A review from Amazon:

Dennis B. Mulcare

5.0 out of 5 stars Still-valid Constructive Redirection of then-prevailing AI Practices

Reviewed in the United States on 30 October 2018

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Granted that this book is quite dated, I would nevertheless presume that much of its critique of AI (artificial intelligence) remains valid, even now as that discipline’s agenda seems to have morphed rather opportunistically (agile programmatics?). In any case, I assuredly hold that the authors’ ideas on design approaches and tools for computer systems are still in general both apt and practical. Moreover, I believe those design approaches are widely applicable to other kinds of systems.

Overall, I found the thematic core and organization of the book to be highly illuminating and quite compelling. The ideational focus and flow did seem a bit abrupt at some stages, but that may be largely due to the concision of the provided content. In any case, the conceptual density of rather novel as well was diverse content warrant and reward careful if slower reading.

At the outset, the authors state that their intention is not the debunking of prevailing design practices or products, but rather the establishing of a new orientation toward them. Overall then, the authors developed a thoughtful case and credible ideas in pursuance of such reorientation. I found the substance and articulation of their case to be quite insightful and convincing. Their approach contrasts with that of the AI pioneers who confidently proceeded on the basis of rather glib presumptions about correspondences between the computer and the human mind, or in effect their operative dogma. Basically, their rationalistic formulations avoided due consideration of relevant knowledge regarding the nature and implications of the mind according to certain more penetrating scholarship in philosophy, biology, and linguistics.

Part I of the book questions the then-prevalent rationalist (but not necessarily rational) approach to the design and use of computer systems. Next, the authors examine several theoretical topics pertaining to human attributes and nontechnical modus operandi that bear crucially upon the design or utilization of computer systems. These topics are elucidated using prominent scholarly sources in order to compose a meaningful framework for ensuing discourse and ultimately for substantiated recommendations. Relevance of these topics is explicated within the following complementary perspectives:

● Phenomenological dimension: being-in-the-world [Dasein] as human situatedness wherein a person encounters and copes with the surrounding world==● Biological dimension: ==structural coupling whereby a person apprehends their focal world through reciprocal attunement with it==● Linguistic dimension: ==language as the communicative form whereby a person performs speech acts targeting their engaged world.

These dimensions delimit the consensus domain, wherein human interactions occur and a person’s knowledge is acquired. In particular, speech acts occur in the consensus domain, whereby a person makes a commitment, as expressed and understood through language, which initiates or continues action in a shared world. The consensus domain, moreover, is a central concept throughout the book, especially where a computer system mediates such interactions. Notably, a computer itself cannot make a commitment because it cannot truly understand the meaning of language. This part of the book was the most intriguing and valuable one for me.

Part II of the book explores issues seen to affect human interactions involving computer systems, and critiques attendant yet dubious positions then typical of computer system design approaches or practices. These issues relate back to the dimensions of the consensus domain, thereby identifying specific leverages for potential improvement in system designs or their development methods. The more significant phenomena/concepts covered in this part include:

● Breakdown during computer system deployment: most operational breakdowns of computer systems are due to unanticipated modes of use or latent incompatibilities with interfacing equipment. Such conditions may be masked by the overall complexity of the systems
● Blindness as the cause of breakdowns: blindness results from unmatched assumptions, as for example a designer’s lack of complete understanding of operational conditions that may occur
● Pre-understanding to alleviate blindness: blindness may also result from a designer’s ignorance of a solutions domain that offers options to design a better system. At root, that blindness may be attributable to a lack a pre-understanding pertinent to steering an ongoing search for design options.
● Context as determinative of meaning: pre-understanding derives from accreted experience and its corresponding applicability, which are needed to deal with context. Such pre-understanding is codified and accessible through the interpretation of meaningful experience
● Interpretation to resolve contextual implications: such interpretation invokes background knowledge to discern the meaning and salience of phenomena exhibited by new situations. In turn, such interpretation updates the content of that background.

Computer systems themselves are totally unable to deal with any of the foregoing issues. The designer or perhaps a user must therefore address or employ such faculties. For example, if a designer unsuccessfully exhausts the prospects of a focal domain, that realization should prompt the invocation and search of another domain, namely one out of present scope. Or more problematical, the designer may have to initiate and characterize a new domain in order to grasp and explore the precipitating circumstances. Ideally, all such intractability matters would be avoided, rectified, or accommodated during the design process. Accordingly, this part of the book exemplifies and invokes some of the theoretical topics of Part 1, as remedial for difficulties too often encountered in computer system design or usage experience.

Earlier in the book, the authors cited the need for designers to diligently pursue the question of what users do, or attempt to do, with their computer system within their overall enterprise environment. In Part III then, the authors address this matter directly in two chapters: one characterizing activities fundamental to managing a business; and the other examining design approaches that facilitate the conduct of those activities. Naturally, the advocated approaches involve the purposeful utilization of the enabling insights described in the first two parts. The authors identify management’s foremost need as effectively communicating with parties in their organization’s computer-based network; and then offer and exemplify their recommendations for design activities/approaches tailored to fulfill this need and its implications. Here, the following points are especially worth pondering and pursuing:

● Management’s situational reactiveness to contingencies: rapid formulation and dispatch of directives to dispersed parties/entities
● A systematized enterprise domain: its capture, analysis, and the operationalization of essential management patterns while architecting the computer system
● Management’s pervasive dependency on prompt actionable communications: clearly stated directives that enact commitments and exact follow-up
● Recurrent enterprise conversational patterns: their codification and transparent support through linguistic tools and techniques
● Global system effectiveness: the paramount computer system criterion centering on overall performance in the total encompassing system

Notably, Section 12.2 lists and illustrates eleven maxims for designer guidance. Forcefully, Section 12.4 concludes the book with a concise yet penetrating summary. It also projects a vision of the benefits deriving from emphasis on aptness, openness, and clarity as vital to the redirection of design perspectives and practices as advocated by the authors. In all, this book is a timeless, stimulating contribution to design thinking and practice in general.

[[hermeneutics]] and [[ontology]]

Gadamer, and before him Heidegger, took the hermeneutic idea of interpretation beyond the domain of textual analysis, placing it at the very foundation of human cognition. Just as we can ask how interpretation plays a part in a person’s interaction with a text, we can examine its role in our understanding of the world as a whole. Heidegger and Gadamer reject the commonsense philosophy of our culture in a deep and fundamental way. The prevalent understanding is based on the metaphysical revolution of Galileo and Descartes, which grew out of a tradition going back to Plato and Aristotle. This understanding, which goes hand in hand with what we have called the ‘rationalistic orientation,’ includes a kind of mind-body dualism that accepts the existence of two separate domains of phenomena, the objective world of physical reality, and the subjective mental world of an individual’s thoughts and feelings. Simply put, it rests on several taken-for-granted assumptions:

1. We are inhabitants of a ‘real world’ made up of objects bearing properties. Our actions take place in that world.
2. There are ‘objective facts’ about that world that do not depend on the interpretation (or even the presence) of any person.
3. Perception is a process by which facts about the world are (sometimes inaccurately) registered in our thoughts and feelings.

4. Thoughts and intentions about action can somehow cause physical (hence real-world) motion of our bodies. Much of philosophy has been an attempt to understand how the mental and physical domains are related-how our perceptions and thoughts relate to the world toward which they are directed, Some schools have denied the existence of one or the other. Some argue that we cannot coherently talk about the mental domain, but must understand all behavior in terms of the physical world, which includes the physical structure of our bodies. Others espouse solipsism, denying that we can establish the existence of an objective world at all, since our own mental world is the only thing of which we have immediate knowledge. Kant called it “a scandal of philosophy and of human reason in general” that over the thousands of years of Western culture, no philosopher had been able to provide a sound argument refuting psychological idealism - to answer the question “How can I know whether anything outside of my subjective consciousness exists?” Heidegger argues that “the ‘scandal of philosophy’ is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again,“7 He says of Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism” that it shows ”… . how intricate these questions are and how what one wants to prove gets muddled with what one does prove and with the means whereby the proof is carried out,“s Heidegger’s work grew out of the questions of phenomenology posed by his teacher Husserl, and developed into a quest for an understanding of Being. He argues that the separation of subject and object denies the more fundamental unity of being-in-the-world (Dasein). By drawing a distinction that I (the subject) am perceiving something else (the object), I have stepped back from the primacy of experience and understanding that operates without reflection. Heidegger rejects both the simple objective stance (the objective physical world is the primary reality) and the simple subjective stance (my thoughts and feelings are the primary reality), arguing instead that it is impossible for one to exist without the other. The interpreted and the interpreter do not exist independently: existence is interpretation, and interpretation is existence. Prejudice is not a condition in which the subject is led to interpret the world falsely, but is the necessary condition of having a background for interpretation (hence Being) This is clearly expressed in the later writings of Gadamer: It is not so much our judgments as it is our prejudices that constitute our being… • the historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience Prejudices are biases of our openness to the world, They are simply conditions whereby we experience something-whereby what we encounter says something to us. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (1976), p 9. We cannot present here a thorough discussion of Heidegger’s philosophy, but will outline some points that are relevant to our later discussion:9

==Our implicit beliefs and assumptions cannot all be made explicit.== Heidegger argues that the practices in terms of which we render the world and our own lives intelligible cannot be made exhaustively explicit.. There is no neutral viewpoint from which we can see our beliefs as things, since we always operate within the framework they provide, This is the essential insight of the hermeneutic circle, applied to understanding as a whole. The inevitability of this circularity does not negate the importance of trying to gain greater understanding of our own assumptions so that we can expand our horizon. But it does preclude the possibility that such understanding will ever be objective or complete. As Heidegger says in Being and Time (1962, p. 194), “But if we see this circle as a vicious one and look out for ways of avoiding it, even if we just sense it as an inevitable imperfection, then the art of understanding has been misunderstood from the ground up.”

==Practical understanding is more fundamental than detached theoretical understanding.== The Western philosophical tradition is based on the assumption that the detached theoretical point of view is superior to the involved practical viewpoint. The scientist or philosopher who devises theories is discovering how things really are, while in everyday life we have only a clouded idea,. Heidegger reverses this, insisting that we have primary access to the world through practical involvement with the ready- to-hand-the world in which we are always acting unreflectively. Detached contemplation can be illuminating, but it also obscures the phenomena themselves by isolating and categorizing them. Much of the current study of logic, language, and thought gives primacy to activities of detached contemplation. Heidegger does not disregard this kind of thinking, but puts it into a context of cognition as praxis - as concernful acting in the world. He is concerned with our condition of thrownness - the condition of understanding in which our actions find some resonance or effectiveness in the world.

==We do not relate to things primarily through having representations of them.== Connected to both of the preceding points is Heidegger‘s rejection of mental representations. The common sense of our tradition is that in order to perceive and relate to things, we must have some content in our minds that corresponds to our knowledge of them. If we focus on concernful activity instead of on detached contemplation, the status of this representation is called into question. In driving a nail with a hammer (as opposed to thinking about a hammer), I need not make use of any explicit representation of the hammer. My ability to act comes from my familiarity with hammering, not my knowledge of a hammer. This skepticism concerning mental representations is in strong opposition to current approaches in cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and the foundation of cognitive science, as described in Chapter 2. Representation is so taken for granted that it is hard to imagine what would be left if it were abandoned. One of the major issues discussed in later chapters is the connection between representation and mechanism; this discussion will aid our understanding of what it means to take seriously Heidegger’s questioning of mental representation.

Meaning is fundamentally social and cannot be reduced to the meaning-giving activity of individual subjects. The rationalistic view of cognition is individual-centered. We look at language by studying the characteristics of an individual language learner or language user, and at reasoning by describing the activity of an individual’s deduction process. Heidegger argues that this is an inappropriate starting point-that we must take social activity as the ultimate foundation of intelligibility, and even of existence A person is not an individual subject or ego, but a manifestation of Dasein within a space of possibilities, situated within a world and within a tradition. pp.30-33