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At a basic level, both Dewey and Simon say that a problem is not simply found but must be composed or represented,³ and then represented again.⁴ Both thus understand what I am calling the composition of a problem in terms of a process of re-presentation, understood as presenting – or perhaps better, situating – the problem again and again as part of a methodologically informed process. Dewey proffers the drawing of a line of inquiry as an overarching term, while Simon uses the term design. For both, the process of re-presentation is an active practice in which a problem is repeatedly composed or put together anew. For both, the composition of a problem across a problem space involves repetition of one kind or another and is thus a process in which temporality is of profound importance.

Indeed, both Dewey and Simon show that the methodological process I am calling composition always involves the operation of ‘an alternation in time’ (a term I adopt and adapt from the anthropologist Maurer, 2008; see Tooker 2014). Neither believes it sensible or appropriate to restrict the temporality of composing problems to a linear sequencing or staging of re-presentation. Instead, both consider composition to involve engaging with the non-linear organization of uncertain or indeterminate temporal relations across a space. In other words, for neither Dewey nor Simon is the indeterminacy of the relation between a problem and its situation or environment to be eradicated by containing it in space or time; rather, it is the stimulus for the inventiveness of the process of inquiry or design. Both thus recognize the methodological potential of problem spaces. However, while Dewey and Simon share an emphasis on the importance of a non-linear temporality for the expression or realization of methodological potential they differ in their understanding of what is involved: for Dewey, indeterminacy is understood in terms of the existence of solutions as possibilities in the present, and for Simon it is to do with the inevitability of contingency in the composition of a problem; that is, contingency becomes a resource because problems can always be other than they are.

To start with Dewey: he argues that, in the pursuit of inquiry, a solution must be a mere possibility in the process of problematization, not ‘an assured present existence’ (1938: 118). This point is of central importance to him: it is what leads him to argue that a problem is never static or fixed, but emerges in constantly changing relations to a situation that is itself constantly changing. He asserts, ‘To mention the temporal quality of inquiry is not simply to assert that inquiry takes time, but that the subject matter of inquiry goes through temporal modifications’ (1991: 125). As Paul Rabinow puts it, for Dewey, ‘Thinking was itself a temporal experience or, to be more precise, thinking was a temporal experiment’:

From the standpoint of temporal order, we find reflection, or thought, occupying an intermediate and reconstructive position. It comes between a temporally prior situation (an organized interaction of factors) of active and appreciative experience, wherein some of the factors have become discordant and incompatible, and a later situation, which has been constituted out of the first situation by means of acting on the findings of reflective inquiry. The final solution thus has a richness of meaning, as well as a controlled character lacking in the original. (Dewey in Rabinow 2009: 16)

To find a way to acknowledge and incorporate modification, or modulation, in the process of inquiry Dewey identifies specific roles for facts and ideas as described above. To be able to exploit the transformative relation between ideas and facts, Dewey insists upon the importance of ‘formulating [facts] in propositions: that is, by means of symbols’. This is important both because unless they are so represented they will ‘relapse into the total qualitative situation’ and because, if facts are not ‘carried and treated by means of symbols’, they lose their provisional character, and in losing this character they are categorically asserted and ‘inquiry comes to an end’. In other words, symbolic logic – what might also be called conceptualization – plays a vital role in Dewey’s formulation of the process of inquiry, since it is what enables the researcher to identify and exploit the temporalities of possibility in a given situation in practice:

Experimental operations change existing conditions. Reasoning, as such, can provide means for effecting the change of conditions but by itself cannot effect it. Only execution of existential operations directed by an idea in which ratiocination terminates can bring about the re-ordering of environing conditions required to produce a settled and unified situation. (1938: 118)

Simon’s concern with temporality is different to that of Dewey. What is fundamental to Simon’s understanding and to his adoption of the term ‘design’ is the notion of artificiality. Phenomena are artificial for Simon if, ‘they are as they are only because of a system’s being molded, by goals or purposes, to the environment in which they live’ (1996: xix). Simon continues: ‘If natural phenomena have an air of ‘necessity’ about them in their subservience to natural law, artificial phenomena have an air of ‘contingency’ in their malleability by environment’ (1996: xi). A variety of points might be made about this distinction between natural and artificial phenomena, one of the most important of which returns us to the criticism previously noted concerning the tendency towards instrumentalism in Simon’s approach.⁵ He himself notes a concern as to whether artificial phenomena could or should be the subject of science, given their goal-directed nature and the consequent difficulty of disentangling description from prescription, what is from what could or should be. However, he says that this is not the ‘real difficulty’: what concerns him instead is how empirical propositions can be made at all about systems that, given different circumstances, might be quite other than they are. In other words, it is not so much the moral or normative aspects of sciences of the artificial that preoccupy Simon, but the problem their contingency – the unavoidable possibility of their being otherwise – poses for reason.

In different ways then, temporality is fundamental to both Dewey and Simon’s acknowledgement that a problem (space) can always be other than it is. And as is true for Dewey, symbolic logic is important for Simon in this respect. He too stresses that the emphasis on the symbolic is not to be understood as an exclusive emphasis on the virtual or ideal. Thus, he says that symbol systems need to be ‘physical’; that is, they ‘must have windows on the world and hands too’. The computer, for example:

… must have means for acquiring information from the external environment that can be encoded into internal symbols, as well as means for producing symbols that initiate action upon the environment. Thus it must use symbols to designate objects and relations and actions in the world external to the system. (1996: 22)

In short, both Dewey and Simon signal the importance of the temporality of the composition of a problem space by emphasizing the dynamism of iterative relations between symbolic representation and action or methodologically informed intervention in the (material semiotic) composition of problem spaces. The importance of this concern for compositional methodology is taken up below in the discussion of the formal properties of circulation and in later chapters in a consideration of recursion.

However, while both writers emphasize the symbolic, they have very different understandings of its relevance, with Dewey emphasizing the metaphorical potential of symbols for theory and concept formation, and Simon focusing on symbolic logic, based on abstract formulas, which he seems to see as somehow transparent to thought in ways that bypass the ambiguities of (the metaphorical dimensions of) language. While neither is especially concerned with the variety of registers and modes of signification involved in the making of problem spaces, Chapter 2 will suggest transformations in the material semiotic modalities of epistemic infrastructures is one of the things that is changing the possibility of composing problem spaces.