No Social Constructs in My Little Town

In Paul Simon’s song “My Little Town”, there is the lyric “everything’s the same in my little town”.  This can be contrasted with "the big city" that is cosmopolitan, multicultural, not all the same.  It is only when you have the experience of more than one culture that it becomes natural to see that there can be more than one notion of how things are.  In Philosophy, when there is one “correct” definition of something, due to it existing in nature, independent of man, it is called a “natural kind”.  However, when something only exists because people have agreed to think that it does, that is called a “social construction”.  Computer programmers need to be aware that, of the things they have to model in their databases, user interfaces & business models, most are social constructions, and hence, there are many ways to skin a cat, but not arbitrary ways.  Two case studies are given that show how programmers can err on either side of the spectrum.

Social Constructs versus Natural Kinds

It is common to consider Natural Kinds to be “discovered”, and Social Constructions to be “invented”.  An example of something that only exists because we say it does is money.  A Bitcoin (or an ounce of gold, or a piece of paper with $100 printed on it) is worth whatever we say it is, and how many Big Macs can be bought with each is whatever we agree upon.  And via the computerized marketplace, we can change our collective mind every microsecond.

Social Constructions are also inherently “relative” to some culture, which means that there can be more than one version of it floating around, and each can be equally valid.  A traditional example is the definition of what it means to be a woman.  While there are the aspects of womanhood that are controlled by DNA and biology, many aspects are defined by society, and there are many different definitions existing simultaneously.

On the other hand, we believe that atoms exists in nature.  We may discover better definitions and understandings of them over time, but those would be mere changes in our knowledge of them, rather than making them an invention.  When Europeans thought that swans only came in white, and then found black ones in West Australia, their definition of swan changed, but we still think that swans are in fact a natural species, independent of whether you’re European.

Natural Kinds that Aren’t

There are times that something is thought to be a natural kind, but later realized to not be, for example, planets.  We thought that planets existed objectively and independent of our latest definition.  We now realize that those orbiting chunks of rock and clouds of gas may exist objectively, but our classifications of “planet” versus “dwarf planet” versus “failed star” do not.  I.E. they are arbitrary enough that aliens landing here will likely have different ways of classifying orbiting stuff.

Saving the Phenomena

So, if planets aren’t “real”, where did they come from?  An early view of the universe was that everything literally revolved around the earth in a perfect circle, except for a handful of “wanderers”, the original meaning of planet.  As we gained more knowledge, we would update our definitions. But we always (if only unconsciously) wanted to “save the phenomena”; in other words, make sure that the new definitions didn’t drop any planets and didn’t add any, otherwise, we would be defining something that did not match our intuitive notion of planets.

Of course, recently that became impossible because we realized that we were either going to have to add hundreds of new “planets”, or, drop Pluto, to be consistent.  The more that people tried to keep the original collection, the more it became clear that the collection was based on culture and history rather than an objective category of things in space.  Some even say that Jupiter is not really a planet, but a failed star.

Case Study: World Headquarters in My Little Town

The world headquarters of Coca-Cola is in Atlanta, and while a world headquarters would be expected to be pretty cosmopolitan, it is in The South which was traditionally very monoculture, conservative, and religious (which I can say because I grew up there).  I was there, on a Y2K project, redesigning data files which were using just 2 digits to represent years (even though the file formats had been specified only two years previously, by the way).  During discussions with the developers (all Atlanta locals), it was assumed that there was only one obvious “correct” way to represent dates in a string: mmddyyyy.  Having lived overseas, I knew to point out that most of the world doesn’t do it that way, instead using ddmmyyyy, or yyyymmdd (and we did not even get into other calendar systems).

The point is that it was assumed that dates were a natural kind when they are actually very socially constructed. In my little town every thing is the same and therefore looks like the one and only way God intended.

Case Study: Bizarrely Arbitrary User Interface at domain.com

While the concept of “social construction” says that there can be several equally-valid ways of defining some things, do not forget about the “social” part! I.E. you should not create an arbitrary definition that no one actually uses and therefore no one will understand.

On the website of domain.com (a domain name registry provider), there is the domain name registration form which includes a mandatory phone number field.  The required format is so bizarre though that it took a chat with customer support to figure out what is was.  It turned out to require the phone number to be entered as the fractional portion of a floating point number…let that sink in…floating point notation, with a mandatory leading plus sign and mandatory integer of 1.  So, phone number “(123) 456-7890” had to be entered as +1.1234567890  ...AND, to make matters worse, the error message received when it was not entered that way, only said that a legal phone number was required, without explaining what the non-obvious required format was.

When I pressed the support chat operator for an answer to my question, WTF?! , I was told (after some time on hold) that “that was the format that the developers chose”. There was no answer to my question: Of all the phone number formats on the planet, who has ever used that?   Apparently it was the culture of domain.com off-shored contract developers with no managers who were engineers enough to review the design.

The purpose of a thing is in US as well as in IT

In an earlier post, I advocated adopting Philosophers' practice of considering the purpose of a thing when creating a definition for that thing.  Plato and Aristotle would have said that one of the things that made an acorn, an acorn, was that it had the "goal" or "purpose" of becoming an oak tree.  In defining a domain model (aka business objects model), document the "purpose" of a class in order to get at its true attributes and behavior. But, as I was recently reminded, not only can the purpose of a thing be "in the thing itself", it can also be solely in our minds.  I.E. it begs the question: if we are defining a class of things, what is our purpose in caring if we know that something is one of those things?

I had this AHA moment after reading the article "Unclassified" in the June 2010 issue of Discover magazine, where I was surprised to learn that there is no accepted universal definition of a biological species; there are at least 20+ competing definitions.  I had thought that "being able to breed fertile offspring" was the definition, but that is only one (and of course it leaves out the vast majority of living things on earth that reproduce asexually).

After having read about all the conflicting ways to organize and cluster individuals into species, each one with its own way of looking at things, it begged the question: Why do you want to know? I.E. What is the purpose of knowing which species something is?"  Depending on why you want to know, you choose one definition over all the others.

But of course as Darwin thought, this would mean that species are not "real". Instead of discovering pre-existing forms, we would merely be inventing arbitrary sets of attributes-in-common. Therefore, unlike the "teleology" of Plato and Aristotle where the "purpose" or "goal" of a species is internal to itself, it would seem that a possibly more important purpose is the one that WE have in wanting to place a particular into that species.

For example, Ponder all of the various shapes, sizes, forms, etc of things that you would want to call a "chair" [and do a Google image search of "chair"]. Now, ponder coming up with a universal definition of chair (such that all chairs would be recognized as such, and nothing else would), and you will see that it will be much easier if you can refer to the purpose we have for them; i.e. being able to sit (comfortably?) on them.  Without that, it is hard to distinguish between a storage box (not a chair) and a storage bench (a chair).  [Try it. Do a Google image search for storage box and then storage bench.]

In this sense, a species would be more like a Java Interface than a Class.  Classes usually embody the pre-existing forms viewpoint, i.e. the notion that attributes and behavior are really "in the thing" rather than merely "how we want to look at it".  And while in practice Interfaces are often just wrappers around class definitions, ideally, each Interface defines a standard socket into which an object of any "form" may fit, as long as it can perform a certain "role" and participate in a certain "protocol" (see my definition of component).

SO, the lesson to learn is: When considering the purpose of a thing as a part of its definition, "purpose" is both its purpose, and our purpose for wanting to recognize one in the first place.

POSTSCRIPT - July 4th, 2011
Once again, I see that I've come to a brilliant insight that someone else did a long time ago. In the new "The Philosophy Book", I just found the following apropos quote: "Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose"- William James.

Class Constructors considered harmful

PREFACE: There is a school of thought in computer programming that Classes are harmful in certain ways, but the basis for those arguments are very programming-technique specific.  This essay is about a much more general, mind-set oriented, objection.

My basic project these days is to learn Philosophy 101 and contemplate what impact that knowledge should have on software development practices.  After reading topics like the Philosophy of "becoming", and Aristotle's "four causes", it is clear that Philosophers spend much more time trying to define the circumstances of an entity's creation than do system analysts and programmers. While Philosophers have long been concerned with WHY did WHO do WHAT to cause an object to come into being, programmers are mostly concerned with the mechanics of HOW an object should be constructed.  It strikes me that this is due to the tunnel vision encouraged by the class constructor method.  [And, due to destructors and automated garbage collection, an even worse situation applies to object “death”.] So, to paraphrase a famous title, I (albeit tongue-in-cheek) consider Class Constructors harmful.

CASE STUDY: At a recently defunct Top-5 bank, I uncovered the fact that there were major incompatibilities in data being used to produce credit scores for borrowers and their loans. The scores depended on a grade generated for a "facility". The problem was that the very concept and definition of "facility" was not the same in various parts of the bank. If they had answered the following simple questions, they would have realized that they were not talking about the same thing: When and why does a new facility come into existence, and when/why does it cease to exist.

In the course of analysis and requirements gathering, a major goal is to identify and define the various business domain entities. But, in a vicious cycle, the definition of an entity is often too shallow with regard to its birth and death because “causal” information often stagnates as merely background text in some requirements document.  This is because programmers have no standard place to put that logic into the code.

Object oriented practice has one put "all" the properties and behavior associated with an entity into its Class definition, where "all" for class Dog means "the dog, the whole dog, and nothing but the dog"[1].  However the "nothing but the dog" constraint means that, the logic involved in deciding whether an instance of class X should be created, is not normally a method of class X.  Since the "cause" of X's instantiation usually involves other classes, that logic lies outside of X proper, thus, standard development methodologies leave the analysis of causation and purpose out of the design of class X.  Even Factory classes are focused on object construction, rather than why it should be constructed, and why now, and by whom.

The Mediation pattern comes to mind as a place to put this sort of logic because it involves multiple classes.  The logic that decides it is time for a Sculptor to use a Chisel to carve a Statue out of a block of Marble doesn’t belong solely in any of those classes.  A programmer would be tempted to put a “carve” method in Sculptor since that is a “behavior” of the sculptor, but Philosophy considers it an essential part of the definition of the statue itself.  And that is a problem with Mediator classes in the first place; the desire to have everything relevant to X be “nearby in the source code” (a raison d'être for classes) is defeated when some of it is off in various Mediators.  Having the teleology of Statue off in some CarveMediator isn’t much better than it residing in Sculptor.carve().

With event-driven systems (e.g. MOM, SOA), the series of events that trigger the creation of an entity instance may be complex. And whether event-driven, or "batch processing", the sub-systems are often distributed, increasing the value of encapsulating this logic in a single place. With Java EE and service oriented designs, there would be value in having the entity services include this logic.

In any event, I believe that there is a need to learn from Philosophy that their concept of "form" (which is the equivalent of OOP's class) has always included the purpose of a thing as well as its blueprint.

[1] Object Oriented Analysis and Design, Grady Booch,  1991