[FRIAM] chicken-egg::gumflap-talk

[uǝlƃ ☣]

No, I reject both your and Dave's concepts (for the sake of argument). In both the story-conception and the songline-recitation, there's a sense that there's something underlying the actual stuff ... some idea(s) that drive, guide, cause, modify, the things ... some *coherence* that can be well-inferred. In Dave's conception, the collapse integrates/coheres into an ephemeral story. In the classroom, there's a sense of "training", "indoctrination", "learning", etc. This is what I mean when I say people *reify* their thoughts.

I *imagine* there are pathological, accidentally accreted "trajectories" that are not even identifiable as trajectories (or meshes, or lineage trees, etc.). They're simply an accidental mish-mash of junk from which no sense can be inferred.

Now, it would be a spectrum, of course. Stigmergy is a word we use to describe the mostly accidental coming together of some accreted thing into perceivable patterns like a cityscape. Jon's idea of the Equisite Corpse is another. But if we allow a spectrum, then we should allow both extremes, which would include collections of speech acts that don't ever cohere.

Your example of scientific training does evoke, however, scientific *practice*, which I think lands more toward the incoherent side of the spectrum. That it's less coherent than philosophers of science try to make it seem is a frequent topic.

On 6/8/20 9:26 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> Scientific training has a strong parallel?   Classroom study being  a
> bit like learning to recite a songline, and lab work a bit like "walking
> the talk" and new discoveries ranging from correcting a misphrase or
> accomodating a nuanced change in the environment or adding a side-jaunt
> up a different canyon to a never-before (or not in this songline)
> explicated bit of territory?

On 6/8/20 8:36 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> To me this suggests that the speech act is, in itself, nothing more than 'gum-flapping' but when a collection of 'flaps' are inter-connected / integrated into a conversation, or, more accurately, a story; the story  has an emergent property of "meaning." 
> 
> 'Flaps' have no "meaning." Stories do.


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