How the built environment is dealt with in a multidisciplinary fashion could serve as an example of productively merging paradigms. Simply put, a room is part of a building is part of a town or city is part of a country is part of the earth. The scales of room and building are the domain of architecture. The next larger scale is addressed by the discipline of urban planning. For it is long since recognized that a town is not just a bigger house. It is qualitatively sufficiently different to justify a characteristic approach. Of course, the disciplines for different scales are also heavily interdependent. Nonetheless, in recognition of limits to transposing methods etcetera across scales, corresponding disciplines such as architecture, urban design and regional/national/supranational spatial planning (co-)exist.

in: Civil information management, a short introduction: an information discipline for society and the metaphor of traffic

 

As the concept of ecology should establish, independency in the sense of autarky has of course always been an illusion[.]

in: Ontology for interdependency: steps to an ecology of information management

 

[C]onstitution surely is a more productive metaphor than foundation. Where foundation ignores differences, plurality, relativity, multiplicity, etcetera, at least in a democratic sense constitution embraces such concepts.

in: The constitutional force of perspectival phenomenology: philosophical unification in information systems

 

[I]n analytical geometry there is no space between that of two dimensions and three dimensions. It is one or the other. It requires a shift. Two-dimensional ‘objects’ will always fit in three dimensional space, but not the other way around.

in: note 23.23

 

A useful comparison exists with architecture of the built environment. For information systems, despite rhetoric, there’s actually still only one type of ‘architect.’ S/he deals with an information system as if it were a separate building, only. Lacking is the additional and complementary discipline of considering information flows at the scale of, as the analogy suggests, city, region, etcetera.

in: On "nil" modality and Metapattern

 

In [Metapattern’s] conceptual scheme, so-called shared meaning simply doesn't exist. […] It is an assumption, one that I myself f[i]nd liberating. In fact, differences (also read: relativity) do not at all hamper coordinated action, but actually promote it. Just think of members of a soccer team; they can play together properly because they are different (of course, I don't want to stretch such an analogy). Just imagine how life would stagnate from uniformity.

in: Notes on Metapattern and enneadic semiosis, part 1

 

From the original Metapattern perspective, what [was] 'needed' for practical information modeling at 'open' scale was a way to loosely couple what became called context and intext. The engineer's solution is to add a third element, acting as their hinge. [The] innovation regarding information modeling is to move in the direction that is considered counterintuitive for the modeling tradition so far. Rather than filling up the 'hinge,' that is, stuffing it with attributes, [Metapattern] ke[e]p[s] it as empty as possible. As with a physical entrance, a hinge does not at all pretend to be door-like and/or wall-like. Precisely by its intervention, it allows the door ... to remain door, and the wall to remain wall.

in: Notes on Metapattern and enneadic semiosis, part 2

 

Let’s say, it is a nail that you want to drive through two planks in order to hold them together. For that task, you have a tool available, which you also know how to handle: a hammer. Suppose you don’t know about hammers. Confronted with the task of connecting two planks with a nail, you might set out to design, develop, and so on, an instrument to perform the task. With hammers available as a commodity, that would certainly amount to a waste of effort, et cetera. Of course, you’d be completely right to embark on trying to come up with a new method for modelling when you’ve established that existing methods don’t qualify. I found myself in such a situation, with Metapattern as one of several results.

in: note 53.6

 

When you care to take a look at the — metamodel of the — semiotic ennead, you see that concept appears as a teleological … concept. For it is inherently motivated, through focus. For example, the concept of water varies with motivation. Are you thirsty? Or soaking wet? Et cetera … And it is again different when I am thirsty, and so on.

in: note 53.8

 

For equating event with behavior I took my cue from Schopenhauer. He attributes will to anything. Well, why not? You see how such a tolerant attitude promotes formalism. When someone objects that, for example, a stone does not have a will, you can respond that it does, but with a value […] set at zero. Like recursion, so-called boundary values are a great mathematical trick (and really nothing ‘more’).
With a particular stone taken as object, it does ‘behave.’ Dependent on — what is taken as — the situation, it continues to lie, it momentarily falls, it erodes, et cetera. So, event can be taken to mean behavior … Doesn’t it rather sound like Alice in Wonderland?

in: note 53.13

 

And I would say that metaphor is even an illusionary category when we realize that signs irreducibly mediate between objects and interpretants (Peirce). To paraphrase Kant, just as it is impossible to know a Ding-an-sich, it is equally impossible to express it as such. That effectively makes every sign metaphorical …

in: note 53.17

 

The relevant concept of behavior mediates between the apparent opposites of identity and difference. Example: water. The child is familiar with water as a fluid. Cool it sufficiently, and water becomes a solid. For it to appear as steam, heat it. Throughout, it remains water. However, what makes its properties change, in other words, what makes water behave differently, are mutually exclusive circumstances, or situations.

in: Analytic philosophy for synthesis from early education on

 

It might help to see the conceptual modeler producing two different kinds of models. One — and the first to draw up, iteration for the time being ignored — is, as argued above, as purely conceptual as possible. It is about meanings of information of and for users.
When users agree that their (!) relevant meanings are being catered for properly, unambiguously, exhaustingly and so on, another model may be derived from the purely conceptual one. It is aimed, not at users for their understanding and approval, but at programmers et cetera for subsequently developing the actual tools.
This is not different at all form what we are familiar with for the so-called built environment. When you are not a (building) architect yourself, you engage one for designing, say, a house. Upon your approval, ‘your’ architect draws up specifications for one or more building contractors (and in their turn they may elaborate such specifications for their particular contributions under the original architect’s supervision on your behalf). In this analogy, for digital information systems assignments are still right away given to programmers-as-building-contractors. So far, no architect is involved ‘in between.’ Adding to the confusion is that programmers now often call themselves architects. Indeed, they do design — well, who doesn’t — but they do so from a tool, rather than from a user perspective. And users, knowing no better, only pay attention to the job title, assuming that what will be produced is done from their perspective. Wrong!

in: note 71.36

 

[C]oncepts should first of all be modeled without any consideration of how information-about-them should be facilitated by technology (with, for example, pen-and-paper of course deserving to be called a technology, too). When conceptual variety is at stake, there really is nothing more practical than suspending actual construction until after it has become clear enough what to construct. I am all in favor of trial and error, but without design-as-plan merely error results. You would mistrust a carpenter who would right away start hammering planks together, and even most confident and happy to do so, for constructing your new house.

in: note 71.36

 

What Charles Peirce basically does is transferring a well-proven engineering solution to a conceptual problem. For when there are just two elements, keeping them mutually related necessarily limits possibilities for variety. Have you ever realized what makes you open and close a door with the surrounding wall — and the rest of the building, for that matter — remaining where it is? Right, hinges supply a third element mediating between wall and door (or window, et cetera). So, I find Peirce’s real stroke of genius is to have added sign as a mediating concept between the concepts of object and interpretant respectively. Indeed, the so-called semiotic triad results.

in: note 80.1