Between the relatively monolithic and uniform ideal of a literate
society convinced of the virtues of logic, and the pluralistic
and heterogeneous reality of partial literacies that transfer
logic to machines, one can easily distinguish a change in
direction. Persons with a rather adequate literate culture,
educated in the spirit of rationality guarded by classic or
formal logic, are at a loss when facing the sub-literacies of
specialized practical endeavors, or the illogical inferences made
within new fields of human self-constitution. Let us put their
attitude in some perspective. At various stages in human
evolution-for instance, transition from scavenging to hunting, or
from hunting and foraging to herding and agriculture-people
experienced the effects of the erosion of some behavioral codes
and projected their new condition in new practical patterns. One
type of cohesion represented in the declining behavioral code was
replaced by another; one logic, deferring the code, was followed
by others. When interaction among groups of different types of
cohesion occurred, logic was severely challenged. Sometimes, as
a result, one logic dominated; other times, compromise was
established. Primitive stages are remarkably adaptive to the
environment.
Our stage, remote in many ways from the wellspring (Ursprung),
consists of an appropriated environment within which the effort
is to provide a pragmatic framework for high efficiency. Logic,
rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics interact inside this
framework. In other words, human evolution goes from sensorial
anchoring in the natural world to an artificial (human crafted)
world superimposed on the concrete reality-and eventually
extended into artificial life, one from among the most recently
established fields of scientific inquiry. Within this world,
humans no longer restrict the projection of their natural and
intellectual condition through one (or very few) comprehensive
sign systems. Quite to the contrary, the effort is towards
segmentation, with the aim of reaching not global cohesion, but
local cohesiveness, corresponding to local optima. The
complexity and the nature of the changes within this system
result in the need for a strategy of segmentation, and a logic,
or several, supporting it. In the interaction between a language
and the humans constituted in it, as the embodiment of their
biological characteristics and of their experience, logical
conflicts are not excluded. After all, the logic of actions,
influenced by heuristics as well, and the logic inherent to
literacy are not identical.
Actions bring to mind agents of action and thus the logic
integrated in tools and artifacts. The assumption that the same
logic housed in language is involved in the expression leading
to the making of tools and other objects related to people's
activity went unchallenged for a long time. Even today,
designers and engineers are educated according to an ideal of
literacy that is expected to reflect in their work the
rationality exemplified in the literate use of language.
Complementing most of the development of humankind's language,
drawings have expressed ideas about how to make things and how
to perform some operations that are part of our continuous
experience of self- constitution in practical activity. Each
drawing embodies the logic of the future artifact, no matter how
useful or even how ephemeral. There is a large record of literate
work from which logical aspects of thinking can be derived.
There is a rather small record of drawing, and not too many
surviving artifacts. They were conceived for precise practical
experiences and usually did not outlast the experience, or the
person who embodied it. Roads, houses, tools, and other objects
indeed survived, but it is not until better tools for drawing
itself and better paper became available that a library of
engineering was established.
As a hybrid between art and science, engineering accepts the
logic of scientific discovery only in order to balance it
against the logic of aesthetic expectations. In the pragmatic
framework of the civilization of illiteracy, engineering
definitely has a dominant position in respect to the
self-constitution of the human being in language- based practical
experiences. This is due to the impact it has on the efficiency
of human practical experiences and on their almost endless
diversification.
There is a phase of conflict, a phase of accommodation, and a
phase of complementarity when some means (such as language and
the means for visualization used by designers and engineers)
replace others, if they do not render them useless. In our time
of experiences involving many more people than ever, of
distributive transactions, of heterogeneity, and of interactions
that go beyond the linearity of the sequence, the structural
characteristics of literacy interfere with the new dynamics of
human development as this is supported by very powerful
technologies embodying a variety of logical possibilities. At
this time, the implicit logic of literacy and the new logics (in
the plural) collide in the pragmatic framework.
Within the logic of the literate discourse, followed volens
nolens in this book, it should be clear that the attempt to
salvage literacy is the attempt to maintain linear relations,
determinism, hierarchy (of values), centralization-which fostered
literacy-in a framework requiring non-linearity,
decentralization, distributed modes of practical experiences,
and unstable value (among others). The two frameworks are
logically incompatible. This does not mean that literacy has to
be discarded altogether, or that it will disappear, as cuneiform
notation and pictographic writing did, or that it will be
replaced by drawing or by computer-based language processing. The
linear will definitely satisfy a vast number of practical
activities; so will deterministic explanations and centralism
(political, religious, technological, etc.), and even an elitist
sense of value. But instead of being a universal standard, or
even a goal (to linearize everything that is not linear, to
ascertain sequences of cause and effect, to find a center and
practice centrality), it will become part of a complex system of
relations, free of hierarchy-or at least with fast changing
hierarchies-valueless, adaptive, extremely distributed.
Of no less significance is the type of logic (and for that
matter, rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics) housed in
language, i.e., projected from the universe of human
self-constitution in the system of inferences, knowledge, and
awareness of the being characteristic of literate frameworks of
practical experiences. Language successfully captured a
dualistic logic indebted to the values of truth and falsehood,
and supported experiences embodied in the abstract character of
logical rationality. It was complemented by logical symbolism
and logical calculus, very successful in formalizing dualism,
and in eliminating logical models not fitting the dualistic
structure.
Literacy instilled bivalent logic as another of its invisible
layers-something is written or not, the written is right or
wrong-allowing only quite late, and actually in the realm of
logical formalism, the appearance of multi-valued schemes. The
non-linearity, vagueness, and fuzziness characteristic of the
post-industrial pragmatic framework opened avenues of high human
efficiency, better adapted to the scale of humankind that
required efficiency and eventually made efficiency its major
goal. Literacy is ill endowed for supporting multi-valued logic,
although it was always tempted to step in its vast territories.
Even some of the disciplines built around and in extension of
literacy (such as history, philosophy, sociology) are not able
to integrate a logic different from the one seated in the
practical experience of reading and writing. This explains, for
instance, computationalism as a new horizon for science, within
which multi-valued logic can be simulated even if the computer's
underlying structure is that of Boolean logic. The literate
argument of science and multimedia's non-linear heuristic path to
science are fundamentally different. Each requires a different
logic and results in a different interaction between those who
constitute their identity in the practical experience of
scientific experiments and those who constitute their identity in
co- participation.
It took longer in the world of predicative logic and in the
science based on analytic power to accept fuzzy logic and to
integrate it in new artifacts, than it took in the world of
non-predicative logic and in the science based on the power of
synthesis. Within the universe of non-predicative language,
fuzzy logic made it into the design of control mechanisms for
high-speed trains, as well as into new efficient toasters. It was
accepted in Japan while it was still debated among experts in the
Western world, until 1993, when a washing machine integrating
fuzzy logic was introduced in the market. This fact can go on
record as more than a mere example in a discussion regarding the
implications of the global economy for the various language
systems and the logical coordinating mechanisms specific to
each.
Progress in understanding and emulating human thinking shows a
progression from a literacy-based model to a model rooted in the
new pragmatic framework. Rule- based, pattern-matching systems
generalize predicate calculus; neural networking is devoted to
mimicking the way minds work, in a synthetic neuron-plex array;
fuzzy logic addresses the limitations of Boolean calculus and
the nondeterminism of neural networks, and concentrates on
modeling imprecision, ambiguity, and undecidability as these are
embodied in new human practical experiences.