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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>Dave, <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Some really good metaphoring in what you wrote. Please see larding, below:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Daylight Saving in NM. Ugh. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>N<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal>Nicholas Thompson<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Clark University<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><a href="mailto:ThompNickSon2@gmail.com"><span style='color:#0563C1'>ThompNickSon2@gmail.com</span></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><a href="https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/"><span style='color:#0563C1'>https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/</span></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #E1E1E1 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b>From:</b> Friam <friam-bounces@redfish.com> <b>On Behalf Of </b>Prof David West<br><b>Sent:</b> Sunday, March 8, 2020 1:41 AM<br><b>To:</b> friam@redfish.com<br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation<o:p></o:p></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial",sans-serif'>"tracing ideas to foundations" \u2014 valuable, humbling, essential.<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial",sans-serif'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial",sans-serif'>"crap" \u2014 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial",sans-serif'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial",sans-serif'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial",sans-serif'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial",sans-serif'>"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 ..."<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial",sans-serif'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial",sans-serif'>davew<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial",sans-serif'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial",sans-serif'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 5:28 PM, <a href="mailto:thompnickson2@gmail.com">thompnickson2@gmail.com</a> wrote:<o:p></o:p></p></div><blockquote style='margin-top:5.0pt;margin-bottom:5.0pt' id=qt><div><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>Larding below<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>Nicholas Thompson<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>Clark University<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1><a href="mailto:ThompNickSon2@gmail.com">ThompNickSon2@gmail.com</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1><a href="https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/">https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1> <o:p></o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal>-----Original Message-----<o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>From: Friam <<a href="mailto:friam-bounces@redfish.com">friam-bounces@redfish.com</a>> On Behalf Of Prof David West<o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 2:23 AM<o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>To: <a href="mailto:friam@redfish.com">friam@redfish.com</a><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation<o:p></o:p></p></div><p class=qt-msoplaintext1> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>glen,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>As a "trained" academic writer I am forced to "justify" every assertion with voluminous footnotes proving some"Eminent Person" had the idea first.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1><b><i>[NST===>] I would call this, \u201cTracing my ideas back to their foundations.\u201d It\u2019s 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.</i></b><o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1> It was not uncommon to find one of those whose work provided multiple "connection points" and therefore "unified" my work.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>But that is all crap.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1><b><i><span style='color:black'>[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\u2019s not CRAP. </span></i></b><o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>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.<b><i>[NST===>] Yeah. I do this too. But I\u2019m 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\u2019t think we sloppy scholars ought to be put to death, but I do think we should be a bit humble about what we do. </i></b> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>davew<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>On Fri, Mar 6, 2020, at 3:34 PM, u\u01ddl\u0183 <span class=font><span style='font-family:"Segoe UI Emoji",sans-serif'>\u2623</span></span> wrote:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> Interesting. I'm skeptical that it *unifies* your work so much as it<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> *abstracts* your work into a fuzzy/vague thing that seems like it<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> unifies your work. That's the risk with unification and what I call<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> Grand Unified Models (GUMs). To produce an actual unification, you<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> have to show the details for how the general model specializes into<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> the fully operational particular models. If you can't do that<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> *completely*, with no hand-waving, then it's not really a unification<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> but an abstraction.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> I'm not anti-abstraction. But I find it useful to contrast the two.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> The ideas you advocate here, which you claim are Peircian, seem<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> *unapplicable* to any detailed work. I haven't read much of your<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> writing and am unfamiliar with the work being unified. So, I could be<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> laughably wrong, here. But one litmus test I use, if/when I start to<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> obsess over any single/unitary thing (like you obsess over Peirce), is<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> to do a what-if exercise and pretend that unitary thing doesn't exist.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> Try to remove all the tendrils of that thing from whatever I do/think.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> If, once I've done that, the things I do/think remain and don't<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> crumble away, then maybe it's a necessary obsession.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> It seems to me like we could get to what you want absent Peirce. His<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> work is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. And in some situations,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> obsessing too much over nice-to-haves slows the travel to the<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> destination.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> On 3/5/20 7:39 PM, <a href="mailto:thompnickson2@gmail.com"><span style='color:windowtext'>thompnickson2@gmail.com</span></a> wrote:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> > 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. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> --<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> <span class=font><span style='font-family:"Segoe UI Emoji",sans-serif'>\u2623</span></span> u\u01ddl\u0183<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> ============================================================<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> at St. John's College to unsubscribe<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> <a href="http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com"><span style='color:windowtext'>http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com</span></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> archives back to 2003: <a href="http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/"><span style='color:windowtext'>http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/</span></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> FRIAM-COMIC <a href="http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/"><span style='color:windowtext'>http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/</span></a> by Dr. Strangelove<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>============================================================<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv<o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe <a href="http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com"><span style='color:windowtext'>http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com</span></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>archives back to 2003: <a href="http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/"><span style='color:windowtext'>http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/</span></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=qt-msoplaintext1>FRIAM-COMIC <a href="http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/"><span style='color:windowtext'>http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/</span></a> by Dr. Strangelove<o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>============================================================<o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv<o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College<o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>to unsubscribe <a href="http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com">http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com</a><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>archives back to 2003: <a href="http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/">http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/</a><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>FRIAM-COMIC <a href="http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/">http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/</a> by Dr. Strangelove<o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></blockquote><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial",sans-serif'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div></div></body></html>