3 Comments

Fantastic post! Most notable for me:

"It is a mistake, made in many accounts of the debate, academic, popular, past, and recent, to credit one side or the other with following the only true path. The motion was, and continues to be, necessarily zigzag, dialectical, reciprocal."

As I will be writing over the next couple of weeks, the dialectical tools are implicit for any given perspective whose lens and subsequent feature are distributive, ie. map & location. The call "to be objective" is especially pronounced as the implication is one of "suppressing" whatever urge might arise or showing "restraint." Whatever unit or measure and even the process being described are readily deferred elsewhere with a notable lack of precision. The lens, and the salient features that rise to meet it, imply some insalient tool that is, as far as I can tell, always the opposite whenever lens and feature are both distributive or dialectical. An example of the latter would be an artist who must anticipate some dialectical set of influences within some media, and they must also implement that vision sufficiently, requiring real world skills that are only as sufficient as the body is fluently distributed and coordinated.

Cheers!

Expand full comment

Wonderful introduction ... We're still in the early part of the puzzle. As it turns out this is part of a longer story / puzzle involving determinism, computability, understanding, chaos, complexity ... we're just at the 'baby-talk' stage of learning the actual language of reality. Great writing, great discussion, keep pressing forward ... much more enlightenment to be had ...we're only about a century or so into the puzzle ...

Expand full comment
Jul 26·edited Jul 26Liked by Jim Baggott

Sounds like an interesting book!

If we accept that our theories are always contingent, can a domain of study *ever* be closed? There seems something metaphorically Gödelian in play. An uncountable domain.

Expand full comment