Nicholas Thompson wrote circa 10-10-22 12:14 PM:
> So how do we "convince" in pomo scholarship. Bribery? Threats? If not
> logic, what legitimate inducements to agreement are available?
"PoMo" seems, to me, to rely heavily on parallax, the approach to the
truth without actually knowing anything about what's being approached.
The point is to fill all the inputs and state variables with as much
data (dirty data, not info, not knowledge, certainly not wisdom) as
possible and see what falls out.
_If_ there is a mesh or structure in there somewhere, then some of the
junk you threw at it will stick and other junk will fall away.
The real trick is that the structure is at least dynamic and probably
pathological. So even if you discover a structure with junk set J in
time T and space S, you'll have to do it again when any part of {J,T,S}
changes. But that doesn't mean we can't develop methods that
continually revise {J,T,S} and continually toss it out in space so that
even if there is no absolute truth, there is a piecewise truth we can
operate on within some reasonably small extrapolation of the most recent
{J,T,S}.
Anyway, that's the way it seems to me.
I've often been accused of being PoMo because of my verbal support of
critical rationalism and the "open society". The gods know I'm often
accused of speaking nonsense. Since all ideas are initially welcome,
wackos tend to dominate the upstream. It's fun swimming around in all
the nonsense to try to determine which parts might survive the
downstream. I've even been known to actually _read_ the output of
Eddiington typewriters like the Chomskybot looking for interesting
statements... kinda the same as reading individuals evolved with genetic
programming. ;-)
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://tempusdictum.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
