Years ago I read a passage from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions which caused me to understand the importance of examples in illustrating concepts in a deeply different way. (This book is infamous for unleashing the expression “paradigm shift” on the world.)
What Kuhn helped me grasp was that examples do not only illuminate or prove a theoretical statement — they give the theoretical statement its sense.
Why am I talking about this here? The ends experience strategists try to accomplish, the means we use to accomplish them, and the language and concepts we use to talk about our means and ends are very abstract. Our clients are often flying blind. They know (sometimes vaguely) what they hope to accomplish by way of “improving the customer experience”, but much of what leads up to this improvement is either confused, force-fitted into more familiar (mis)conceptions, or fragmentary, wispy or left a frank mystery. When we supply a client examples we are not only reassuring them that we are capable of solving their problems for them — we are also helping them understand how to see their problems in clearer and more productive terms.
If you’re interested, here’s a large chunk of the quote (bolds added):
Philosophers of science have not ordinarily discussed the problems encountered by a student in laboratories or in science texts, for these are thought to supply only practice in the application of what the student already knows. He cannot, it is said, solve problems at all unless he has first learned the theory and some rules for applying it. Scientific knowledge is embedded in theory and rules; problems are supplied to gain facility in their application. I have tried to argue, however, that this localization of the cognitive content of science is wrong. After the student has done many problems, he may gain only added facility by solving more. But at the start and for some time after, doing problems is learning consequential things about nature. In the absence of such exemplars, the laws and theories he has previously learned would have little empirical content.
To indicate what I have in mind I revert briefly to symbolic generalizations. One widely shared example is Newton’s Second Law of Motion, generally written as f = ma. The sociologist, say, or the linguist who discovers that the corresponding expression is unproblematically uttered and received by the members of a given community will not, without much additional investigation, have learned a great deal about what either the expression or the terms in it mean, about how the scientists of the community attach the expression to nature. Indeed, the fact that they accept it without question and use it as a point at which to introduce logical and mathematical manipulation does not of itself imply that they agree at all about such matters as meaning and application. Of course they do agree to a considerable extent, or the fact would rapidly emerge from their subsequent conversation. But one may well ask at what point and by what means they have come to do so. How have they learned, faced with a given experimental situation, to pick out the relevant forces, masses, and accelerations?
. . .
A phenomenon familiar to both students of science and historians of science provides a clue. The former regularly report that they have read through a chapter of their text, understood it perfectly, but nonetheless had difficulty solving a number of the problems at the chapter’s end. Ordinarily, also, those difficulties dissolve in the same way. The student discovers, with or without the assistance of his instructor, a way to see his problem as like a problem he has already encountered. Having seen the resemblance, grasped the analogy between two or more distinct problems, he can interrelate symbols and attach them to nature in the ways that have proved effective before. The law-sketch, say f = nw, has functioned as a tool, informing the student what similarities to look for, signaling the gestalt in which the situation is to be seen. The resultant ability to see a variety of situations as like each other, as subjects for f = nw or some other symbolic generalization, is, I think, the main thing a student acquires by doing exemplary problems, whether with a pencil and paper or in a well-designed laboratory. After he has completed a certain number, which may vary widely from one individual to the next, he views the situations that confront him as a scientist in the same gestalt as other members of his specialists’ group. For him they are no longer the same situations he had encountered when his training began. He has meanwhile assimilated a time-tested and group-licensed way of seeing.
The role of acquired similarity relations also shows clearly in the history of science. Scientists solve puzzles by modeling them on previous puzzle-solutions, often with only minimal recourse to symbolic generalizations. Galileo found that a ball rolling down an incline acquires just enough velocity to return it to the same vertical height on a second incline of any slope, and he learned to see that experimental situation as like the pendulum with a point-mass for a bob.
. . .
That example should begin to make clear what I mean by learning from problems to see situations as like each other, as subjects for the application of the same scientific law or law-sketch. Simultaneously it should show why I refer to the consequential knowledge of nature acquired while learning the similarity relationship and thereafter embodied in a way of viewing physical situations rather than in rules or laws. . . . the verbal statement of the law, taken by itself, is virtually impotent. Present it to a contemporary student of physics, who knows the words and can do all these problems but now employs different means. Then imagine what the words, though all well known, can have said to a man who did not know even the problems. For him the generalization could begin to function only when he learned to recognize “actual descents” and “potential ascents” as ingredients of nature, and that is to learn something, prior to the law, about the situations that nature does and does not present. That sort of learning is not acquired by exclusively verbal means. Rather it comes as one is given words together with concrete examples of how they function in use; nature and words are learned together. To borrow once more Michael Polanyi’s useful phrase, what results from this process is “tacit knowledge” which is learned by doing science rather than by acquiring rules for doing it.
*
In my opinion, getting a better grasp of what tacit knowledge is, what it effects, how to research it and how to employ it in design is the most interesting and explosively promising area of exploration in experience strategy and design.
In pursuit of this goal, I’ve been reading Suzanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key, whose central idea is that human beings use two different kinds of symbolic meaning to order our existences, and James Spradley’s The Ethnographic Interview which teaches methods for learning about and analyzing (at least some of) these symbolic meanings. Very exciting stuff.
0 Responses to “Substantiation”