Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 192.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
[1] From: Tim Smithers <tim.smithers@cantab.net>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.185: theory and fashionable dogma (264)
[2] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: skill, luck, accidents (46)
[3] From: Christian-Emil Smith Ore <c.e.s.ore@iln.uio.no>
Subject: Sv: [Humanist] 39.189: mobile phones & theories (54)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-10-29 08:44:12+00:00
From: Tim Smithers <tim.smithers@cantab.net>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.185: theory and fashionable dogma
Dear Willard, Manfred, Henry, Jerry, and Jim,
I'm interested in the practice of good tool use, and in the
design and making of good tools. And, I use the term practice
a lot, notably in the courses I do for PhDers (from across all
the disciplines), which I describe as Foundations of Research
Practices.
Preliminaries
To me . . .
A tool is something which enables the doing of some
purposeful activity, where the enabling makes the doing
possible or the outcome better.
A good tool is one designed to afford comfortable
enabling, and doesn't get in the way of the doing when
used.
Good tool use requires a practice: knowledge and
understanding of the designed use of the tool, and of the
discipline of its safe and effective use.
Your thesis, I'll call it, Willard, but without implying you
necessarily believe in this ...
For any activity for which use of a tool is essential,
theorising its use has value for others in proportion to
the theoriser's experience with it ...
[I left off the "... and even then requires exercise of both
modesty and bravery."]
... puzzled me. What, I wondered, has theorising tool use
got to do with good use of tools, for the tool user, or for
anybody else? Good practices, including tool using practices,
don't have theories, and don't need theories, I think.
Manfred, Henry, Jerry, and Jim, your respective responses
showed me a way to take on Willard's thesis, perhaps, and
given me a way to do this, again, perhaps: I'm not sure how
well what follows works.
Your example, Manfred, picking out Heidegger on "the work of
art" is a relief. I'm no Heidegger scholar, far from it, but
what I do make of this I completely disagree with. It reminds
me of people who've never designed anything but who insist on
telling us what designing is. [It's rude to say this, but my
favourite example of this was Hebert Simon.]
Thus, we have, I would say, good practice lesson 1:
Basing your understanding of something you have never seen
in reality can completely distort your interpretation of
it -- leave alone a theory you build upon such flimsy
ground.
Your point 3, Manfred, about history making only accessing,
and dealing in, what's left from and after things have
happened, and not with what actually happened, is equally
valid, and important, I would say, for those of us who think
we deal with things in the present and future: designers, for
example.
Thus, we have, I suggest, good practice lesson 2:
Differentiate as cleanly as possible between the
representation of some item [of the past] and our
interpretation of it.
Henry, thank you for digging out the [may be] Einstein
quotation.
“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In
practice, they are not.”
Which I take to say [no matter what it was originally used to
say], and will call good practice lesson 3:
There is no good theory of a practice, including a tool
using practice.
Which, with lesson 1, means we should be suspicious of any
attempt to offer a theory of some tool using practice.
[My checking on the origin of this quotation found this piece
<https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/04/14/theory/>, which
suggests it was Benjamin Brewster who first said it, back in
1882. But, Brewster or Einstein, it matters little for my
purposes.]
Then, Jerry, you provided another needed lesson, which I'll
called good practice lesson 4:
Experience always out runs conception.
Which I like as a proverb, and thus a lesson, but would not
call it theorising. I'll come back to this, but lesson 4
warns us that our conceptions will always chase after
experience in our attempts to catch it in some invented
abstractions because, in our rush to try, it always misses
stuff that really happens, the mistakes, in particular, and,
often, the frustrations and failures too, but also the why
things worked this time.
And then your post arrived, Jim, with another needed good
practice lesson, lesson 5:
Theory is an unobservable explanation of, or the positing
of a cause of, observable phenomena.
[I hope my punctuation doesn't mess up what you really said?]
Using these lessons of good practice, and, in particular, tool
using practice, I think we can go on to say the following in
response to Willard's thesis. Starting with a simple but
needed observation.
Experience only happens when we do something.
Lesson 1 tell us to be careful what we say we observe here: we
observe that there is experiencing only when we do something.
Yes, but it's _not_ and observation of what is experienced.
So, just because we see experiencing happening, because we see
someone doing something, gives us no access to what is
experienced by the person doing the observed doing. We may,
and often do, as observers of some experiencing happening,
place interpretations on what we see, and make presumptions
about it, based on what we imagine is being experienced by the
person doing the doing, but our interpretations are not the
doing, and may be quite mistaken.
Lesson 2 reinforces this; it tells us to differentiate "as
cleanly as possible" between the representation of some item
and our interpretation of it. Which here means, I would say,
we must be sure not to present anything we might think the
experiencing involves as the actual experiencing. We must not
present our interpretation of the experiencing we see as a
representation of what was experienced.
If we can't reliably form representations, or abstractions,
and thus conceptions, of the content of observed experiencing,
because all we really see is some experiencing happening, but
not what is experienced, we cannot properly form good theories
about it. This is what lesson 3 tell warns us about.
But, what of the doer? The person doing the doing has the
experience, and surely they will know what this experience is
composed of, right? Yes, they will. We can and do speak of
our personal experience of doing something, but lesson 4 warns
us we should not take it that our self reporting is complete
enough to give us a well conceived picture of all that
happens.
Experiencing is not a reliable way to make complete enough
observations of what really happens when we do something,
especially not of tool using, and particularly not of skilled
tool using, which is what I'm interested in, and in how people
get such skills in practice. In reporting what we experienced
when we did something, we tend, naturally, it seems, to clean
up the story, so that we don't report some things an external
observer may see signs of; mistakes and failures which we, the
doer, correct without noticing we do this, for example, or the
application of a "neat trick" which we know and which we
unconsciously see we can use this time, but which, again, goes
by un-noticed by us as our doing goes on. Experience often
missed what the experienced tool user has "compiled down into
their hands and fingers, as we say. [Well, I do.]
Thus, my claim is that the doers of something, in particular
tool using, don't reliable observe all that really happens in
their doing, despite being the experiencer of this, and,
external observers of the same doing can't see what's actually
experienced, but can see signs of what happens, and sometimes
of things the doer doesn't experience, and thus notice,
despite doing them.
So, any attempt to theorise tool using, taking Jim's useful
working definition of what theory is in lesson 5, is
necessarily hazardous, if not practically impossible, because
we can never know we have sufficient observations of what we
try to theorise, and we can't design experiments sufficient to
test theory made predictions about what will, perhaps, must,
happen when someone does some tool using activity.
Experiencing counts, but it's not, I think, a good window on
any truth.
But, this doesn't stop people claiming to theorise tool using,
despite having no personal experience of the particular kind
of doing and kind of tool using, I've noticed. Which, in my
view, and experience of teaching foundations of research
practices to PhDers, gets in the way of teaching and learning
needed skills and professional practices. (Which is why I
think theory and practice, particularly of tool using, don't
go together.)
This all means, I will further assert, good tools are only
designed and made by people who do the kind of purposeful
activity the tool is intended to enable. In other words, good
tools are designed and made by practitioners, and not by
technologist, as many think, and plenty claim. Technology and
tools are not the same thing. Technology is the knowledge and
understanding of how to make something that can happen, happen
in a way that can be made safe, effective, efficient, doable,
etc. Tools are rendered from some particular technology, or
technologies, and often the technology used to render a good
tool changes, as new technology is invented and developed.
But it's the design of the tool that counts here, not simply
the stuff of which it is made. What a tool is made of does
not make the tool good.
Computation is one of the most widely usable technologies we
have; extraordinarily flexible and workable. But just
developing some specialised form of computation, like what we
call Machine Learning, or [misleadingly] Generative AI, today,
does not deliver useful tools; it gives us things to play
with. This playing, if done with sufficient discipline, may
uncover the possibility of, thus the conception of, something
that might be useful as a tool, but the playing must be the
playing of practitioners. The hype' and Fairy Stories of the
technology developers won't do.
Time to stop, but not without thanking you, Willard, for your
productive provocation, and Manfred, Henry, Jerry, and Jim,
for your clarifying thoughts and insights, for me, at least.
-- Tim
> On 26 Oct 2025, at 08:34, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 185.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2025-10-25 17:47:15+00:00
> From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.182: theory and fashionable dogma
>
> Has anyone defined "theory" yet? My working definition is that a theory is
> an unobservable explanation of or the positing of a cause of observable
> phenomena: e.g., the Big Bang theory, the theory of evolution, Freud's
> theory of the mind, etc. By this definition, experience always comes first.
> No theory exists prior to experience. Reflection on or development of the
> theory, therefore, is only as valid as knowledge of the experience. The
> more data points the theory covers, the more valid the theory, but you need
> many data points before you can begin to develop the theory or really
> consider it. Everyone can and will always have an opinion, of course, but I
> think this way of thinking gives us some criteria by which we can evaluate
> those opinions.
>
> Jim R
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-10-28 13:11:58+00:00
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: skill, luck, accidents
My thanks to Oda Bakkeli Eide for her pros and cons against the
background of 10 years' experience in a field where all of these--skill,
luck, accidents--figure in.
What attracts me to taking photos is the whole experience from handling
the camera (digital, almost entirely manual) to the preternaturally
sharp megapixel result -- the demanding communion with a beautiful
machine and so with subjects transformed in the process. It is from that
communion that I leap into speculating about what a smart machine might
be able to do.
Allow me to commend to your attention David Trotter's wonderful review,
"Unconditional Looking", on Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and three
editions of it, in the London Review of Books 47.19 (23 October), pp.
3-8. At various points Trotter writes about the sudden moments that
emerge out of ordinary experiences--forgive the long quotation:
> Most of the time, Woolf maintains, we exist enveloped in a kind of
> ‘nondescript cotton wool’. ‘One walks, eats, sees things, deals with
> what has to be done’ – the ‘broken vacuum cleaner’, or clothes to be
> washed, or, all in a day’s work for the owners of the Hogarth Press,
> books to be bound. Arising unpredictably out of the cotton wool,
> however, are ‘exceptional moments’ during which some aspect of the
> world appears to us in what might feel like its essence. ‘Sketch of
> the Past’ dwells on a moment of utter captivation experienced by the
> young Woolf as she took in the sweep of gardens stretching down the
> slope below Talland House, the family’s holiday home in St Ives.
> ‘The buzz, the croon, the smell, all seemed to press voluptuously
> against some membrane; not to burst it; but to hum round one such a
> complete rapture of pleasure that I stopped, smelt; looked.’ Woolf
> was a virtuoso of the semicolon. The last one in this sentence gives
> us a split second in which to consider what the look in question
> might have involved. It is, I think, above all unconditional. It has
> no agenda. In Woolf’s experience, unconditional looking constituted,
> if not rapture as such, then its precondition.
There are such with the camera-machine & photographer. What sort of
'look' is possible with the smart machine?
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-10-28 12:53:46+00:00
From: Christian-Emil Smith Ore <c.e.s.ore@iln.uio.no>
Subject: Sv: [Humanist] 39.189: mobile phones & theories
I have often thought of the short story Øyvind refers to, as an example of
extreme foresight .
It is unfortunately not translated. Machine sould give an idea.
Best,
Christian-Emil
________________________________
Fra: Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org>
Sendt: tirsdag 28. oktober 2025 13:28
Til: Christian-Emil Smith Ore <c.e.s.ore@iln.uio.no>
Emne: [Humanist] 39.189: mobile phones & theories
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 189.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org<http://www.dhhumanist.org>
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
[1] From: Öyvind Eide <oeide@uni-koeln.de>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.181: theory and fashionable dogma (172)
[2] From: Manfred Thaller <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.187: before Theory (79)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-10-26 17:22:26+00:00
From: Öyvind Eide <oeide@uni-koeln.de>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.181: theory and fashionable dogma
Dear Manfred,
to your moved part, about mobile phones in SF: the best reference I have seen is
Lillebror (Little Brother); the concept is a pun on Orwell's 1984. It was
introduced in the short story Kodémus by Tor Age Bringsværd in 1968 (Bringsværd,
T. Å. (1968). Probok. Gyldendal Norsk Forlag).
A short quote:
”2) Kodémus har alltid Lillebror med seg. Lillebror vet alt. Mye bedre enn
Kodémus. Når Kodémus er i tvil om noe, spør han Lillebror. Alle har lillebrødre.
Det er påbudt.”
2) Kodémus always brings Little Brother. Little Brother knows everything. Much
better than Kodémus. When Kodémus is in doubt, he asks Little Brother. Everybody
has small brothers. It is compulsory.
https://ndla.no/r/norsk-pb/kodemus/f56f027985
All the best,
Øyvind
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