The Meaning of Common Sense

"We are asleep. Our life is like a dream, but in our better hours we wake up just enough to realise that we are dreaming" - Ludwig Wittgenstein.

My brain has been readjusting only slowly from the tasks of navigating an SUV around Athens at high speed (if you drove slowly they would just run into the back of you).

But for most of that time, I've been mulling over Paul Dyson's post about Pair Programming and Common Sense. It reminded me of a couple of things. First, it reminded me of the Vikings and the Inuit in Greenland as it is described in "Collapse" by Jared Diamond and this white paper that I wrote after reading it ages ago. The upshot is: even if something is happening right in front of you, that you have to notice to save your life, there may well still be cultural and religious reasons why you can't see it.

The second thing it reminded me of was my experience of reading Wittgenstein. When I was a second year at university, I would chat to some of the older students and they would try to tell me "But, you see, for Wittgenstein, the meaning of a concept, is it's use!" And I would have no idea what they were talking about. Then I spent a year or so (only in my spare time of course) reading the Philosophical Investigations. At the end of that year, I found myself saying to many many uncomprehending people, "But don't you see? The meaning of a concept is its use!"

In many ways what Wittgenstein says about meaning is so forehead-smackingly obvious that when you hear it and understand it, it seems almost unremarkable - you might even say, common sense, but that didn't stop it taking about 2300 years for anybody to come up with an answer to Socrates's problem of how we define "good". One of the reasons is that Socrates sets the problem up so that it's looking for a definition, and it takes a genius like old LW to come along and climb out of that culture, that mindset and point out that abstract definitions are precisely the problem. Obvious when you understand? Yes. Common sense? maybe. Easy to figure out for yourself? Possibly, if you've got 2300 years to think about it.

Perhaps this is why so many people fail to see the "common sense" of pair programming, they're in a culture where, as managers, they're supposed to get the most out of their people - as one of my management consultant friends sometimes rather unpleasantly puts it "sweating assets". In order for pair programming to make sense, they have to be in a culture of solving software problems in the most efficient and resilient way possible irregardless of team groupings. The Vikings wouldn't realise they were in the survival business and start fishing like the Inuit even when it killed them, so perhaps persuading people to do what can be regarded as "Common Sense" isn't that easy.


For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)

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This Blog in a line: How to use Agile Methods to stay sane and in control when everything around you is going crazy.

This Blog in 150 words: How do you manage a software or web development project in a world that just keeps on changing? Technologies change in the course of a few months. Economies lurch from boom to bust and back again. Staff are here one minute and gone the next and there’s hardly a chance that their set of skills is going to be right for whatever’s coming. Old methods of project management just don't seem to fit. Agile methods, Scrum, extreme programming and others make more sense, and give us at least a chance of dealing with continuous radical change, but there’s a danger that they can be seen as a magic bullet, a one-size fits all solution.

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For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)