[Arisbe] Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry

[Jon Awbrey]

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Mishtu,

Yes, Max Weber called it the "Iron Cage" of modernity.
But it is the characterictic illusion of modulernity,
that "mods out" every differential detail of history
beyond the modulus of its current cycle of hysteresis,
also to forget that the Iron Cage was constructed in
the Iron Age, as the Ancients well knew, to wit, here:

| You see, first, how the priestly class is separated off from the rest;
| next, the class of craftsmen, of which each sort works by itself without
| mixing with any other;  then the classes of shepherds, hunters, and farmers,
| each distinct and separate.
|
| Plato, 'Timaeus'

And now we toddle on the brink of a grand transformation, a radical e-volution,
oh, sure we do, but will it mount to no bigger e-lightenment, with all the dim,
all 2-dim sides thereof, than a simplex-minded refitting of the iron cage as a
brand-spunking new silicon, all too syl-icon cage?  Ai, there that rub again.

This is why I am trying to sell folks on a 3-adic sign-relational setting for
thinking about the problem of isms and the PhDedness of our disciplines, that
pits against each other all of the facets of the "good enough material" (GEM)
that we were initially given to work.

This is what Sue an I have been focusing on from the beginning, most expressly
for the last decade or so, to wit, here:

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/inquiry/fall95/awbrey.html
http://www.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/awbrey/inquiry.htm
http://www.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/awbrey/integrat.htm
http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals/Details/issue/abstract/ab017772.html

Many Regards,

Jom Awbrey

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Mishtu Banerjee wrote:
> 
> Saturday Morning Ode to Isms:
> ----------------------------
> 
> One morning you wake up
> and find the path
> has become the cage
> 
> Your journey
> has been worrying a circle
> 
> You wonder how long you have been here
> 
> Somewhere overhead
> a small beam of light
> is streaming through
> 
> You notice some waterstains
> and begin to think:
> "There is an outside to this"
> 
> You dream your world is a small room
> you are about to leave.
> 
> -- mb
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawbrey@oakland.edu]
> Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2001 10:01 AM
> To: Organization Complexity Autonomy
> Cc: Generic Ontology Group; Arisbe
> Subject: OCA: Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry
> 
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> 
> | Well, I've been waiting, I was sure
> | we'd meet between the trains we're waiting for
> | I think it's time to board another
> | Please understand, I never had a secret chart
> | to get me to the heart of this
> | or any other matter
> |
> | Leonard Cohen, "The Stranger Song"
> 
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> 
> Howard, Stan, & All,
> 
> I would like to try and bring together a few of the threads
> that are threatening to unravel here, because I think that
> there are several important connections that are yet to
> be made among them, at least, in a fully explicit way.
> 
> For instance, I see a connection between this bandying about of isms
> that Stan and I have been carrying on for a while now and the number
> of misunderstandings about conceptual, formal, and logical analysis
> that Howard and I are constantly running up against.
> 
> The strange thing is that, behind all the fuss and the fuzz about isms,
> in particular, empirisicm versus rationalism, just to name one of the
> bigger lose-lose battles among them, I believe that we all share an
> interest in integrating the diverse one-eyed views of the universe
> into a more stereoscopic perspective on the cosmos.
> 
> As a person who has been kicked around each and every one of these mental blocks
> several times in one lifetime already, I have frequently, all too frequently for
> my taste, had the experience of starting out on a problem from the standpoint of
> where I happened to be anchoring the skiff of my transient POV at the time, say,
> in the quay of "formally intensional proof-theoreticism" (FIPT) that all the
> world knows on more familiar terms as "glasperlenspielism", only to discover
> as I persisted on the problem, heedless of where my dinghy an sich might be
> drifting, that I had gradually become an apostate to my former faith and
> a born-again convert to the opposite point of view, in this case, say,
> "materially extensional model-pragmaticism" (MEMP).  After this sort
> of thing has happened to you umpteen times in every direction that
> you set out to "cover the earth", you begin to get the nagging
> sense that maybe the space you're exploring is non-orientable
> with respect to all of these ismaelic coordinate systems, and
> so you, or at least, I, who lives to tell the tale, begin to
> entertain the notion of just palin abandoning the notion
> that these ismatisms ever dissect the space in question,
> no matter how far we may try to draw each ism@ism out.
> 
> Now, all of us here are supposed to be sensitive to the
> themes of complementarity and relativity that developed
> as physics become a "reciprocant observational science",
> and so I do not quite understand why I should even have
> to trouble anyone hereabouts to mention this posability.
> 
> Somewhere along the line between my readings
> of Bohr, Dirac, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohm,
> and that whole crew, it got impressed rather
> deeply on one of my younger selves that there
> is a complementarity or a trade-off between
> the causal and spacetime pictures of things,
> and I know there have been 2 or 3 reactions
> and counter-reformations against the Danes
> since then, but I still see the wisdom of
> considering the off-chance of irreducible
> exchange relations whenever we find our
> wits being tangled by some perpetually
> perennial and recalcitrant problem of
> our former and formative philosophies.
> 
> It is precisely because I care about achieving basic conceptual frameworks
> in which the many-splintered facets of reality can be redintegrated into
> sensible and intelligible perspectives on the world as a holos that I
> find the standpoints of most dedicated isms to form such annoying
> and frustrating obstructions to this integration.  I understand
> that most isms are born out of enthusaism for a special aspect
> of the cosmos, and I truly enjoy the "Hey, looky here!" phase
> of their early developments, but if you look at what happens
> after that, in real historical terms, it becomes clear that
> all of the typical examples of "mature" isms, to wit, those
> that attain the age and reach the stage of becoming aware of
> themselves as isms, explicitly formalize their platoforms as
> built on the planck that all opposing isms are invalid.  And
> isms like that cannot be re-fused into any kind of glass that
> will allow us to see, much less refract the diversity of things.
> 
> Q.  How do you sharpen the automic axe?
> A.  With a Möbius strop.
> 
> Enough for a start,
> 
> Jon Awbrey
> 
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> 
> Incidental Musement:
> 
> http://www.sherwin-williams.com/
> 
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