[FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

[Nick Thompson]

Lee, 

Just to bend the thread a bit further, is "excess meaning" a term of art for
you?  It seems very close to the term "surplus meaning" which was used in a
famous article assigned to all Psychology graduate students in the sixties
on the distinction between hypothetical constructs and intervening
variables.  Wondering if  your term has the same meaning and if it has a
life somewhere.

As to the convex hull I went from there to the overturned boat in NCIS and
thence to "manifold" which, when the term is deployed by mathematicians I
always think of a shroud, like a blanket dropped over some lumpy thing to
contain it, roughly.  Which, now that I mention it, makes me want to explain
wtf you mathematicians mean when you use the word manifold.  

If that's not a thoroughly bent thread I don't know what is. 

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of
lrudolph at meganet.net
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2019 7:04 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

Steve writes in relevant part:

> My position is that I favor each and every one of us taking whatever 
> responsibility for understanding our own "convex hull" of 
> capability/knowledge/intuition as we are capable of and "managing" it 
> to the best of our ability.

The quotation marks around the phrase 'convex hull' and the word 'managing'
presumably signal that they are being used non-literally, and (I guess)
metaphorically.  I would particularly like Steve, if he is willing, to delve
into the intended metaphor in the first case.  On the one hand, lots of my
work uses more or less geometry; on the other, in lots of my other work I
use metaphor; and I even think and write about metaphor.  So it's likely
that I'm taking the metaphor more seriously than intended.

With that disclaimer: in the technical contexts I'm familiar with, to pass
from something X to the convex hull of X has the effect of (1) 'filling in
holes in X', in a well-defined manner that is (2) as economical as possible
and (3) (therefore) unique. Which (if any) of those properties are
reflected, and how, in the case that X is our
"capability/knowledge/intuition"?  ... I could ramble on a lot more but will
start with that.





============================================================
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