Essentially Contested Concepts

This is another cool idea, similar to the "invincible rhetoric" concept I discussed in my previous posting. The idea was initially expressed by W. B. Gallie in 1955, and then revisited by John Kekes in 1970.

Essentially Contested Concepts (ECCs) are "Big Concepts" like the following: art, love, morality, reason, nature, democracy, culture, knowledge, science, truth etc. The concepts are vague, ambiguous, highly general, and also highly valued. There is constant debate over the proper use of these terms, such as whether or not a particular installation of objects is "really art" or not. Very often, people will disagree over how these ECCs should be used. Each side in such a dispute feels that they are making the proper use of the term, but they are also aware that the other side does not agree with them on that very point. Nonetheless, neither side is prepared to concede the term to the other side, and pick a different term that better captures their side of the distinction. Instead, they go to war over who gets custodianship of the ECC.

Gallie described 7 conditions which together define an ECC. I review them here:
1) It defines some kind of valued achievement.
2) That achievement must be internally complex, with many parts adding up to make the whole achievement.
3) HOWEVER, there are several possible ways to interpret HOW the sub-components contribute to the end value, and these interpretations need not be consistent with each other.
4) The achievement itself must be adaptive or modifiable, capable of being expressed differently in different circumstances.
5) The ECC must be simultaneously used both defensively and aggressively - when you take a stand and say "art is x", you are consciously aware that some people say "art is y", and your articulation of your position includes an opposition to theirs.

These first five points describe what an ECC is, but they fail to distinguish ECCs from other concepts around which communication is merely radically confused. Gallie's solution to this problem was to appeal to history - to an ideal exemplar that everyone can agree to as an example of the concept (point 6); and this exemplar must also be internally complex, so that the final performance of the concept depends on the performance of composite activities in ways that are not clearly straightforward (point 7). The exemplar provides the indisputable shared point of reference that distinguishes an ECC from an idea that is merely confused, but yet that example too is complex enough to be essentially contested.

Kekes offers 6 conditions for something to be considered an ECC:
1) ECCs signify some kind of voluntary activity - they involve conscious human conduct and choices. Thus their essential defining characteristic can be thought of as either the activity itself or its goal - the means or the ends, or both.
2) ECCs are evaluative, and the conflict over them is value-charged, with participants putting great weight into which side will prevail because of the evaluations that will be implied.
3) The contest over an ECC will be in the interests of the participants, because the single concept being disputed concerns their best way of satisfying their needs and achieving their goals.
4) Like Gallie, Kekes states that the goal-directed activities that can be classified as instances of an ECC must be internally complex, with many elements each of which plays a role in the performance of that activity. These elements have certain qualities - one element must be something the agent does or has, and could stop doing or having without ceasing to be an agent, and the elements do not each have value of their own (they do not achieve a piece of the goal in isolation). Only the goal state is evaluated, and the constituent activities gain their value from that fact.
5) The component activities must be variously accessible - people will disagree about how significant each element's contribution is to the overall performance.
6) Despite all of this dispute at component levels, participants in the debate have to agree about the general description of the domain they are contesting, and they must share the core problem that prompts the debate in the first place. (This general agreement takes the place of Gallie's appeal to history.)

It seems to me that ECCs and invincible rhetoric are related - both are produced in part by human source-monitoring limitations. These source-monitoring limitations may be caused by general working-memory limitations, or as a side effect/pathology of our capacity to generalize across exemplars. At any rate, if we cannot all agree on how to weigh all the source components of the final goal-achievement, then we are likely to choose explanations that we like based on some extrinsic preferences or some general bias.

This has my Spidey-sense humming... there is some kind of shared pattern here...

W. B. Gallie's paper was in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 [1955-56] pp. 167-198, and in Chapter 8 of Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, London: Chatto and Windus, 1964. John Kekes' paper was in Philosophy and Rhetoric 10(2) [Spring 1977].

Invincible Rhetoric

Okay, so this is a seriously cool idea about a seriously annoying phenomenon - the phenomenon of invincible rhetoric. People who use invincible rhetoric are always right. They will stress a point one way to be right in another situation, but then when you bring up an objection they have another stock answer for that one too. A quick example of the difference would be the two sayings "haste makes waste" and "the early bird gets the worm".

A person who enjoys dispensing post-hoc advice will always be infallibly wise, if their knowledge base supports both of these claims. These two invincibly paired proverbs are not necessarily mutually exclusive or contradictory. In some contexts one proverb applies, and in other contexts the other does. However, sometimes when you want to challenge the advice someone gives you, you want to hold them to one claim-context pairing or another. This can be difficult. Since their assumption base contains both beliefs, they can stipulate either of the opposing points as what they "really" meant, and in so doing, they can re-contextualize or re-frame the debate. If they keep shifting within their assumption base just so as not to be wrong, this should be criticized as a type of invalid argumentation. This is a subtle and infuriating case of the if-by-whisky fallacy of infallibility.

Any kind of unassailable belief system enables invincible rhetoric. Religious people - truly religious people - don't make a fetish about being "right" all of the time, instead they use their faith to commit to meaningful lived actions amidst the uncertainties of life. However, religious literalists and armchair apologists often do crow with pride about how their belief system can answer every question and withstand every argumentative challenge. They can mount this kind of invincible facade because they have an assumptions base that generates invincible rhetoric. For example:

- SUPREMACY CLAIM: Their religion is the one true religion (of many thousands throughout human history), and their omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god wants everyone to know this and to follow this one religion (sect).
- AGENCY COUNTER: If that is what this omnipotent being wants, why doesn't it just make it so, or make it obvious to each one of us.
- SHIFT TO 'ORDEAL' FRAMEWORK: This one god wants people to believe in it for the 'right' reasons, so it sent a message through a very narrow channel (one person/tradition) instead of a broad one, and deliberately made it difficult to believe in it, so that people can 'prove' their belief and loyalty in the face of opposition, disbelief and persecution.
- BURDEN OF PROOF COUNTER: Why would an omnipotent, omnipresent being need or value oaths of recognition and fealty from much more limited beings, such that it would set up these kinds of ordeals and tests?
- SHIFT TO 'GIFT OF LOVE' FRAMEWORK: It loved us so much it gave us free will, which we abused to turn away from it. But it loves us so much it sent us messages and signs to lead us back.
- INCONSISTENCY COUNTER: So it gave us the means to do what it did not want us to do, in order that we would do what it does want us to do?
- SHIFT TO 'ORDEAL' FRAMEWORK: For the right reasons - that we may prove ourselves worthy.
- RATIONALITY COUNTER: Based on what we know about agency, intentions, and the scope and scale of subjective goals and concerns, it does not make much sense for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent being to develop these kinds of intricate tests of loyalty. However, it makes perfect sense that human groupings develop these kinds of in-group tests of belonging and commitment.
- SHIFT TO THE 'MYSTERY' FRAMEWORK: How can you claim to understand the reasons or motives of such a supreme being? All of our concepts are so limited in trying to understand god. He has revealed himself to us in the only way we can understand, but he is far greater than our understanding. All we can do is accept what he has shown us in his benevolence.

This kind of thing has a great sense of felt-closure to it. There is an answer to every objection, and it seems irrefutable, despite the fact that the different frameworks or assumption bases in the rhetoric are not all perfectly consistent with each other. It is odd that supreme beings demand all kinds of commitment signals from humans. It is also odd that supreme beings with no limitations would leak their message out through narrow and protected channels. Why not just tell everybody? But there is a framework in apologetics - call it the SHIFT TO THE HERMENEUTIC FRAMEWORK - that this being *has* told everybody, but people are just too busy, confused, misled, numb or fallen to notice the message that is everywhere. But this is inconsistent with the need to be loyal to one specific channel for this message.

These objection-countering themes can wax and wane throughout a discussion with a religious literalist, creating a position that they feel is unassailable because it has an answer for every challenge. However, the coherence between the answers is loose, and reliant on dubious premises which would support conclusions the religious person might not endorse. The only thing notable about their invincible rhetoric is that it is invincible, with no necessary indication that it is also correct. This makes it incredibly annoying to argue with them.

In a research paper called "The Invincible Character of Management Consultants' Rhetoric: How one blends incommensurates while keeping them apart" (Organization, Vol 7(4), 2000, p. 633-655), Johan Berglund and Andreas Werr describe how rhetoric of this sort draws its objection-countering power from the fact that we embrace a wide variety of master-narratives or root-metaphors as valuable for different explanatory contexts. By freely mixing arguments from more than one mythical system within the same discourse, we can construct a sequence of arguments that has an answer for any objection. The argumentation may also be easy to endorse, because we recognize the value of each argument within it. Receptive audiences for this kind of message react positively to the prima facie validity of each of the commonplaces of wisdom as they are trotted out, without reflecting on the fact that each commonplace is drawn from a very different discursive context, and as such they cannot really be jointly applied against the same objection.

In the religious example I used above, there is the "Omnipotent Creator" mythic system, which emphasizes an unbroken narrative of cause and effect (except for the cause of God itself, which is never given, and so the creator myth still fails to explain how it all started. It just shifts the creation-from-nothing from an object-protagonist - the universe - to an equally inexplicably pre-existing subject-protagonist; the creator. This probably seems plausible to each individual human who believes it because they were once tiny kids with huge parents who *were* their world, so it makes sense that subjects precede the world). Then there is the "Ordeals of Faith" myth, whereby God tests the loyalty of those who believe in it, and the way to be down with God is to prove your unshakable faith no matter how sparse the evidence, or how hard the test. This sits uneasily with the "Omniscient judge" myth, according to which God would already know how loyal you were anyway, thereby requiring no test to find out...

If you freely counter objections raised relative to one mythic system by drawing on another mythic system without noticing that the story lines are kind of distinct, then you can always have an answer for every objection without noticing their incompatibility, because each answer draws on mythic systems which are fuzzily-distinct enough to prevent the conflicts from being noticed. This is unbelievably infuriating for us rationalist types, to the seeming great delight (at times) of those who manage to silence our objections without having to submit any of their incommesurable beliefs to Occam's razor.

This phenomenon is similar to one of the cognitive defects that Pascal Boyer identifies as one cause of religious belief in "Religion Explained"; specifically "Source Monitoring Defects". We do not recall or activate our awareness of the distinct sources of distinct knowledge types. Other defects Boyer analyzes include the well-known "Confirmation Bias", "Cognitive Dissonance Reduction", "Consensus Effects" and "Memory Illusions", all of which can conspire to efface the disparate sources of wisdom to create invincible rhetoric, where incommensurable ideas cohabit in powerful ways.

However, this same infuriating aspect of religious literalist apologetics tells us something important about religion as a human cultural activity that should lead us to receive religious wisdom in a respectful manner (even if we don't believe that God exists in any kind of way besides in human culture). Religious wisdom has enormous power as a repository of important generalizations drawn from many domains of human life, compressed into non-argumentative mythic structures.

So religious belief will be full of inconsistency, and unacceptable as a rational description of how the universe works, but at the same time it will be a powerful mashup of observations and generalizations about all features of human life. This storied richness is a resource that people can draw on to act meaningfully in positive ways, and some religious people who are committed to this kind of lived religion are empowered to do more good than they would otherwise have attempted. Thus people who take the love of wisdom seriously will attend to the wisdom of the irrational, even while rejecting it as a description of the world, and remaining vigilent against its capacity to empower people to do more evil than they might otherwise do, as well. What goes for religion can also go for all kinds of human discourses that are non-scientific, such as the pop psychology and pop business writing were a great many important observations may come together in ways similar to how root metaphors come together in religious traditions.

There are thus thoughtful ways for rationalists to engage religious ideas, pop-psychological ideas, folk wisdom, managerial/self-help guru-dom, and other such cultural repositories of meaning. Nevertheless, invincible rhetoric remains totally infuriating, and when it is being used as a dodge, people should really be called on it.

Defining Management 1

Defining management is not a task that produces closure. It's more contingent on the purposes of your exposition. However, there is one fairly concise one that I appreciate, and I think it kind of sums up the generic views I have about management. The source for this is a paper that Karl Wiig from the Knowledge Research Institute has posted at http://www.krii.com/articles.htm , called The Intelligent Enterprise and Knowledge Management. He actually isn't defining management in this paper, but intelligence more broadly. I guess I must see the role of management as the intelligent guidance of organizations, in part.

Anyway, he says that people in organizations need pertinent expertise in order to:
- Provide competent handling of both well-known and less-known tasks.
- Provide innovative approaches to work and all other endeavors.
- Evaluate the consequences of actions.
- Manage relationships and work environments.
- Conserve resources.
- Support personal and enterprise renewal.

I think that sums up what management is all about, at a shoot-from-the-hip, generic level.

Virtual Teams, Distance Work, Silence and Resentment

I work in Distance Ed, and I've been working on distance/virtual teams for a long time. The unique problem with distance work/distance management, I think, is the lack of shared context. When you all work in the same office, you know when someone is sick, on vacation, overloaded or working to a deadline on something. So if they do not respond to a request of yours right away, you understand. When you don't have that contextual information, then when somebody doesn't get back to you, the reason is a mystery. You just get a sense that the person is unreliable, or thinks you are unimportant. Then you resent them for that.

Basic attribution theory suggests that this is a natural way to respond when lacking contextual info, but it is very destructive on virtual/distance teams!!

One way around this is to spend time at the beginning of a distance collaboration with everybody together in one space, to synchronize everybody's internal sense/mental models of themselves, each other, the team, the task and the timeline. Then you have to meet face-to-face periodically to re-synchronize and keep your collective "groove" fresh.

Here's something I wrote elsewhere on this topic:

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Advantages of Collaboration at a Distance over Collocated (local) Collaboration (Shunn et al., 2002):

On virtual teams:

- Info sharing can be more even (all members have more to share, because as a group they have access to more/more varied information sources, by virtue of being in different contexts)
- Wider influx of ideas, wider variety of mental models (same idea as above)
- Less tendency for groupthink, regionalism, conformity
- Asynchronous communications more thoughtful, measured and complete than live conversation, and better-structured for persistence and re-use
- Asynchronous communications tend to be more durable
- Collaboration of any kind involves a rhythm of social integration and then going off to do solo work - the "solo" part of this work cycle unfolds with less disruption when collaborating at a distance

However:

- Frequent face-to-face meetings are important, esp. at beginning of a collaboration (e.g. weekly)

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WHY?
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DISTANCE COLLABORATION DISRUPTS INTERACTIVE GROUNDING

Copresent collaborators can build the common ground that will sustain the successful distance collaboration, through dense and rich interactions.

In copresent communications, they can coordinate conversational turn-taking, respond to the precisely timed conversational cues of their collaborators, repair misunderstandings in real time. As a result, the mental model each collaborator forms of the other collaborators' communication styles, frames of reference, assumption bases and cognitive processes, greatly facilitating coordination during solo work phases.

Collocal meetings inculcate task, team and context awareness. "People keep up with information about the demand for their work in the real world, how particular tasks are progressing, what fellow workers are doing, who is communicating with whom, what equipment is out of order, and many other details of the collaboration that concern them directly or tangentially. Here we distinguish between awareness of the task (e.g. what steps have to be taken next…) and awareness of the collaborative team (e.g., who knows what among the members…). Developing and maintaining this team awareness is much more difficult in distributed teams than collocated ones.

Task awareness, which includes collaborators' beliefs about the overall project, including its history, current status, and future directions, is crucial for successful coordination. When collaborators divide work, they need to monitor their partners' activities for personnel management and to understand the impact of their partners' progress on their own work. This monitoring can help people determine when and which collaborative actions are required (e.g. whether it is time to nag someone to complete his or her section of the project). The granularity with which collaborators need to maintain task awareness differs depending on the nature of the task…

Team awareness, on the other hand, refers to collaborators' beliefs about both stable and changing attributes of their partners. Detailed and accurate models of each other's knowledge, skills, and motivation help collaborators assign tasks appropriately and solicit and offer appropriate help. Collaborators share beliefs about project roles and responsibilities, interdependencies among team members, the current status of each person's assigned tasks, their availability for interaction, and the like…Equally important, when team members are collocated, they can passively monitor activities going on around them and pick up relevant information without explicit communication… This passive monitoring of other's activities aids collaboration… [e.g.]members of a team pick up information about each other while training side by side, which allows them to allocate tasks more effectively.
Not only do collocated teams pick up information implicitly, but they also share a context that helps them accurately interpret this information… the lack of shared context leads to misattributions for behaviour, resulting in poorer coordination and distrust. For example, one member may send another mail asking for an update, but does not get a response because the recipient is on vacation. In a distributed team, the lack of shared context often led to ambiguity about interpreting silence, which in turn resulted in failures of coordination and distrust… failure to respond to mail was attributed negatively to the person (that person is unreliable) rather than to the situation (the mail did not get through or the team was on vacation). By contrast, in a collocated setting, vacation schedules and availability would likely be known." (Kraut et al., 2002 p. 153-154)

THE IMPLICATION of the first study is that when collaborators take the time up front to build shared cognitive models through interactive grounding, then they can better withstand the corrosive effects of distance collaboration, and reap the rewards of distributive work efforts.

THE RISK to virtual organizations such as our own is that we fail to recognize the strategic importance of building a cohesive group through real-time, face to face interactions, and so many of our distance interactions will be compromised by insufficient shared grounding.

REFERENCES:
Kraut, Robert E., Susan R. Fussell, Susan E. Brennan and Jane Siegel, "Understanding Effects of Proximity on Collaboration: Implications for Technologies to Support Remote Collaborative Work" p. 137. in Hinds, Pamela and Sara Kiesler, Distributed Work. MIT Press: Cambridge Mass., 2002

Schunn, Christian, Kevin Crowley and Takeshi Okada, "What Makes Collaborations Across a Distance Succeed? The Case of the Cognitive Science Community", p. 407. in Hinds, Pamela and Sara Kiesler, Distributed Work. MIT Press: Cambridge Mass., 2002