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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Re: The Rule of Least Power - does it miss the point?
 On Thu, 2006-03-09 at 15:01, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote: > As I said, after a month of digging through papers > on pragmatics and business intelligence, this is the > subjective approach: reality is what you say it is > if enough people agree. Subjective systems provide > for multiple points of view over the same information. > Objective systems provide for information plus operations > so really, one point of view. Neither one of your definition of Subjective or Objective really fits with what David Bohm says regarding reality, but I actually think that his thinking is particularly applicable to computer science as well as his original context of physics (see Wholeness and the Implicate Order's Reality and Knowledge Considered as Process chapter): "Rather, it implies that any describable event, object, entity, etc. is an abstraction from an unknown and undefinable totality of flowing movement. This means that no matter how far our knowledge of physics may go, the content of these laws will still deal with such abstractions, having only a relative independence of existence and independence of behaviour." He goes on to say that knowledge is a process, but it's the process that's the basis of both reality and any derived knowledge of reality. >From this point of view, each of the subjective theories is as or more correct than an objective one because the objective one is being treated as a fixed truth when, if knowledge is a process, this is really a false assumption. The basis of the objective theory is that this is just one interpretation based on a certain context in which the knowledge of reality can be seen as fixed. Twiddle any of those variables defining the context, and the objective theory may or may not still apply. One of the things that the last several years of computing should be telling us is, like physics, no one is actually ever going to be "right". The definition of "right" depends on the context and the knowledge available to the one stating the "truth". Ultimately, this is where permathreads on things from editors to languages (programming, mark-up, schema,...) to politics come from. What we need to spend more time on articulating is the context in which these "truths" hold so that everyone can be able to evaluate them effectively based on their own needs and understanding, e.g. their own personal context. If we can achieve this sort of thing, we'll be a lot better at picking the right tool for the job because we'll have a much better understanding of both the tool and the job. ast -- Join me in Dubrovnik, Croatia on May 8-10th when I will be speaking at InfoSeCon 2006. For more information, see www.infosecon.org. *************************************************************************************************** The information in this email is confidential and may be legally privileged. Access to this email by anyone other than the intended addressee is unauthorized. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, any review, disclosure, copying, distribution, retention, or any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance on it is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the intended recipient, please reply to or forward a copy of this message to the sender and delete the message, any attachments, and any copies thereof from your system. *************************************************************************************************** 
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