Tom,
Thanks for supplying this quote. To my shame, I have never read Rorty.
"Interesting [field of study] is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of
a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an
entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new
vocabulary which vaguely promises great things... "
What I have been unable to sort out is which category "complexity babble"
belongs to. Is there such a thing as a half-formed new vocabulary that has
become a nuisance?
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu)
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]
> [Original Message]
> From: Tom Vest <tv...@caida.org>
> To: glen e. p. ropella <g...@tempusdictum.com>
> Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com>
> Date: 3/23/2010 8:47:01 AM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] (advice needed!)
>
>
> On Mar 22, 2010, at 5:06 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote:
>
> > Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 10-03-22 04:58 PM:
> >> Yes. I am sorry. That was my fault. There was a bit of a slipup between
> >> the "provost" and the professor.
> >
> > No worries! It looks like a great book and I expect I'll enjoy it when
> > I pop it off the queue.
> >
> >> Byers main point is that it is AMBIGUITY that makes maths great! But its a
> >> subtle argument because what he is really saying is ironic: as
> >> mathematicians strive to reduce amibiguity they inevitably generate more,
> >> and thus, against their feverish and futile resistance, does math progress.
> >
> > Very interesting. If there's one conviction I'm actually guilty of,
> > it's believing that irony (or, more accurately, paradox) is the ultimate
> > teacher. And ambiguity is closely coupled with paradox. (Warning: the
> > broken record begins again.) That's why I'm so fond of "Vicious
> > Circles" by Barwise and Moss. It's the closest body of math I've found
> > that tries to explain how cycles impact the definiteness of math.
> >
> > But it's wrapped in other stories, too. I remember once looking up
> > "impredicative definition" in the index of some overly large math
> > reference book in some library somewhere. (I lose track sometimes. ;-)
> > It told me to look at a particular page. That page made a vague
> > reference to the term "vicious circle". So, I looked up "vicious
> > circle". It took me to another particular page, which made a vague
> > reference to "impredicative definitions". If it hadn't been such a
> > large book, it would have been funny. Instead, I learned a valuable lesson.
>
>
> Interesting mix of interests! Glen I wonder if you've ranged even further
> afield, and come across a book by Richard Rorty called Contingency,
> Solidarity, and Irony (1989) -- or maybe Rorty's first, fame-making book,
> Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)? Rorty was a modern American
> School pragmatist (a tradition which he broadly defined to include William
> James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, as well as WVO Quine and Donald Davidson),
> and most of his life's work focused on debunking (or if that was not
> possible, discrediting) all sorts of perceived impediments to
> inter-subjective communication and coordination -- prerequisites for the
> social/political goals (e.g., understanding, cooperation) that he was more
> open about in his final years. One nice quote from Contingency about his own
> disciplinary labors, which could easily be applied to the current context:
>
> "Interesting [field of study] is rarely an examination of the pros and cons
> of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an
> entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new
> vocabulary which vaguely promises great things... This sort of
> [discipline-specific research] does not work piece by piece, analyzing
> concept after concept, or testing thesis after thesis. Rather it works
> holistically and pragmatically." (p. 9)
>
> While this observation seems a bit exaggerated to me (i.e., narrow, stepwise
> analysis often accompanies the broader contest between rival paradigms), this
> actually sounds quite a bit like the work I'm participating in this week, at
> the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Los Angeles (esp. the Routing
> Research Group, which is trying to develop a consensus recommendation for a
> new Internet architecture to be developed over the next couple of years).
>
> Sadly, it also reminds me of an old grad school benefactor (whom you may
> actually remember Glen -- he sponsored my mid-1990s participation in the
> Swarm conferences where we met once or twice, and later spent a summer there
> as a visiting fellow -- the results of which were later memorialized in one
> of Simon Fraser's chatterbots). Sometimes those "vague promises of great
> things" on the other side of the next disciplinary fence can be so compelling
> that the lure of serial fence-hopping displaces the much more challenging but
> enduring work of fence removal and field integration. I learned may valuable
> (and ironic) lessons from that particular association...
>
> Regards all,
>
> TV
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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