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

[Nick Thompson]

I am sure it helps a lot of people;  just not me.  

 

I need a metaphor.  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2019 8:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

Succinctly, and I may leave something out, a manifold is a topological space for which there is a homeomorphism between every open set and an open set in Rn for some n.  More concretely, lines and surfaces are manifolds but things get complicated in higher dimensions.  That probably doesn't help.

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

 

On Fri, Mar 8, 2019, 8:27 PM Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net> > wrote:

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 <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> ] On Behalf Of
lrudolph at meganet.net <mailto:lrudolph at meganet.net> 
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2019 7:04 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto: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.





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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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