On 04/05/16 12:18 PM, erik zepka wrote: > > Your point earlier about the problematic nature of normativity I think > can be approached via a notion of combining normativity with agency. > That is, if the Brandomian normativist is also a norm-creator > normativity becomes a rational construct that a subject works to invent, > modify and redact. > > Between these I think the validity of the norm is found in its > constant revision - likewise the defense of new rationalism and its > ties to accelerating the means of both resistance and production > might lie less in the sort of Adornian critique of instrumental > rationality (and the move then to poetics and the like) but to a > pluralization of rationality in the most scientist way possible.
Yes I think Negarastani's essay in The Accelerationist Reader addresses some of this (and their talks at The New Centre definitely do). But Malik's essay in Collapse VIII raises the problem of contemporary "Risk Society" being corrosive to social norms, although I haven't had time to really look into that. Pluralistic rationality is very, very far from Twentieth Century logicism. This is a non-monotonic/defeasible reason. > I think between Feyerabend and Stengers there might be a nice complement > to the Peirce/Sellars/Brandom pragmatist continuum - in it we progress > from rationalism to its revisions to their explosion. Both (Feyerabend > and Stengers) having been branded (as always, by enemies) as > irrationalists, they might be the most persistent exponent of a plural > rationalism. Feyerabend at every moment demands debate and overturning > of the precepts of any rational construct of experimental endeavour > (having himself - somewhat comparably to Putnam - evolved through > different positions that he would then come to "refute"/disagree with > (empiricism, rationalism, eliminativism, anarchic disagreement, > democratization, abundance), while Stengers evolves directly from the > laboratory construct to ecology, politics - in a sense skipping > traditional rationalism to the applied effects of activities. Reading about Feyerabend here what immediately interests me is the idea of (in)commensurability. > For me this is a strong area of accelerationist tendencies - questions > like: what would a rationalist ecopolitics look like - how is > revisionism, plurality and alterity connected - how can technological > discourse evolve to a rationalist otherness that disagrees in essence > with the progress of bureaucratic vagueness. Very yes to all of this. :-) One of the things I don't understand in neo-rationalism is the scope of revision. I assume we wish our mistaken and unjust beliefs (and self-images) to be revised, but is identity ring-fenced as it seems to be in Sellars and if not where is that kind of limit identified? Would alterity be normatively revised? If so surely not towards majority norms. But if away from them then, again as with Sellars, how do we avoid a consumerist/(neo)liberal demand that people be ever more like themselves? > Rob can you say more about the Casper algorithm? Oops I meant Serenity (so. many. codenames.). Here's a technical description: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/53 The problem it addresses is that, as any Bitcoin hater will tell you, "the blockchain doesn't scale". Rather than try to make it quicker or more efficient to fetch and store all the information needed to keep track of the state of the entire world('s worth of transactions) every ten seconds, Serenity makes it so that you only have to keep track of the subset of the world('s transactions) that you are interested in for your own security. These subsets of the world('s transactions) are known as "shards", a term taken from traditional databases. Each shard, and the code and value within it, is isolated from the others unless it takes special measures to access them. This means that you only need the data for the shard you are working within, not any others. If the classic blockchain looks like a post-relativistic universe with a unified/God's-eye view of the information it contains, a sharded blockchain looks very much relativistic with local frames of reference. Local rather than global truth. But the information contained within each shard must ultimately be reconcilable with the global state. Where communication takes place across shards, it cannot contradict the state of the contents of either shard. So I may be overreaching, but I think this is a nice example of a system that is locally specific but globally reconcilable. Which obviously relates to philosophy of science and to neo-rationalism. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
