[FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

[Prof David West]

"tracing ideas to foundations" — valuable, humbling, essential.

"crap" — pro forma scholarship only because "The Committee" demands it is crap. The experiences one has when rummaging around the attic of long forgotten texts; the experience of "the serendipity of the stacks" and the insights, illuminations, connections arising from that experience is certainly equal to any drug-mediated experience.

The problem, for me, I know how to weave a tapestry of understanding, of meaning if you will allow, from rummaging / stacks experiences, but have not figured out how to integrate the experiential threads arising from altered-states mediated experience. My tapestry looks like it has a bad case of moths.

"sloppy scholars" even in essay form, I try to be conscientious about whose shoulder's I am standing on, and I try to juxtapose quote and interpretation of quote with the standing caveat, "I might be misunderstanding here, but ..."

davew


On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 5:28 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> Larding below

> 

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

> Clark University

> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

> 

> 

> 


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
> Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 2:23 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

> 

> glen,

> 

> As a "trained" academic writer I am forced to "justify" every assertion with voluminous footnotes proving some"Eminent Person" had the idea first.

> **[NST===>] I would call this, “Tracing my ideas back to their foundations.” It’s like finding af chest of ancestral letters in your attic and loosing your self while reading them amongst the dust fuzzies, the cobwebs, and the dad wasps. Also, to be brutally honest, I really love it when some body finds something I wrote a quarter of a century ago and relates it to something they are currently doing. It melts my metaphorical heart.**

>  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.

> **[NST===>] Naw. Come on Dave. Now you are capitulating to ANTI-academia, which occasionally is alive and well on this list. The experiences of unity one gets from reading long forgotten texts has no LESS potential for illumination than trips to acid-land. So, it’s not 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.**[NST===>] Yeah. I do this too. But I’m not sure I am proud of it. My son is a Wittgenstein scholar and he rightly shudders when I quote W. without fully understanding what was meant by the words in the context in which they actually appeared. Never mind their place in the biography of W. I don’t think we sloppy scholars ought to be put to death, but I do think we should be a bit humble about what we do. ** 

> 

> 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

> >

> > ============================================================

> > 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

> > 

> 

> ============================================================

> 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

> ============================================================
> 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
> 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200308/c75c5e7f/attachment.html>