Nick, PoMo discussions go lots of places, and maybe even do lots of things... but I think by definition, one thing they do not do is find truth, nevertheless Truth or TRUTH!. They pretty quickly fall into the, if not quite circular, then spiral, junk where you need to be hypocritical or accept that cultural relativity is itself just one of many equally valid culturally-contextualized view.
So, for example, early generations of in pomo people liked to discuss power relations. But of course they Should (note value judgment) always be quite self aware that the success or failure of their works will only be a product of power dynamics, but no testament to a deep inner truth in their claims. One of my linguist friends at Altoona tells tales of early Chomsky followers who seemed to understand this quite well, and would literally stand up and heckle others off the stage at academic conferences. Overtime, they would thereby come to monopolized the societies. Blah, Eric On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 04:11 PM, "Nicholas Thompson" <nickthomp...@earthlink.net> wrote: > > Glen, > >Is there an example of a pomo discussion that actually got anywhere? Or by >using the terms "getting anywhere" have I already imposed values >hostile to >the enterprise. > >Nick > >-----Original Message----- >From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf >Of glen e. p. ropella >Sent: Friday, October 22, 2010 1:49 PM >To: friam@redfish.com >Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Chomsky Supports Thompson > >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 > > > > > Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State University Altoona, PA 16601
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