we can’t define things. Categorisations, however imperfect have the value of setting something on which we can build upon. In a sense, we build our meanings on quick sand but they are only quick sand if we look too close: if we move fast enough, we can get to the other side without too much trouble.

It was very much what I experienced when Nigel brought us in a room where we could see the (in)famous Marcel Duchamp urinary. There were also several other exhibits of equally challenging, similar in some ways, work of Art. It was striking for me how they formed together a type of Art. Whether you would qualify that of as Art (your definition here), there was a definitive air of family resemblance about them, based on cynicism, irreverence, joke, etc… It also makes us think about our own definition.
So, in a sense, at one level, that put us back into in the situation that Wittgenstein wanted us to avoid: attempting to define precisely something that is in fact a family resemblance. At another level, Marcel Duchamp’s statement was a kind of new definition that triggered new family traits to be included or new elements to be created and included in what we consider to be Art.

I am struck here again with the parallel of my work, where language and definition, are often at the source of the problems that organisations have to deal with, and, at the same time, language and definition, even in its imperfections offer ways to unstuck situation and develop new realm of possibilities.