design for a subjective situationism, including conceptual grounds of business information modeling
Pieter Wisse
Chapter 12 demonstrates where derivations of Habermas’s theory of communicative action onto information modeling approaches often fail to reflect its original complexity. It also claims that he himself has contributed to confusion and misappropriation.
What Habermas cannot help of course, is that his theory is often studied from secondary sources that lack a necessary critical quality. At least this would explain why his own outspoken reservations do not survive, for example in modeling theories that flaunt communicative action.
However, his own work already has a low threshold for biased interpretation. For Habermas does not clearly maintain a distinction that would otherwise prevent much confusion. He starts out by developing his theory of communicative action as a sort of measuring standard. So, for him it does not have absolute and general validity. It serves to chart phenomena. Their description, he argues, is made relative to his standard.
Such a bootstrap mechanism is extremely common. Take for example a meter. After it has been declared a standard, measurements are uniformly possible. It is essential to understand, however, that measuring results are always relative, that is, relative to the – assumption of the – relevant standard. And results involve a reduction; only what falls within the range of the standard’s dimension(s) gets included.
So far, so good. But next, the impression is inescapable that Habermas nevertheless actively promotes his standard as the behavioral norm. Now that is really something of a different order. A meter can be applied as a standard, but so can a yard, etcetera.
By making it difficult for his readers to distinguish between communicative action as standard versus norm, description flows over into prescription, vice versa. And it is as a (meta)theory of prescription – regardless of how different that might be from the originally more balanced view of Habermas – that communicative action holds attraction for construction-oriented information modelers. For they consider an information model a prescription of reality, i.e., a reality to be constructed. Given the nature of the digital technology, an unambiguous prescription is required. Then, a normative approach is ideally suited, especially when the norm is subsequently inflated to cover all of reality. It comes down to mistaking a measuring standard for the reality reflected by measurements.
Communicative-action-as-norm is especially attractive for information systems blueprint-thinking because of the emphasis that Habermas places on rationality. A concomitant analytical closure is easily welcomed. Conceptual information modeling, however, is not aimed at producing a tool blueprint. That comes later in every iteration. At the conceptual stage of design, what is at stake is an interpretation of reality with all its variety relevant to – interests of – stakeholders. A priori reduction to a particular norm excludes requisite variety.
Chapter 12 ends the series of four critical chapters in Part ii. In Part i, Chapter 5 offers criticism. All other chapters are constructively oriented toward designing the ontology of subjective situationism (Part i) and erecting an anatomy of meaning of those grounds (Part ii).
What remains in this treatise is the final chapter. Chapter 13 indicates some directions for application of subjective situationism and its anatomy of meaning.
2002, web edition 2005 © Pieter Wisse
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