[FRIAM] flattening -isms

[Nick Thompson]

Glen, Dave,

Gosh.  So Stuff of Stuff and plain old stuff are different stuffs?  So Nick
Thompson is a dualist?  

Damn!  

Perhaps to maintain my monism I  have to become an "of" monist.  It's "of's"
all the way down. 

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 glen?C
Sent: Sunday, November 17, 2019 8:49 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flattening -isms

Herein lies the monist rub. If types of things are the same as things of
type, then why do we have 2 words: "thing" and "type"? Why not just have one
word: "thing"? The same is true of "kind" vs. "type". Or any 2 words you
might choose at random from the dictionary. So, we all turn into
"enlightened" people and go around mumbling "mu" all the time.

My answer, of course, is methodological pluralism. It's pragmatic to allow
different types, to distinguish one thing from another. And that's the end
of the hand-wringing. 8^) Sure, if you can partially unify things in order
to make some task simpler/better (e.g. inducing patterns into causal graphs
to stress test markets), fine. Do your partial unification. But moderation
in all things (including moderation) ... except beer consumption, which
cannot be moderated!

On 11/17/19 7:17 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>      "There are two kinds of people.  Those who believe there are an 
> irrational number of types of things, and those who don't."

On 11/17/19 7:31 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Yes, I meant to say including the types type.

On 11/17/19 7:40 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Hywel was an experimental particle physicist and a regular Friam attendee.
> He had been a professor at Penn and Cornell and a group leader at Los 
> Alamos.  Once he said to me, "the number one does not exist".  He 
> meant that there is nothing that is precisely one centimeter long, for
example.
> I asked him, "How many biological mothers did you have?"  I don't have 
> enough time to repeat his answer.


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