"tracing ideas to foundations" — valuable, humbling, essential.
"crap" — pro forma scholarship only because "The Committee" demands it is crap. The experiences one has when rummaging around the attic of long forgotten texts; the experience of "the serendipity of the stacks" and the insights, illuminations, connections arising from that experience is certainly equal to any drug-mediated experience. The problem, for me, I know how to weave a tapestry of understanding, of meaning if you will allow, from rummaging / stacks experiences, but have not figured out how to integrate the experiential threads arising from altered-states mediated experience. My tapestry looks like it has a bad case of moths. "sloppy scholars" even in essay form, I try to be conscientious about whose shoulder's I am standing on, and I try to juxtapose quote and interpretation of quote with the standing caveat, "I might be misunderstanding here, but ..." davew On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 5:28 PM, [email protected] wrote: > Larding below > > Nicholas Thompson > Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology > Clark University > [email protected] > https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Prof David West > Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 2:23 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation > > glen, > > As a "trained" academic writer I am forced to "justify" every assertion with > voluminous footnotes proving some"Eminent Person" had the idea first. > **[NST===>] I would call this, “Tracing my ideas back to their foundations.” > It’s like finding af chest of ancestral letters in your attic and loosing > your self while reading them amongst the dust fuzzies, the cobwebs, and the > dad wasps. Also, to be brutally honest, I really love it when some body finds > something I wrote a quarter of a century ago and relates it to something they > are currently doing. It melts my metaphorical heart.** > It was not uncommon to find one of those whose work provided multiple > "connection points" and therefore "unified" my work. > > But that is all crap. > **[NST===>] Naw. Come on Dave. Now you are capitulating to ANTI-academia, > which occasionally is alive and well on this list. The experiences of unity > one gets from reading long forgotten texts has no LESS potential for > illumination than trips to acid-land. So, it’s not CRAP. ** > > I stopped writing "papers" a decade or two ago, and now only write essays. I > do cite Eminences, but only to the extent that I think they say, more > eloquently than I, what I want to say. Of course, that means I often twist or > interpret their words for my convenience.**[NST===>] Yeah. I do this too. But > I’m not sure I am proud of it. My son is a Wittgenstein scholar and he > rightly shudders when I quote W. without fully understanding what was meant > by the words in the context in which they actually appeared. Never mind their > place in the biography of W. I don’t think we sloppy scholars ought to be put > to death, but I do think we should be a bit humble about what we do. ** > > davew > > > On Fri, Mar 6, 2020, at 3:34 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote: > > Interesting. I'm skeptical that it *unifies* your work so much as it > > *abstracts* your work into a fuzzy/vague thing that seems like it > > unifies your work. That's the risk with unification and what I call > > Grand Unified Models (GUMs). To produce an actual unification, you > > have to show the details for how the general model specializes into > > the fully operational particular models. If you can't do that > > *completely*, with no hand-waving, then it's not really a unification > > but an abstraction. > > > > I'm not anti-abstraction. But I find it useful to contrast the two. > > The ideas you advocate here, which you claim are Peircian, seem > > *unapplicable* to any detailed work. I haven't read much of your > > writing and am unfamiliar with the work being unified. So, I could be > > laughably wrong, here. But one litmus test I use, if/when I start to > > obsess over any single/unitary thing (like you obsess over Peirce), is > > to do a what-if exercise and pretend that unitary thing doesn't exist. > > Try to remove all the tendrils of that thing from whatever I do/think. > > If, once I've done that, the things I do/think remain and don't > > crumble away, then maybe it's a necessary obsession. > > > > It seems to me like we could get to what you want absent Peirce. His > > work is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. And in some situations, > > obsessing too much over nice-to-haves slows the travel to the > > destination. > > > > On 3/5/20 7:39 PM, [email protected] wrote: > > > I write and think about Peirce, for instance, because his work connects > > > several disparate threads in my own work which seemed unrelated until I > > > read him. He unifies me. Talking to you guys helps me digest all of that. > > > > > > -- > > ☣ uǝlƃ > > > > ============================================================ > > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe > > at St. John's College to unsubscribe > > http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > > archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe > http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
