[FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Interesting. I'm skeptical that it *unifies* your work so much as it *abstracts* your work into a fuzzy/vague thing that seems like it unifies your work. That's the risk with unification and what I call Grand Unified Models (GUMs). To produce an actual unification, you have to show the details for how the general model specializes into the fully operational particular models. If you can't do that *completely*, with no hand-waving, then it's not really a unification but an abstraction.

I'm not anti-abstraction. But I find it useful to contrast the two. The ideas you advocate here, which you claim are Peircian, seem *unapplicable* to any detailed work. I haven't read much of your writing and am unfamiliar with the work being unified. So, I could be laughably wrong, here. But one litmus test I use, if/when I start to obsess over any single/unitary thing (like you obsess over Peirce), is to do a what-if exercise and pretend that unitary thing doesn't exist. Try to remove all the tendrils of that thing from whatever I do/think. If, once I've done that, the things I do/think remain and don't crumble away, then maybe it's a necessary obsession.

It seems to me like we could get to what you want absent Peirce. His work is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. And in some situations, obsessing too much over nice-to-haves slows the travel to the destination.

On 3/5/20 7:39 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> I write and think about Peirce, for instance, because his work connects several disparate threads in my own work which seemed unrelated until I read him.  He unifies me.  Talking to you guys helps me digest all of that.  


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☣ uǝlƃ