Notes on a characteristic fallacy
The fallacy of which I am thinking is the attack on knowledge claims by a "skepticism" wielded ignorantly as a rhetorical club. It is characteristically used in business environment by managers on workers.
The typical scenario: the worker by physical interaction with the tools of production acquires genuine technical knowledge.
However, this knowledge contradicts managerial plans and agendas, both open and secret.
The typical counter-argument to representations made by the worker becomes a false Enlightenment: a "skepticism" which neatly reverses the polarity, concealing the fact that the worker is Enlightened in some small measure by direct practical experience as opposed to managerial grab-ass.
What's forgotten is that the NEGATION of an advanced proposition is also a proposition, demanding or requesting belief.
This reversal of Enlightenment, which replaces technical knowledge with management folk-lore and superstition, occurs in its most extreme form when existential propositions are denied, because the denial of the humble technical assertion of the logical form
(Ex)[P(x)] (there is at least one x such that P of x is true)
happens to be a VERY STRONG universal:
(x)[~P(x)]
For example, let's say a programmer claims that there are some bugs in a piece of code, of sufficient strength to create problems downstream.
This existential, falsifiable, and verifiable assertion is typically countered by a sweeping generalization, masquerading as "the big picture", and skeptical about knowledge claims with a smirk as seen on the face of the President.
The Sweeping Generalization, in a system development activity (whether a new health insurance system or the Power Pointless invasion and destruction of fucking Iraq), is the declaration of victory, that states that as opposed to "there exists at least one problem", We Are Skeptical of these clerkish knowledge claims, and "for all possible x, for all possible scenarios, no 'important' problems will occur".
The programmer points out that (1) the code doesn't handle international unicode characters and (2) he has spoken with at least one user in Bangalore who is sending orders in Urdu.
The manager dismisses this concern because this marginal international business didn't matter in 2000 (he was promoted before the Bangalore business became critical to the company's survival).
The believer in the detail data point who says "there exists an x" is pushed into the Wack Zone because "consensus" in American and Americanized circles means follow the money, and "consensus" is top down agreement with the boss.
The rhetoric is that he's a Believer, not Skeptical and truly enlightened, like Donald Rumsfeld, who was highly skilled in using his ignorance as if it were a lofty, *sub specie aeternitatis* Renaissance pose, far above mediaeval, theoretic, and French concerns...which tried in vain to point to existent facts, such as the fact that the Turks had a Parliament, and this Parliament had the power to stop the securing of Mosul by a larger force in its tracks.
That pointed out that the Blix team was getting results, but that Blix was too humble to himself make a sweeping negative generalization (there are NO WMDs).
The contradiction to Blix wasn't a simple, verifiable and falsifiable existential assertion, it was of course modal (our leaders don't go out on a limb, we do): it asserted the possibility of the truth of an existential proposition and as such was unanswerable (and Bush's spinmeisters knew that).
Abstraction and ignorance pose as an Enlightenment to which people so Clueless as to work with actual machines as opposed to grabass have become a newly benighted peasantry, consulted only on occasion.
Thus we can read Web pages of completely uninstantiated nonsense about something called Quality at failing companies like General Motors, not one of which actually defines Quality or gives an instance.
We're being managed by people who stayed awake in school just long enough to confuse the logical Not operator with a modal Doubt operator, in a society in which Holocaust deniers, Creationists, and "global warming skeptics" are advancing in fact new, and universal propositions, masked by the Not operator.
These are that the Jews just died of the 'flu: that G-d created the world in six days and then He rested, literally: that one species can overrun the planet and not change it.
People who have learned to doubt their own perceptions aren't helped by Weinberg's classes in "better communication". The problem is logical and a matter of the collision of social classes, a war in fact on the middle class and of course, and as always, children and the poor.
"Rationality" is being used as a club.
Habermas
Whether or not we will ever learn as a society (and I hope we will) that communicative reason must prevail in a restorative sense, the way Frankfurt school writers first tore apart Instrumental Reason (yuck!) and then, via Habermas unleashed the idea of Communicative Reason is a beautiful thing. I hope it works. I'm trying to make it work on the personal/Micro level all I can.
Jurgen Habermas' hope
Adorno concluded *simpliciter* that "rationality" is being used as a club, as when the manager who's not thought of a solution to the problem charges the programmer with irrationality (the irrationality of having an unexamined "favorite solution to all problems") when the programmer has realized that the business problem is in fact solved by an "academic" algorithm...more broadly, that there are NO "business problems" at all, and that "business" other than following the laws (of logic, of mathematics, of the more technical parts of accounting, of society, of decency) is a criminal activity.
He calls upon the hipster to stand outside of society which IS IMPOSSIBLE, as we see in the People Who Smirk: these lost boys (like Dennis Miller of Saturday Night Live) become Republicans as soon as they make their first million.
Jurgen Habermas, the German philosopher (where the very phrase is suspect to the uninitiate because of what Germans did in Germany's name) holds out the hope that communicative reason operates independently of money and power.
That is: he located its origin in German civil society *circa* 1800 when Napoleon made Germans conscious by force of arms that whatever else they were, they sure as hell weren't French.
In this era, various groups were formed, various *vereins*, to do things that Germans liked to do without having any Frenchies about, including but not limited to hunting quite small animals, drinking quite large steins of beer, compulsively exercising, stuffing themselves, playing the music with the oom pah, and, last but not least, discussing politics.
Habermas finds that in the last we see that communicative reason in which we discourse more or less politely to get t'other chap see things our way, is logically prior to "money and power"; the technocracy of business and government.
He acknowledges that business and government are necessarily cannibalistic on communicative reason in modern, democratic societies. They necessarily rely not on force for the most part but also upon suasion, but they didn't invent suasion, they start with force (where we can understand money as an attempt to civilize force).
Whence the "structured walkthrough". After the disasters of large systems development in the 1960 (notably, the 1000s of bugs in each successive release of the IBM 360 OS) and more important after the collapse of the American invasion of Vietnam, in an epoch of self-doubt (the disco era), smaller and nimbler organizations and work groups discovered the necessity of programmers within large firms acting AS IF they were free bourgeois of the 19th century, with firm ownership of the tools of production represented by capital as secured by a gold standard, getting together freely to discuss mathematical Truth.
The motion into this mode was simultaneously necessary and impossible. As Frederick Brooks, author of THE MYTHICAL MAN MONTH, found, traditional force simply did not work with programmers, because they could control how buggy the product was when they could not control the deadline.
Brooks in fact, instead of being ignominiously retired and silenced by Thomas Watson Jr.'s IBM, was treated dialogically and as an equal by TJ and for this reason was able, as a member of the community of communicative reason, to fully disclose what had happened.
This hadn't happened before, but more important, it hasn't happened since. Grabass returned almost immediately after the publication of Brooks' essays, and since then, essayistic assessments of software engineering haven't had much traction.
[My own experience with writing for the 2005 ACM SIG on essays on software was that I approached the status of being in the Proceedings. This status was WITHDRAWN at the last minute after I'd done quite a lot of unpaid labor, the pretext being that I would not be able to attend the meeting. I wasn't able to attend because I had no funds to travel back to the USA, and I sensed in the process a higher-up intervention. Perhaps I am paranoid: perhaps I am being followed: perhaps both, the first, the second, or neither.]
Money and power (business and government) are systems tending to entropy because composed of self-interested actors alienated from their *telos*, and for this reason, they require, in Habermas' account, a push from outside.
There's a very good reason for the common white collar feeling that nothing, absolutely nothing, is getting done in many offices. Dilbert's and Wally's needs for community, connection, and Buddhist Right Livelihood are denied AS A MATTER OF COURSE. This is why Wally gets another cup of coffee.
Within large systems organizations such as Standard Oil in 1981, I often felt that it was utterly pointless to do much of anything much before 3:00 in the afternoon, and my peak time was after 5:00 PM. This was after that time, I didn't have to get depressed by hearing conversations drift across cubicles that were almost never work-focused but instead about commodities that my coworkers wanted to buy.
But even after data processing culture sharply changed in the 1980s to higher levels of "discipline", I found that the same sort of coworkers rationally found ways to game the system.
The paradox was that to be fully human, you have to be Attentive to the matter at hand. But within IBM during the 1990s at its monster Waterbury site, which does internal IBM DP, the personnel software people were required to continually change personnel and pension software in such a manner that destroyed THEIR OWN PENSIONS, and no man should have to be Attentive to a self-destructive pursuit.
Today, the tech hope is Open Source and the Web, and its heroes are guys like Dan and the Web admin on Lamma Island, because they both Foo Fight spammers who represent the entropy that may yet take us into a new Dark Age in which money and power rule.
[Spammers think they are real cute and real cool. What they are are assholes who work hand in glove with money and power, because they hate the light of communicative reason. I suggest Russian jail for the lot of them.]
I just write on this site, and have none of Dan's technical skills to protect it. Let's have a round of applause for all people who throughout history have provided a platform of Jurgen Habermas' hope: communicative reason.