Now it is one of those trendy nuggets of common knowledge that philosophy is one of those subjects designed for the technically-challenged to while away their time considering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or whether to push the fat man onto the tracks in order to save the lives of the many passengers on the train.\u00a0 No practical applications can be found in philosophy.\u00a0 It has nothing important to offer workplaces where holes are drilled, sheet metal bent, circuits soldered, products built, and so on.<\/p>\n
The fishbone diagram speaks otherwise \u2013 it deals with what is real and practical and with what we know and how we know it in a practical setting.\u00a0 It marries concepts of ontology and, more importantly, epistemology with the seemingly humdrum worlds of quality assurance and manufacturing.<\/p>\n
To appreciate exactly how this odd marriage is affected, let\u2019s first start with a distinction that is made in fishbone analysis between the proximate cause and the root cause.\u00a0 A practical example will serve much better here than any amount of abstract generalizations.<\/p>\n
Suppose that as we are strolling through ancient Athens, we stumble upon a dead body.\u00a0 We recognize that it is our sometime companion by the name of Socrates.\u00a0 Having been fond of that abrasive gadfly and possessing a slice of curiosity consistent with being an ancient Greek, we start trying to determine just what killed Socrates.\u00a0 One of us, who works in the new Athenian pottery plant where the emerging science of quality management is practiced, recommends making a fishbone diagram to help organize our investigation.<\/p>\n
Inside the head of the fish we place the key observation that Socrates is dead.\u00a0 Off the central spine, we string possible causes of death, grouped into categories that make sense to us.\u00a0 After a lot of discussion, we agree these four:\u00a0 Divine Intervention, Natural Causes, Accidental Death, and Foul Play. \u00a0\u00a0Under each of these broad headings we add specific instances.\u00a0 For example, some of us have heard rumors of the dead man\u2019s impiety, so perhaps Zeus has struck him down with a thunderbolt.\u00a0 Other suggest that being hit with a discus was the cause of death, just like what happened to uncle Telemachus at the last Olympic Games.\u00a0 We continue on until we have our finished fishbone.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n This version of the fishbone diagram aims at helping us determine the proximate cause.\u00a0 We want to know what actually killed him without, at this stage, trying to figure out why (although the question of \u2018why\u2019 helped us in populating the list).<\/p>\n We then, in good logical fashion, start looking for observations that either strengthen or weaken each of the bones in our diagram.\u00a0 We find no evidence of charring or submergence in water, so we argue that Divine Intervention is highly unlikely.\u00a0 There is no blood or signs of blunt force trauma, so scratch all the possibilities under Accidental Death.\u00a0 One of us notes that his belongings are all present and that his face is peaceful and his body shows no subtle signs of violence like what might be attributed to strangulation or smothering, so we think murder very unlikely.\u00a0 Finally, one of us detects a faint whiff of a distinct odor and concludes that Socrates has died by drinking hemlock.<\/p>\n In fishbone analysis, hemlock poisoning is the proximate cause \u2013 the direct, previous link in the chain of causation that led to his death.\u00a0 Note that we haven\u2019t actually seen Socrates consume the lethal cocktail; we are simply inferring it based on the effect (he\u2019s dead) and the smell (likeliest cause).\u00a0 The next step is to determine the root cause \u2013 the reason or motivation for his consumption of the hemlock.<\/p>\n We find, after collecting a different type of observations, that he was executed by the Polis of Athens for impiety and for corrupting the morals of the youths of our city state.\u00a0 We generally fill out this step by interviewing people and collecting human impressions rather than physical evidence.\u00a0 A what point we decide that we\u2019ve hit the root is up to us.\u00a0 We can stop with the death sentence passed down by the Athenian court or we can look to the politics that led to that sentence.\u00a0 We can stop with the politics or dig further into the social and demographic forces that led to Athenian democracy so disposed to dispatch the father of Western thought.\u00a0 We can trace events back to Hippias the tyrant, or back to Homer, or wherever.<\/p>\n This sense of arbitrariness isn\u2019t confined solely to where we cut off the determination of the root cause.\u00a0 We also limited our universe of explanations in determining the proximate cause.\u00a0 We can\u2019t consider everything \u2013 how about dryads, sylphs, and satyrs?<\/p>\n In other words, all of us start our fishbone analysis with a Bayesian a priori expectation of likeliest causes and we apply, whether consciously or not, Occam\u2019s razor to simplify.\u00a0 Let\u2019s reflect on this point a bit more.\u00a0 Doing so brings into sharper focus the distinction between what we think we know, what we actually know, and what we don\u2019t know; between the universe of knowable, unknown, and unknowable.\u00a0 Ultimately, what we are dealing with is deep questions of epistemology masquerading as crime scene investigation.<\/p>\n The situation is even more interesting when one has an observable effect with no discernable cause.\u00a0 Is the cause simply unknown or is it unknowable?\u00a0 And how do we know in which category it goes without knowing it in the first place?<\/p>\n This epistemological division is even further muddied when we deal with indirect observations provide by tools (usually computers).\u00a0 Consider the case where a remote machine (perhaps in orbit) communicates with another machine, which unpacks the electronic signals it receives.\u00a0 If a problem is observed (a part is reported dead, for example), what does this actually mean?\u00a0 Where does the fault lie?\u00a0 Is it in the first machine or the second one?\u00a0 Could the second one be spoofing by accident or malice (hacking) the fault on the first.\u00a0 How does one know and where does one start?\u00a0 And if one is willing to extend the concept of a second machine to include human beings and their senses then the line gets even more blurred between observer and observed.\u00a0 Where does the fault lie, with our machines or with ourselves, and how does one know?<\/p>\n I will close on that note of uncertainty and confusion with an aporetic ending<\/a> in honor of Socrates. \u00a0And all of it came from a little fishbone, whose most common practitioners would most likely tell you that they are not interested in anything so impractical as philosophy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"http:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Socrates-has-died-fishbone.jpg\")
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