(This is a re-post of a 25-year-old entry from a long-since retired blog called ‘The Buddha Nature of Software’. The topic came up in a conversation with a colleague today about how to present they whys and wherefores of our service-mesh architecture to smart business people in our monthly business-facing technology forum. Still seemed relevant, so thought I would dust is off here.)
‘Folk psychology’ and ‘folk physics’ are two conceptual frameworks in common use in psychology and physics and related fields. They refer to the ‘unscientific’ sets of everyday concepts that people use to explain and understand their interactions with other people and with the world.
There must also be a ‘folk computer science’ – a ‘folk I.T.’ – the conceptual framework that end users use to explain and understand their interactions with computers. Understanding the nature of Folk I.T. might revolutionize the ability of IT shops to effectively capture and understand requirements, to promote new technology solutions, and to succeed in creating true business alignment.
Snapshots from Wikipedia (the links will take you to the cited passage):
Folk psychology (also known as common sense psychology, naïve psychology or vernacular psychology) is the set of assumptions, constructs, and convictions that makes up the everyday language in which people discuss human psychology. Folk psychology embraces everyday concepts like “beliefs”, “desires”, “fear”, and “hope”.
Naïve physics or folk physics is the untrained human perception of basic physical phenomena. In the field of artificial intelligence the study of naïve physics is a part of the effort to formalize the common knowledge of human beings.
Many ideas of folk physics are simplifications, misunderstandings, or misperceptions of well understood phenomena, incapable of giving useful predictions of detailed experiments, or simply are contradicted by more thorough observations. They may sometimes be true, be true in certain limited cases, be true as a good first approximation to a more complex effect, or predict the same effect but misunderstand the underlying mechanism.
Even people who start to become educated in the underlying sciences persist in keeping their folk systems of understanding.
In Steven Pinker’s ‘The Stuff of Thought’ he relates that “[m]any psychological experiments have shown that when people have a pet theory of how things work (such as that damp weather causes arthritis pain) they will swear that they can see those correlations in the world, even when the numbers show that the correlations don’t exist and never did…”
In ‘The New Cognitive Neurosciences’ Michael S. Gazzaniga and Emilio Bizzi summarize the folk sciences:
Folk psychology is our everyday ability to understand and predict an agent’s behavior in terms of irrational states such as goals, beliefs and desires. … Folk physics is our everyday ability to understand and predict the behavior of inanimate objects in terms of principles related to physical causality.
Folk IT is our everyday ability to understand and predict the behavior of software applications in terms of …. ?
I don’t have the answer.
But it is clear that rather than trying, point by point, to correct and educate end users about the true nature of software and computer systems, we should consider instead systematically capturing the world of their existing understanding…to capture the Folk I.T. framework by which, in which, they understand how software and computer systems behave.
Then and only then would we be in a position to successfully add to, to augment, to extend, their framework by integrating a new or changed component on their terms.
Health IT Architect 