Theory and communities (was: Re: Small Methods - a ramble)

[Mostly off-topic to the list. Sorry.]

At 03:50 PM 1/14/02, David Alan Black wrote:
>Cf. Fish's experiment (is this in "Is there a text..."?) where instead
>of erasing the blackboard at the beginning of class, he leaves
>whatever words happen to be there from the previous teacher and tells
>his students that it's a poem.

It's in one of the papers in that collection. I can't check which one 
because I'm still on vacation.

The story is quite interesting. I've used it in several contexts. It goes 
something like this...

He was teaching a class in literary theory and had written a series of 
names of theorists on the board. I don't have the names so I'll make some up:

          Thomas - Hunt
                Black
               Fowler
              Neumann (?)
                 Feldt

His next class in the same room studied European religious poets of some 
century. He circled the names, told them it was a poem, and told them to 
analyze it. There was some style of allegorical poem during that century 
that used name-poems as a kind of religious puzzle.

You can see how that would go. "Thomas" is pretty easy: there's an apostle 
Thomas. Pairing it with "Hunt" doubtless refers to the soul's hunt for 
salvation, and you could probably find a biblical reference involving 
Thomas and that hunt. (The two names also make the shape of the poem 
reminiscent of a cross or altar, cuing us to its religious nature.) A 
"fowler" is someone who hunts birds, and of course we know that the soul is 
often represented as a dove. "Neumann" is German for "new man". The 
question mark refers to the question of whether the hunt for salvation 
yields benefits in this world (makes you a new man) or only in the next. 
[And so on.]

(Honestly, I picked these names from the ruby-talk list *before* I made up 
the interpretation. I confess that I deliberately left out "Matsumoto". The 
cross shape and question mark after "Neumann" mimic Fish's original. In his 
case, the question mark was there because he wasn't sure he'd spelled the 
name right.)

Fish uses this experiment (repeated several times, always with the same 
result) to make a general argument that people convinced of a theory can 
find what that theory predicts in any evidence. (I think he overstates his 
case.)

> > Stanley Fish's "affective stylistics" reminds me of Ron's narrative of
> > reading Smalltalk-style Ruby code. In affective stylistics, you scan chunks
> > of text and ask "What is the reader thinking at this point? What questions
> > does she have? What does she think she knows?" You (if you are Fish) pay
> > special attention to how the text tricks the reader, keeps her off-balance,
> > when the overall message of the text is something like "there is no
> > certainty". (That is, he likes to show how texts *make* the reader
> > uncertain, not just tell her that she should be.)
>
>All of this, though, takes place *within* an interpretive community.
>If you ascribe agency to the text (it tricks the reader, makes the
>reader uncertain, etc.), then we're already inside a community, where
>it has been agreed, so to speak, that Textual Property X produces
>Cognitive Effect E (confusion, clarity, etc.).
>
>Which then still leaves the question of whether a programming language
>community is, or can become, an interpretive community in this sense.

I agree with the first paragraph. I don't know about the second. What I've 
read so far on "interpretive communities" and "communities of practice" has 
been vague on the nature of such communities, how you find where the 
(doubtless fuzzy) boundaries lie.

I think understanding that will help us understand why some technical 
innovations (like programming languages) get embraced and become 
perpetuated, while others never achieve traction. I even have some fond 
hopes that understanding that will allow people like us to make Ruby catch 
on better and faster. (As you might guess, I read the Asimov Foundation 
novels at a much too impressionable an age. Psychohistory, here we come...)

--
Brian Marick, [e-mail]
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