There is another consideration I feel. Does it make you happier to have the theory captured by a zippy name? I mean you have to admit Zetetic abduction sounds brilliant, even if you believe it is the name of a band or exercise program.
On a more serious note. You have argued that stories are important to knowledge. Stories work by convincing someone else of their validity. But it is rare for everyone to be convinced by the one story. So you may need to choose who you are trying to convince and what might convince them. A name, in this sense, is just another tool in the story tellers arsenal.
By the way, I heard that some bloke called Shakespeare once said something about names. Maybe he could help.
Hmmmm. Is it possible for a philosopher to be happy? History suggests probably not!
More seriously, the challenge is finding a name or way of describing it that doesn't undermine the project. I didn't cover it in the post but I thought Josephson-Storm undermines himself quite often. In the book he repeatedly claimed, in effect, that he'd solved the big questions and identified the future of academic theory - but then argued that we need to be humble about knowledge.
It seems rather important that we can continue to distinguish between information and knowledge, and to bring back Philosophy where it has been edged aside by plausible mechanistic explanation. Science increasingly formulates such ‘understanding’ by means of artificial intelligence. I think you and Storm are deep, so it would be sad to see your work as yet another named school responding to modern thinking. (I guess we still suffer in our modern world from ‘positivism’ and ‘post-modernism’, which to my mind gave philosophy an unfortunate name.)
I feel stuck as usual by the old problem that the map is not the territory. Iain McGilchrist recently remarked, sounding almost exasperated, “The only thing we can be sure of is consciousness”. I wonder then about ‘explanation’, and what can be formulated in words, and then the relationship with ‘territory’. Is philosophy perhaps better considered as a formal branch of conversation? Conversation is a vital, if in humans exaggerated facility, alongside memory, which helps provide what science seems to want to subsume under the heading of ‘information’. But it has its limits as part of consciousness. We are actually part of the bigger deal even if there are no words and little that can be recalled with certainty. We are part of that territory.
Thanks. I share your concern about being put in a certain box by becoming a named school. But I'm uncertain about how to get traction and attention without doing that to some extent.
Maybe the problem is that, to riff off your image, I'm trying to argue not that we need a new map, but that we need to draw our maps differently.
I do not know how to do it but increasingly feel the need to face up to the modern mind – mine included. To riff a bit more on the image I used. I have just reached for an excellent chapter in Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ – ‘Census, Map, Museum’. He was strongly informed by the colonial experience of non-European societies, and his is an illustrative account of the introduction of maps etc into prior cultural thinking. I think his account gives a useful picture of the modern introduction of what we now call ‘data’ and what it does to points of view.
So I googled “maps and territories” and came up with a book “Maps and Territories: Global Positioning in the Contemporary French Novel”, which feels a bit as though contemporary industrialised life might be going round decaying circles, at least in places we might have called home.
Example quote: “… the panoramas we might view from elevated perspectives, or felt in moments intensely lived. Houellebecq employs the conventions of fiction and mobilizes the authority of maps to convincingly stage such a big picture, delivering a commanding, if pessimistic, view of French society and of modernity writ large.”
The idea that we know what ‘we’ (?) are doing looks odd and probably the oddness is accelerating with the aid of large generative AI.
My own attempt at a descriptive title for a new philosophical approach seems too ridden with angst, smile: “Maps, Territories and Voids”. We can’t really possess such a cosmic framework POV?
There is another consideration I feel. Does it make you happier to have the theory captured by a zippy name? I mean you have to admit Zetetic abduction sounds brilliant, even if you believe it is the name of a band or exercise program.
On a more serious note. You have argued that stories are important to knowledge. Stories work by convincing someone else of their validity. But it is rare for everyone to be convinced by the one story. So you may need to choose who you are trying to convince and what might convince them. A name, in this sense, is just another tool in the story tellers arsenal.
By the way, I heard that some bloke called Shakespeare once said something about names. Maybe he could help.
Hmmmm. Is it possible for a philosopher to be happy? History suggests probably not!
More seriously, the challenge is finding a name or way of describing it that doesn't undermine the project. I didn't cover it in the post but I thought Josephson-Storm undermines himself quite often. In the book he repeatedly claimed, in effect, that he'd solved the big questions and identified the future of academic theory - but then argued that we need to be humble about knowledge.
True, but if human beings let hypocrisy get in the way there would be no progress at all.
It seems rather important that we can continue to distinguish between information and knowledge, and to bring back Philosophy where it has been edged aside by plausible mechanistic explanation. Science increasingly formulates such ‘understanding’ by means of artificial intelligence. I think you and Storm are deep, so it would be sad to see your work as yet another named school responding to modern thinking. (I guess we still suffer in our modern world from ‘positivism’ and ‘post-modernism’, which to my mind gave philosophy an unfortunate name.)
I feel stuck as usual by the old problem that the map is not the territory. Iain McGilchrist recently remarked, sounding almost exasperated, “The only thing we can be sure of is consciousness”. I wonder then about ‘explanation’, and what can be formulated in words, and then the relationship with ‘territory’. Is philosophy perhaps better considered as a formal branch of conversation? Conversation is a vital, if in humans exaggerated facility, alongside memory, which helps provide what science seems to want to subsume under the heading of ‘information’. But it has its limits as part of consciousness. We are actually part of the bigger deal even if there are no words and little that can be recalled with certainty. We are part of that territory.
Thanks. I share your concern about being put in a certain box by becoming a named school. But I'm uncertain about how to get traction and attention without doing that to some extent.
Maybe the problem is that, to riff off your image, I'm trying to argue not that we need a new map, but that we need to draw our maps differently.
I do not know how to do it but increasingly feel the need to face up to the modern mind – mine included. To riff a bit more on the image I used. I have just reached for an excellent chapter in Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ – ‘Census, Map, Museum’. He was strongly informed by the colonial experience of non-European societies, and his is an illustrative account of the introduction of maps etc into prior cultural thinking. I think his account gives a useful picture of the modern introduction of what we now call ‘data’ and what it does to points of view.
So I googled “maps and territories” and came up with a book “Maps and Territories: Global Positioning in the Contemporary French Novel”, which feels a bit as though contemporary industrialised life might be going round decaying circles, at least in places we might have called home.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvh9vxnf
Example quote: “… the panoramas we might view from elevated perspectives, or felt in moments intensely lived. Houellebecq employs the conventions of fiction and mobilizes the authority of maps to convincingly stage such a big picture, delivering a commanding, if pessimistic, view of French society and of modernity writ large.”
The idea that we know what ‘we’ (?) are doing looks odd and probably the oddness is accelerating with the aid of large generative AI.
My own attempt at a descriptive title for a new philosophical approach seems too ridden with angst, smile: “Maps, Territories and Voids”. We can’t really possess such a cosmic framework POV?
Sean, have you got any useful old stories?