Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk (Oliver Sparrow)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!demon!chatham.demon.co.uk!ohgs
Subject: Re: dynamic ideography
References: <38ik4k$plp@rc1.vub.ac.be>
Organization: Royal Institute of International Affairs
Reply-To: ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk
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Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 09:57:06 +0000
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There are a number of software packages which are used in commercial strategic
planing which help people externalise ideas, bundle these into concepts and
show the relations which exist between these. Most people have abandoned
these and gone over to the humble Post It, which has the advantage of being
cheap, familiar and easy to handle. One builds cognitive maps on the walls
of boardrooms instead of squinty little screens or through projectors which
require pitch dark rooms. I have been playing with a self-developed package
which does the linkage/ encapsulation/ principle dimension analysis/ options
creation in a single pass, primarily as a CEO's doodling tool; but the 
problems of knowledge representation are :) complex. This is yesterday's
cutting edge and has been abandoned, blunt by the wayside; and I am not aware
of any books which have been written about it.

The other area that you might like to explore is that of systems dynamics. 
Peter Senge has written a somewhat over-heated book (The Fifth Force) about 
this. The idea is that various problems have "archetype" structures which can 
be evoked, mixed and matched and that one can view the dynamics implicit in the 
stucture so described in order to gain insight into the way to think about the 
delivery of soap flakes, or persuasion. Personally, I have enough problems in 
getting as clear view of the field withou confounding it with frankly specious 
quantification.

Th ebroader issue - of how to gian insight into the primitives which underpin 
cognition through their visual representation is, I would suggest, a special 
case of the general problem to which commerce has dedicated a large amount of 
resource with a small amout of return. I have no doubt that technical advances 
- notably, with three dimensional mapping of brain arousal through EEG 
tomography - will allow us to see what primitive *structures* contribute to 
high level events, but the *content* that they contribute may be a harder nut 
to unshell.
 
_________________________________________________

  Oliver Sparrow
  ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk
