[FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

[Prof David West]

glen,

As a "trained" academic writer I am forced to "justify" every assertion with voluminous footnotes proving some"Eminent Person" had the idea first. It was not uncommon to find one of those whose work provided multiple "connection points" and therefore "unified" my work.

But that is all crap.

I stopped writing "papers" a decade or two ago, and now only write essays. I do cite Eminences, but only to the extent that I think they say, more eloquently than I, what I want to say.  Of course, that means I often twist or interpret their words for my convenience.

davew


On Fri, Mar 6, 2020, at 3:34 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> 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.  
> 
> 
> -- 
> ☣ uǝlƃ
> 
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