Anne-Francoise Schmid

Louis Couturat (1868–1914) was a French philosopher and mathematician1. He mainly wrote works on the philosophy of mathematics and the international auxiliary language project. He was involved in the beginnings of the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale and the founding of the French Society of Philosophy. He is known for his polemic with Henri Poincare on the “logistic” question. His extensive correspondence (1897–1913) with Bertrand Russell, published in 2001 (Russell, 2001), contains exchanges on their respective interpretations of Leibniz. We will be making use of this still relatively unexploited document in the course of this paper.

This text proposes a generic epistemology, relatively independent of any discipline, with the aim of understanding newly emerging scientific objects and disciplines, as well as new logics of interdisciplinarity. This epistemology is also relatively independent of the present, requiring a thinking of the future as something other than the realization of the present ; somewhat like that suggested by the practice of scenario planning. It does not supplant “disciplinary; epistemology, but seeks to demonstrate, through their simultaneous exercise, the passage from a critical to a fictional paradigm, where disciplines are decentred and philosophies immersed in the sciences ; not the “established; sciences we know from descriptions constructed along the lines of classical disciplines, but emergent or future sciences, for which the intention of the researcher is constitutive. The question is no longer that of the criteria of scientificity, but that of the identity of science.

Schmid works on the multiple interactions between sciences and arts, between epistemology and the multiplicity of philosophies. These dynamic relationships can only be understood and systematized by a science of terms and relationships, a modality of Design. AFS sees in philosophical invention, rather than a result of criticism, the effect of a conception of and in philosophy, which occurs when philosophy touches another discipline. The Design, rather than a method external to the philosophy, allows it to manifest its construction in its links to the other knowledge, doctored or indoctrinated. Philosopher among scientists (EPFL, INSA, INRA, MinesParisTech), more recently philosopher among artists (vimeo film Letre, Philosophical Scripts for a festival of lost films (Gwangju), collaborations with Robin Mackay, Benoît Maire, Alice Lucy Rekab, Gallien Déjean, Ivan Liovik Ebel). A specialist in Poincaré and editor of Russell and Couturat, she has taught philosophy and epistemology at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre, and mathematical logic at the University of Geneva. She has been teaching at the New Center of Research and Practice since 2016. Her problem is the question of how to avoid exclusions, exclusions of emerging scientific methods in science in view of what she saw in laboratories and research centers, exclusion of philosophies in the name of the supremacy of one of them.

This paper describes the philosophical conditions for a ‘Design Theory’. A theory of design is a theory that recognises a mode of reasoning that produces the new. There is a massive gap between the traditional Philosophy and the Design Theory. Nevertheless, in the current context philosophy is modifying itself and can invent new relationships with the concepts of the design theory. The introduction of the notions of fiction, interdisciplinary site, genericity, enables opening spaces in which we can address heterogeneities. Classical scientific and philosophical disciplines are no longer able to describe these and Design can treat them with the idea of “new”. These relationships between Philosophy and Design are developed in an example, the creation of Genetically Modified Organism Fish. We show that it is not a complex object, but an integrative one, which implies new methodological approaches, participating to philosophy and to design theory together.

Our view is not to see engineering from the point of view of philosophy, nor is it to see philosophy from the point of view of engineering. We are offering neither a philosophy of engineering, nor a re-engineering of philosophy, nor a philosophy from an evolutionary point of view, nor do we see engineering as applied science. Moreover our focus is not on validation or justification. Rather, we are proposing that the relationships among philosophy, engineering, science and the arts needs also to be seen from an interdisciplinary, concept genericity perspective, where philosophy, the disciplines or crafts are on equal footing, no one dominating or making decisions for any of the others, where the emphasis is on producing unstable integrative objects seen from the future or played with in virtual environments or multiply configured in different philo/science/engineering theoretical fictions. This is not to say that the other perspectives do not have an important role or are insignificant, but rather that this interdisciplinary generic perspective sets in relief issues that are usually not considered, though are also important. Our aim is to forge new relationships between philosophies, the sciences, the arts and engineering through a reconfiguration of design and philosophy into a unilateral duality of non-standard design/philosophy. From a non-standard design/philosophy orientation, both human subjects and objects are taken as indefinite and generic, capable of assuming determinations not countenanced in standard disciplines. This is not to say that standard disciplines and standard philosophy are ignored. Quite the contrary, they are hyper-retained but decomposed into flows of fragmentary materials that can be recomposed into non-disciplinarily flows of superposed counterpoint or inchoate harmony or melody. For example, conceptual fragments from quantum theory become entangled with those of philosophy (identity and superposition), study of space-time, biology, information and computing, psychology, linguistics and fiction. These compositions can split into unstable and uncertain integrative objects and also into equally unstable heretic collectives or perhaps even forgo splitting into a subject/object duality. In the process of conjugating relationships between philosophies, the sciences, engineering and the arts a generic epistemology emerges that is at once esthetic and ethical. Collective identity, generic decomposition and recomposition and architecting an interdisciplinary generic space to house and support collective and compositional processes, techniques and apparatuses are mutually formed and produced. This generic work needs scaffolding at the boundary between generic space inside and contexts outside to moderate and modulate the entrenched philosophic and disciplinary forces that seek to impose certain human and object identities. The scaffolding both protects the generic non-disciplinary space of non-standard design from the impositional effects of outside contexts and also enables materials from the outside to be used generically inside. For example, the individual as homo-economicus can be refashioned as homo-non-standard-economicus and value as competitive advantage can be refashioned as value for generic humanity. Non-standard philo/design fictions are modes of resistance to the well-entrenched disciplinary and philosophic stories repeated as sound-bites in our mediatized world that also point toward a new non-standard design engineering ethic.

In the Western tradition, at least since the 14th century, the philosophy of knowledge has been built around the idea of knowledge as a representation [Boulnois 1999]. The question of the evaluation of knowledge refers at the same time (1) to the object represented (which one does one represent?), (2) to the process of knowledge formation, in particular with the role of the knowing subject (which one does one represent and how does one represent it?), and finally (3) to the relationship between the representation and the represented object. Criteria of evaluation such as “validity”, “adequacy” or “truth”, as mentioned in chapter 4, make sense only with respect to these three dimensions. An evaluation can thus (1) depend on the ontological nature of the object of knowledge, (2) relate to the relationship between subject and object—including the structures (cognitive, social) which organize this relationship, or (3) relate to the relation of similarity between the object and its representation as well. The relevant criteria of evaluation thus depend on the points of view adopted on these questions. As there are indeed a plurality of points of view in this field, the goal of this appendix is to summarize, as briefly as possible, the various positions adopted by the philosophers and to refer to the relevant texts of reference for more information. The first section introduces useful discussions about the philosophy of theoretical knowledge and general epistemology, from a quasi-historical perspective. Section two discusses the intermediary but central notion of models. Section three, more exploratory, intro-duces an approach to simulation as “concrete experiment”. It suggests that such a frequent claim in the literature, when precisely evaluated, can, to some extent, renew both the representational and the linguistic views on simulation.

In the Western tradition, at least since the 14th century, the philosophy of knowledge has been built around the idea of knowledge as a representation [BOU 99]. The question of the evaluation of knowledge refers at the same time (1) to the object represented (which one does one represent?), (2) to the process of knowledge formation, in particular with the role of the knowing subject (which one does one represent and how does one represent it?), and finally (3) to the relationship between the representation and the represented object. Criteria of evaluation such as “validity”, “adequacy” or “truth”, as mentioned in [AMB 07], make sense only with respect to these three dimensions. An evaluation can thus (1) depend on the ontological nature of the object of knowledge, (2) relate to the relationship between subject and object—including the structures (cognitive, social) which organize this relationship, or (3) relate to the relation of similarity between the object and its representation as well. The relevant criteria of evaluation thus depend on the points of view adopted on these questions. As there are indeed a plurality of points of view in this field, the goal of this appendix is to summarize, as briefly as possible, the various positions adopted by the philosophers and to refer to the relevant texts of reference for more information (for a first outline [CHA 76, SCH 01]). The first section 1 introduces useful discussions about the philosophy of theoretical knowledge and general epistemology, from a quasi-historical perspective. Section two 2 discusses the intermediary but central notion of models. Section three 3, more exploratory, introduces an approach to simulation as “concrete experiment”. It suggests that such a frequent claim in the literature, when precisely evaluated, can, to some extent, renew both the representational and the linguistic views on simulation.

We introduce the notion of generic design from a new perspective, though the term does have a history in fields like systems science and along somewhat different paths in cognitive science, artificial intelligence and software engineering. For the latter, it was hypothesized as a unique type of thinking with similarities among design activities in different situations but with crucial differences between these and other cognitive activities. For the former, it was an approach to management of complexity through systems design via socialtechnical systems theory. The focus of our work is different from both. We do not investigate design as a unique type of activity, though we do not deny that it could be. Also, our work is not solely ensconced in a social-technical system. For us, the latter can also be seen as a physical and/or biological system from which materials for new construction can also be employed. Also for us, the arts are as important to address as science or engineering. Our work is generic because it does not start by limiting itself to designated disciplines or paradigms, fields or domains. Rather for us, generic design supposes an encompassing multi-disciplinary, multi-field approach for dealing with the ever-growing number and diversity of knowledge islands that are becoming more interconnected with support for going somewhat native. We also show how generic design participates in the qualitative or what are sometimes called incommensurable paradigmatic shifts in which knowledge grows. We begin development of generic design by combining philosophy and engineering, situating them in craftwork through the use of an integrative object from the construction crafts – scaffolding. Scaffolding becomes a way station between knowledge in its current state toward new conceptions under development. This paper is itself a way station, which links generic design with developments in philosophy, in science and engineering.

Louis Couturat (1868–1914) was a French philosopher and mathematician1. He mainly wrote works on the philosophy of mathematics and the international auxiliary language project. He was involved in the beginnings of the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale and the founding of the French Society of Philosophy. He is known for his polemic with Henri Poincare on the “logistic” question. His extensive correspondence (1897–1913) with Bertrand Russell, published in 2001 (Russell, 2001), contains exchanges on their respective interpretations of Leibniz. We will be making use of this still relatively unexploited document in the course of this paper.

What does the hypothesis of a non-epistemology bring to non-philosophy? Our aim is not to found a new discipline, but to take into account a vast reservoir of conceptual material that accompanies the sciences and put it to a new use. It may be that this does in fact pertain to a discipline – we can discuss this later, along with the question of the constitution of such practices as occasioned by other materials. Our aim is not critical either, since we do not seek to minimize the importance of written works about the sciences, but rather to redistribute such works on the basis of this new use. The use as such is the critique. This is a hypothesis, insofar as it can only be effectuated by way of its progressive realization, it is not something that can be obtained by principle, by surveying all these discourses.

Invention, fiction, création Anne-Françoise Schmid Partant de l’invention – souvent mono-disciplinaire - en philosophie, nous élargirons le propos en y ajoutant la fiction. Celle-ci se distingue de l’invention par la supposition d’un point d’extériorité et par une nouvelle ouverture de l’espace. Elle prépare à des variations de diverses disciplines et s’engage dans un processus plus générique. La création, affaire quasi-divine, touche de plus près des formes de réalité. La création amène à une interprétation du langage comme forçage et modifie les fonctions de la métaphore, en les confrontant à l’impossible. La création est indifférente aux disciplines tout en en faisant usage. Nous proposerons de cette suite, il y a un X, il est possible de fabriquer le X, le réel=X d’une œuvre publique, la construction d’un commun = X entre philosophies, arts et sciences. Invention, fiction, creation Anne-Françoise Schmid Starting from the invention - often mono-disciplinary - in philosophy, we will broaden the subject by adding the fiction. This is distinguished from the invention by the assumption of a point of externality and a new opening of space. It prepares for variations of various disciplines and engages in a more generic process. Creation, a quasi-divine affair, touches more closely the forms of reality. Creation leads to an interpretation of language as a forcing and modifies the functions of metaphor, confronting them with the impossible. Creation is indifferent to disciplines while making use of them. We will propose from this sequel, there is an X, it is possible to make the X, the real = X of a public work, the construction of a common = X between philosophies, arts and sciences.

Russell’s logicism consists of a thesis stating that all pure mathematics can be expressed in terms of logical constants and variables. It is usually assumed to be a reduction of pure mathematics to logic. Yet this thesis is a guarantee for the non-reduction of mathematics to number and quantity, of arithmetic to finite numbers only, of geometry to the Euclidean one, and of logic to syllogistic reasoning. Thus logicism cannot be interpreted as a dogmatically asserted doctrine of a logical foundation of mathematics. Besides, Russell’s philosophical work develops a critique concerning the themes related to foundations. All of Russell’s points of view on the links between logic and mathematics can only be understood if logic is considered as a full-fledged science and not as a formal language. This way to deal with logicism enhances “heterodoxical” perspectives to which Russell is led. Indeed, he is not always the “classic” that scholars too promptly identify. The present in­terpretation notably relies on the recently published correspondence between Bertrand Russell and Louis Couturat (1897-1913).