One thing I appreciate about Goodman is that, the skeptic that he is, he manages to do system-building without positing his system as foundational or essential in any way — it’s just a way of “setting our nets”

The recognition of worldmaking as a distinctive activity is the way I draw a parallel between design, philosophy, and programming.

The things I’d love to write about are not primarily topics on which I feel I have something to say, but rather topics which confuse and fascinate me, and thus which I would like to investigate through the exercise of writing.

relative correspondence:

I think the correspondence theory of truth is “all right and all wrong”, to use Goodman’s catchphrase. It’s all wrong because the truth of our descriptions isn’t validated by their correspondence with an underlying reality. But it’s all right in the sense that the process of validating the truth within a given system of description is a matter of judging correspondence. The cat is on the mat if the entity we recognize as “the cat” stands in that identifiable relation to the entity we recognize as “the mat”.

Here’s the trick: the way we establish recognition of an entity or relationship varies wildly on the system of description (the theory) applied. For example, in order to recognize “Paul believes the door is unlocked”, we don’t look inside his brain, we just observe him attempt to turn the door knob. You might call this “indirect” recognition, but what is the meaningful distinction there? When an object falls, we might say we “indirectly” observed the force of gravity — does the impossibility of observing it “directly” make gravity any less real, or that mode of description any less useful, or that form of recognition any less valid?

So what I’m thinking is there’s no way to systematize correspondence and make it absolute, i.e. to reduce all of reality to a single system of description. Yet that doesn’t change the vital role that correspondence plays relationally, within a descriptive paradigm.

Writing/thinking/working in public has become very popular through blogging and digital gardening — it’s a busy space with a lot of individuals and too much content for anyone to engage with it all meaningfully. I find myself wondering whether I should feel guilty for adding to that cacophony.

leslie liu:(Appreciate the font your website is set in. That's all)

I think I often enjoy artworks more as the impetus for a certain kind of activity or conversation than as objects to be somehow appreciated ‘in themselves.’

On it’s face, architecture doesn’t say or depict — it only is, and perhaps expresses, the same things which might be said about music.

But I think I am missing some nuance here — doesn’t the opulence of Buckingham Palace, or the austerity of the U.S. Supreme Court Building, say or at least indicate something about their inhabitants and functions? So I think there is a way in which architecture is often representational.

A very obvious thing that I don’t know if I’ve ever considered is that the form/content distinction doesn’t apply well to architecture, because architecture is typically (but not categorically) non-representational. I now wonder if looking at the formal considerations in architecture would inform the way we understand what we call “form” in graphic design.

some theoretical drives:

I was recently prompted to explain the theoretical drive behind Goby, and I think it led to a better articulation than ones which I have been able to give in the past:

There’s a professor at Parsons who teaches courses on a wide range of subjects, but claims that all of them are about the same thing, something he calls “the art of grammar”. Anyone who has taken one of his courses has heard him articulate the pedagogy behind this term: his are “art” rather than “subject” courses because rather than teaching you new facts within a particular domain, they train a general mental faculty, which can then be applied to many subjects. “Grammar” is the faculty he teaches, and by this he means not English grammar, but Grammar writ large, or “the ability to analyze something in terms of its parts and their relations”. Students in his courses are tasked with reading a philosophical text, and re-presenting its content in a way that makes its internal structure explicit. Each class session consists of discussing a text while he “maps it out” on a whiteboard: writing down terms, defining them, and articulating their relations to one another. It’s significant that this “map” of a text is nonlinear, and he often discourages students from looking to the order of the text itself as a signifier of the structure of its content. 

I’m driven by the question of how to formalize this kind of abstract thinking in an interface, i.e. thinking of something in terms of its parts and their interrelations. It’s a kind of thinking which is so pervasive that to formalize it feels to me like attempting to draw an outline around the shape of thought itself, as lofty as that may rightfully sound. But aside from that theoretical fascination, I think embedding this kind of thinking in an interface has pedagogical value. The other way my professor has described his approach is as “teaching students how to read”. Connecting to Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen’s work on timeful texts and doing-centric learning, his idea is that in order to really engage with a work (and particularly a work of philosophy), you have to bring the concepts to life by articulating and applying them on your own. As Matuschak and Nielsen remark in Timeful Texts, it’s hard for someone without training to go beyond the linear reading process and engage closely with a text in this way. So what if an interface ambiently prompted you to represent something in terms of its conceptual structure? If this interface was integrated in your everyday activity (if it was a “medium” of thought), it might train you to interpret new information differently — it could teach you the art of grammar. 

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Goby is my first attempt to formalize the art of grammar. In it, you organize things into different “classes”, which each have a set of properties — e.g., an “author” class might have properties for first name, last name, and books authored. Some of these properties (like books authored) are relational: i.e., they relate one entity to other entities of the same or different classes. Thus in my previous example, you would also create a class for “books”, one property of which would be “author”. These properties then define a possible two-way link between the entities in these classes. 

Now, what I’ve just described (and what you’ll clearly see looking at Goby) is a relational database architecture, structurally similar to something like Airtable or Notion. But by centering a tabular representation of data, and providing reduced “single/multiple select” fields, I think Notion and Airtable obscure the very conceptual order that I want to make explicit. So whenever you want to select from a set of items, Goby forces you to make or pick a class that represents the kind of item being selected. And borrowing from “Zettelkasten” inspired apps like Roam, I introduced a spatial view which represents your data as a node-network graph; by seeing the same information in multiple formats, my hope is you decouple your conceptual understanding from any particular visual representation.

It’s slowly dawning on me how much more comprehension has to do with an activity prompted in a learner than the correct articulation of an idea by the teacher.

Or rather, I’m already aware of this fact as a learner — I know I need to engage with something and “try it on” in order to really grasp it. I can’t just passively absorb teaching and expect understanding.

However as a designer and writer interested in fostering comprehension, it has taken longer for this point to become salient, perhaps because I’m fascinated by the question of how to represent information. That is, I’m captured by a vision of suspending meaning in language or data or form, despite the mountain of philosophy I have come in contact with that opposes this possibility.

leslie liu::'•) i beamed at this. hope you are enjoying the winter.

sorry for the gibberish:

Sometimes the descriptive paradigms we invent fail to capture features of the entities they describe or organize. This is the source of scholarly hostility towards “abstractions”. However, I want to endorse the claim that everything which can be called knowledge is already abstracted. Thus a descriptive paradigm isn’t inadequate because there’s some fundamental reality underlying it and which it fails to capture. Rather, our reality is already received psychologically and socially through layers of abstraction; when we invent a paradigm, we do it in reference to entities constructed through another existing paradigm. The adequacy of a new paradigm is determined by its ability to capture or negotiate relevant features of the existing paradigms.

Two conceptions of world-making:

1. to invent a reality (a change in belief)
2. to invent a way of describing reality (a change in category)

The two are rarely happening in isolation. For example, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? imagines a future (invents a reality) in which androids have been invented. But it also asks you to reconsider the way you ascribe personhood, i.e., changes the way you define a 'person' (invents a new way of describing reality).

Both of these, you’ll notice, rely on a pre-existing framework for describing reality. #1 changes which descriptions within the framework are true or false. #2 builds upon or modifies the framework itself.

I have a strong conviction that friction and chance are opportunities rather than obstacles; they prompt you to think and work in different ways, and they generate the meaning in your life.

Pulling this thought I had out of an interesting discussion with Patrick here:

The crystal goblet metaphor is formulated in reference to editorial design, but I’m not sure UI design has an exactly corresponding dynamic. In the former case, the designer formulates their concept in reaction to textual and visual content generated by collaborators. However in the latter case, it’s the user who formulates their textual and visual content in response to the framework the designer has set up for them. So in interface design, the designer can’t react to any particular content - you’re designing something inherently generalizable. Therefore all the decisions are built around anticipating or shaping what someone could make with your tool.

Framed this way, I think it’s a valid choice to pare back the visual moves you make, because these thing restrain your users in ways that may not be intended. And in any case, I think a UI designer’s voice comes through more in the functional structure of an application than in the top-layer cosmetic choices.

operationalism:

A few years ago Klein recommended Nelson’s Ways of Worldmaking to me, and I assumed it was because of its content and style. But when I told him he was right that I would like it, he explained that it wasn’t so much because of the content, but rather because of the method. Nelson is what he calls an “operationalist”, meaning that he sets up a clear conceptual framework, and then applies it to various concrete examples that illustrate his position. He reportedly sees me as an operationalist too, as I do the same thing in my papers, coming up with little fictional examples to clarify a point (he always criticizes this though, perhaps because I don’t do it well enough to pull it off).

In any case, this idea of operationalism resonates a lot with the way I like to approach problems - I might adopt the term. I’m curious what relation it holds to the philosophy that the term names according to the SEP.

Different authors may use the same term to mean very different things - two different aesthetic theorists, for example, will call very different things ‘beautiful’. But here is a question that’s often in the back of my head: why then do we take them to be offering competing theories on the same thing, rather than parallel theories on different things?

The answer might be obvious, but nonetheless I think it’s worth pointing out: authors, insofar as they are participants in some shared domain — be it shared culture, shared language, or at the very least shared human social experience — are working from a single starting datum: our common sense views and the ways we use language to describe things in everyday life. So different theories are competing attempts to explain or even dispute our common sense understandings, by situating them in a larger system that draws from different aspects of human life and thought.

leslie liu: Wikimedia Commons Foliage Archive

I’ve always felt static web/interface prototyping to be insufficient — to me it’s comparable to designing a book digitally, without doing test prints (as most good design professors will tell you to do). Coding takes a substantial amount of time, and when I conclude a design needs to be changed after playing with it live, I’m tempted to mourn that time as wasted. But maybe one just has to accept that initial coding stage as part of the discovery process.

I’ve finally been diving into Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking, and I’m stunned by the simultaneous brilliance of the ideas and accessibility of the prose.

The book ties into many of my own lines of thought — the correspondence of language and world, the way we order information, the inadequacy of definitions, the question of what “counts” as art/design, etc — and I will likely be processing and situating it for a long time to come.

None of this is a particularly thoughtful engagement with the text, but I just wanted to express my joy with it and recommend a read, since:

• I think his ideas also connect to many of the practices and lines of research I have seen on here.
• One doesn’t need to have read other analytic philosophy to understand and deeply engage with this text.

It’s usually very easy to reveal incoherences and contradictions in the dogmas put forward by any artistic movement or tradition. But maybe that just means examining an aesthetic movement as if it was a coherent thesis is an unfit way of approaching it.

perception as a creative act:

In Ways of Worldmaking, Nelson Goodman puts forward this idea that whenever you perceive something or attempt to understand it, you in fact re-create according to a particular order. ^1

I’ve been thinking recently about the way we — folks in general but particularly artists — often separate intake/inspiration-gathering from ‘creation’. Research and reading is often analogized to feeding yourself good “inputs” so you’ll produce better “outputs”. But for a while this logic has felt unsatisfactory to me. It seems to me that when I’m doing research and reading, it’s very generative: I’m coming up with frameworks to order and better grasp the things I intake (or if I don’t, then I don’t get much out of it).

I was also recently talking to Emily about the expectations people sometimes bring to abstract art, and the cliché criticisms that anyone could do it, or that it doesn’t affect them. My thought, in connection with this comic I found a while ago, is that viewing an abstract work is a similarly active, generative process. You can’t expect the piece to “do all the work”; you’re not merely passively consuming it. Rather, you’re entering a creative collaboration with the piece in forming your own interpretation. ^2 And if you reframe it in these more open-minded terms, experiencing the work becomes more rewarding.

tragedy of plurality?:

The infinite plurality of authors and content, not only on the web as a whole, but within particular domains of culture (such a philosophy) has a superficial beauty to it which I think was attractive to the envisioners of the web. But it feels to me like there’s a tragic element to it, in that it becomes harder and harder to find shared points of reference. That is: there are so many things which any individual could read and do that areas of overlap become smaller and smaller, to the point that you can have different authors ostensibly writing about the same topic, but without consciousness of each other or any shared background on which to base a discussion.

Another interesting dual meaning: “random” as in without intention, and “random” as in without order. A naturalist (e.g. Spinoza) argues that events are random in the former sense (i.e. non-teleological), but non-random in the latter sense (i.e. determinately governed by natural laws).

I think I ought to banish the fear of being told to go read something (i.e., the fear of betraying my naiveté). And as a listener/reader, I ought to banish my temptation to tell people to go read things.

Why do we group “to be” as to exist and “to be” as to possess a property (e.g. “the leaf is green”)?

This is to ask, do these applications have some kind of intrinsic/logical relation? And if not, why are they so often combined linguistically (as is certainly the case in Ancient Greek, German, and English, among many other languages)?

Philosophers often exploit this relation, and Kant famously denies the validity of doing so. I’m inclined to agree with him on some level, but I think it might be useful to diagnose the initial tendency — to discover on what contingency it rests in our forms of life.

• Maybe: We think in order to describe the properties of a thing, its existence must already be assumed. Thus it would apparently be nonsense to speak of the color of a nonexistent leaf. This is what Quine dubs “Plato’s beard,” or the riddle of non-being.

Going off of this --->

Something that’s been bothering me is it’s not just the web’s grain, but the grain of the tools we use to prototype that makes a static modular grid difficult to implement. At least within Adobe programs, or Xd anyway, I can’t create a column grid in such a way that the columns don’t proportionally span the whole canvas width.

I’m reading sections of Umberto Eco’s The Open Work right now which I have a feeling will relate to this — interfaces, similar to “open” compositions like Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI, give you a kind of freedom while at the same time confining your choices within well-defined parameters.

And both these things, I think, will relate to trains of thought in these channels:

• the very concept of a thinking tool
• when design dictates thought

graceful static grids on the web?:

I’m designing a webpage that I’d really like to have a static grid (rather than changing to fit the dimensions of the window, or not using a grid at all). I know this is somewhat against the web’s grain, but the reason is I want to be able to control where the lines break in a block of body text, and I also want to have the visual rhythm that comes with sizing and spacing items on a grid. A couple thoughts:

• One of my worries if I just do a static grid and have it adapt to the browser with hard breakpoints is that it’ll look antiquated or amateur, like old non-responsive websites. I would be very grateful if anyone in the are.nasphere has examples to share of websites that do a fixed grid this artfully. (here is one I just remembered)

• I’ve noticed a lot of media organizations also use fixed rather than proportionally sized width text boxes (for example the NYT’s two-column interactives), and simply throw grids out the window by centering the text or sizing media to fill the rest of the space. Centering is often thought of as the sort of the uncool, boring, neutral thing to do with text, but on the responsive web it makes a lot of practical sense as opposed to left aligning.

• Resonant thought from this article by Elliot Dahl:

  A modular grid takes columns and rows into account to organize content into a matrix structure. Modular grids are ideal for a strict format layout like a book but can break down for a relative sized responsive web layout. Keep in mind this doesn’t have to encompass the entire page layout. Modular grids are an organizational tool. You decide where it starts and stops.

send help:

to reject metaphysics:

I think once upon a time I would have argued that I don’t like the term “metaphysics” because it implies some layer of reality beyond and/or underlying physical reality.

I still don’t like the term, but now I think I’d explain that by saying physics is just one of many equally true ways of describing the world, so to say something is “metaphysical” is either completely non-descriptive, or it assumes a false dichotomy between two supposedly fundamental “layers” of reality, the physics and the “meta”-physics.

From either angle, I think the term has always just smelled of superstition to me. Attesting to that connotation is the way that in pop culture, it’s often used interchangeably with “spiritual”.

My friend Patrick discovered a copy of Dot Dot Dot 12 at the Strand, which I purchased and have been making my way through. I think I get the hype. The design decisions and the organization/curation of the issue are really cohesive and formally fascinating, and among the text themselves are some of the most compelling works of design criticism I think I’ve ever come across.

Specifically, The Book Abstracted by Katherine Gillieson crystallizes thoughts and discussions I’ve previously had about design as primarily shaped by social conventions and developments in technology, rather than some naive, absolute framework of ‘problem-solving’ (this is broadly the subject of my channel, ‘this thing of ours’). I wonder if the way I've encountered and developed this idea in my own research is a result of the way articles like this have permeated design culture/education. Collected some juicy quotes from the piece here.

Categories are second-order; *or:* why ontologies can't be flat:

I’ve previously observed [1] that categories are exclusive, whereas tags are inclusive (a thing can have multiple tags, but it can only be in one category). Now I’m starting to think about how the exclusivity of categories isn’t merely arbitrary. A thing can’t be in more than one category because it’s category determines what properties it can have — it fundamentally determines what kind of thing it is, the “role” it plays in the system.

So a category is not a mere relation of one thing to another, as a tag is a relation to the thing tagged. And this makes me realize that often a conceptual framework isn’t just a collection of things in relation to each other — a “flat ontology”, to use a phrase sometimes associated with Are.na. A conceptual framework is a collection of different kinds of things in relation, where the “kind” fundamentally cannot be just another element within the system.

Why can’t the kinds just be elements in the system? Because if they were, you would then need a way of distinguishing them from the ordinary “things” in the system, identifying them as those special elements which determine what kind of thing a thing is. And to do so, you would need to rely on a meta-delineation of kind, which is what you’re trying to avoid.

While reading, instead of transcribing juicy passages in the moment, I’ve recently started drawing double stars next to them on the page indicating something I’d like to excerpt for a channel. Then later on I do a second pass of the text for transcribing, which lets me revisit the things I found most compelling.

There’s a lack of transparency which always bothers me when an update for an IOS app becomes available, and the description of the update is something generic like ‘bug fixes and improvements’. I appreciate the few applications that put actual explanations of what changed, notably Slack, which writes really witty summaries to boot.

One way of dissolving a supposedly profound philosophical argument:

1. Someone argues that the designation X applies to thing Y, which is very counterintuitive, as we are not accustomed to thinking of Y as being X.
2. You demonstrate that X, as this person has conceived it, applies to everything or nothing.
3. You then ask the question, “Do we even know what we’re talking about when we use designation X? What would it mean for something to not have that designation? How is this relevant to the thing we actually care about when we use this term in ordinary speech (what’s the cash value)?”
4. If they can’t substantively answer that question, you can declare that X as they have conceived it is meaningless, and hence their argument is nonsense.

(this is just slightly tongue-and-cheek, but I think it’s sort of what Kant is doing in his attack on the ontological argument, what Wittgenstein is doing in his Investigations, what Nelson is doing in The Way the World Is, what Peirce is doing in Some Consequences Concerning Four Incapacities, and probably many other deflationary arguments)

A pragmatist take on the Ship of Theseus:

Consider the Ship of Theseus, whose planks are replaced over the course of a voyage such that, eventually, nothing of the original wood that constituted it remains. I take it that a ship is a physical object, if anything is. But it is notoriously difficult to explain what accounts for its identity over time. Clearly nothing about its material composition or spatial positioning could answer this question. Neither will its ‘form’, in any straightforward sense: the sailors may decide to throw out the mast and navigate by rowing, but the ship will not thereby have become a different ship. These contrivances can continue as long as one likes, and we will continue to find it difficult to justify our assignment of identity to the ship. The most we can do is give a third-person causal account for why we are intuitively inclined to treat it as the same entity. From a psychological point of view, it is likely that our determination of the ship as an entity is greatly dependent on context and on an overlap of many conditions, rather than a universal rule governing all instances of ship-ness or thing-ness. Nonetheless it is clear that these are not completely arbitrary designations; if I am stranded on an island and I see the Ship of Theseus pass, my ability to distinguish it as an entity will be contextually useful. Even if I am not able to articulate what makes the ship an entity, it’s clearly “real” in some sense. Here’s a quote about Charles S. Peirce from Richard Rorty which I think speaks to this:

“Peirce…explains the convenience of naming certain batches — of slicing up nature in certain ways, and thereby developing certain habits of expectation — by reference to the fact that nature has already sliced itself up by developing habits on its own” (Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Categories, and Language,” 211).

One of the early things I was contemplating while I brainstormed goby was whether at bottom, there is any structural quality which is universal to all information models (or ontologies if you like) More recently, I read Nelson Goodman’s The Way the World Is and a couple other papers about ontological status, and they’ve driven my thinking in some new directions which feel like profound developments to me. I can only articulate them fuzzily and uncertainly, so rather than attempt in vain to account for the nuance I haven’t yet grasped, I’m going to state them as assertively as possible:

• Any model/ontology is a whole composed of parts. The parts are in some ordered relation to one another.
• No entity — no part in a whole — is “real” in some absolute, fundamental sense. They are made real by our recognition of them, and the fact that this recognition helps us make better predictions of phenomena (“predictive power”). If an entity is real by this standard, we know there is some underlying order of component parts (in context) which drives our recognition of it.
• We can only speak and think of the world in terms of discrete parts, and yet as stated above, we can come to recognize that there is nothing fundamental about the way we carve up reality into these parts. Does that mean our perception is limited in some way? Nelson, and the pragmatists, seem to think the answer is no. There is just no “reality” beyond what we can describe, ergo every experimentally reliable way of describing reality is equally real.

I’ve noticed there’s a difference in my success rate when I try to articulate something I’ve been thinking about or reading about to someone, based on when it comes in a conversation:

• If it’s in the context of generally catching up with someone and sharing things I’m excited about, I struggle a lot to explain the idea in a way that comes across to someone who’s completely unfamiliar with the material.

• On the other hand if it’s in the context of discussing a very concrete example, and I can bring in the idea by applying it to that topic, it’s more likely for people to understand what I mean and grasp its significance beyond just that topic.

In either case there’s a low success rate though; I’d like to work on this — I want to be able to describe things I find exciting without boring or confusing people. Part of that is just being more organized in my speech, maybe by pausing and organizing my thought before speaking it aloud. But I was chatting about this with someone a while back, and his opinion was that you just can’t talk about certain things with people outside a field without it being dull or unintelligible. From his perspective as an engineer, that makes some degree of sense to me. And I definitely understand if someone doesn’t find SQL database management as conceptually interesting as I do. But when it comes to philosophy this is more difficult for me to stomach. In a certain ideal picture of the discipline, there should be no such thing as a “technical” topic; philosophy should just be holistically intertwined with our lives and world views. On that view it should be relevant and accessible to all, without needing any special knowledge.

A topic that has come up in a few conversations that I’ve had recently is the way in which abstractions sometimes oversimplify and remove the capacity for specific detail. I thought I’d note down a simple example so I can explain what I mean by this in the future:

When posting a used book for sale online, the seller will sometimes be asked to pick an option from a multiple choice box that accurately describes the ‘condition’ of the book. E.g.

• like new
• very good
• good
• decent
• poor

But I was browsing book listings on this page and noticed the sellers use the description to add some pretty specific information about wear. Here’s an example from a listing of Sovrimpressioni by Andrea Zanzotto:

Nice clean copy, pages age toned but clean. Stiff paper wraps have some light rubbing and shelfwear, with one small area on the back containing very light staining. Back cover has a small crease line diagonally through it but is not badly bent or creased. Overall a lovely copy of a somewhat scarce collection stateside.

You lose this kind of detail in using an abstraction to systematize and organize information. I also think that in order to convert the rich factual detail into a broad categorization, you have to make a value-laden decision. For example, you could make the argument that the same kind of wear has differing importance based on the book: a fold in a page is a much bigger deal in a photo book versus a novel, because of what we value in each.

A recommendation from someone is reflective not only of their impression of your interests and values, but of their own interests and values. Maybe this makes it additive in a way that algorithmic recommendation, which just feeds you things similar to what you already know, is not.

One admirable quality that ordinary language philosophy and pragmatism have in common is that they refuse to play the game that everyone else is playing. Pragmatism just denies the validity of epistemological questions, and OL philosophy denies the validity of metaphysical questions.

I think this trait is what makes them therapeutic. These philosophers don’t see themselves as laying out a new framework to solve a real problem in our understanding. Rather, they see themselves as unraveling the confusions that other philosophers got us into. That is: epistemology and metaphysics are rebellious children of philosophy which have made their way into our ordinary ways of thinking and speaking, where they cause much mayhem and confusion.

The moral is questions like “How can I be certain that ___?” and “What is ___, really?” just get in the way of serious inquiry.

on art as language:

Expanding/responding to comments on my earlier analogy between understanding a joke and understanding an artwork:

It’s not that looking at an artwork without a wall plaque is a purely formal (‘aesthetic’, ‘visceral’) experience. The work itself is interlaced with symbolism and references that we often understand without needing an explanation, because we share culture and modes of experience with the author; in a certain sense we are speakers of a visual language.

The aspect of jokes that I found interesting is that possessing the same context by one means versus another changes the experience of the joke. Is it the same meaning either way? I think so. We can understand why something is funny, even in the absence of the feeling. But how can this be? What’s different about having it explained versus already having the relevant background when we hear it for the first time?

I’m very curious if there are existing philosophical or psychological explorations of this question. But here’s a wild speculation: maybe it has something to do with the participatory nature of jokes. When you directly understand a joke, it indicates that you share a space of meanings and values with the author - there’s a kind of communal experience there. On the other hand when you have to have it explained, you feel like an outsider. It makes me think of the concept of “inside jokes”, and what makes it so special to have them with people!

I think it’s an imperfect analogy to art; it definitely doesn’t ‘ruin the effect’ to not understand an artwork, not to mention I’m presupposing that there is a single kind of ‘effect’ which all artworks have. Like Camila and Lina pointed out, you can sometimes appreciate the formal qualities in isolation, and maybe that’s all the artist was trying to achieve.

But as I was suggesting earlier, I think art often has a resemblance to language, and to this extent there are parallels with jokes. I personally do have an experience similar to hearing a good joke when I can directly recognize that meaning in a work. It feels like I’m connected to the author, that I’m participating in something with them. On the other hand when I look at work from an unfamiliar tradition or period, and I don’t natively have the context necessary to understand what they were trying to do, I can still appreciate it but I don’t feel that personal connection.

And then there is work which is not meant to tap into shared meaning at all. There are plenty of artworks which channel a completely personal form of expression, and may not mean much at all until I read the plaque. To me, these are cases where the artist has decided not to include me or anyone in their world - they’re speaking a private language, and expecting others to listen. There may be things to appreciate about it, but I’m less sympathetic to this kind of work in a public setting.

I wonder if this is a useful analogy:

Having to learn about the context in order to understand an artwork is like having to have a joke explained to you, in that it’s necessary but at the same time it completely ruins the effect.

I would like to be able to better articulate why/to what extent the correspondence theories of truth and language fail, in such a way that I can explain it to people who haven’t read the things that I’ve read (or even to people who have, in such a way that demonstrates my own understanding).

I feel convinced by the arguments against correspondence, but I don’t feel certain that I understand them at a level that allows me to apply them to my general worldview or other domains of philosophy discourse.

a good problem to have:

I am making beautiful memories, and my new challenge is keeping them from holding my thoughts captive.

expressing and interpreting ideas in writing:

Some thoughts on expressing and interpreting ideas in writing:

1) Writing to express ideas involves two tasks which are at least on some level independent:

• A) Getting clear about the ideas you’re trying to express.
• B) Finding the right language and written structure to express said ideas clearly.

Although I do thing they are on some level independent, they’re on another level very closely interrelated, and maybe even identical. I don’t know how coherent my idea is until I find the language for it. It feels to me as if expressing my idea in language tests its logical consistency, and exposes all its vulnerabilities. Despite this experience, I also feel compelled to grant that the language I choose will never really “correspond” to my idea or to the aspect of reality that it addresses.

2) Analysis of the structure of a text is necessary to both achieve an understanding of that text and enlarge your understanding of the world. Moreover, there’s a sort of inverse experience to writing when you read and analyze a text. You’re juggling two interrelated interpretive tasks:

• A1: Digging through their prose style and terminology to understand what they’re saying.
• B1: Grasping the ideas in themselves that the author is trying to express.

But there’s yet another wrench thrown into analyzing a text: as I’ve said you need to express ideas in language in order to make them coherent, and so the only way to build an understanding of a text is to write about it. This means that whereas to write your own ideas you just need to do A and B at once, to write about someone else you need to do A, B, A1, and B1, all at the same time.

3) In addition to this challenge with the relation of ideas with language, writing to express someone else’s ideas is challenging in that you have to settle the relationship between your ideas about the world and those of the author. Sometimes these two are completely incommensurable because of a root assumption the author makes that you don’t accept, or because you don’t understand something important about the background of ideas they’re responding to. To be faithful to the ideas of the author in writing then becomes very difficult. Not because it's hard to write things that you don't agree with, but because there are no real differences in values in philosophy, and so the only kind of disagreement you can have is over coherence. It's very hard to represent an argument that you think is incoherent, and it's all too easy to misrepresent an argument by not taking the time to grasp its coherence.

sneezing and meaning:

It just occurred to me that saying “bless you” after a sneeze is one of the most outwardly absurd customs we hold to, founded in an antiquated superstition. Really it’s not clear to me that there’s anything about the subject of the interaction which makes it meaningful; a sneeze is completely ordinary and uneventful, like yawning or blinking.

But that doesn’t make me less inclined to say the words. In context they seem to serve as an expression of good faith and congeniality. And that speaks to me of a sort of arbitrariness behind our most meaningful moments, which amusingly Žižek talks about in relation to love. Particularly in this time of hyper-curated everything, I crave moments of randomness, invest them with more meaning than I invest in things which are intended to be meaningful.

That’s a kind of Sisyphean gesture to me — an act of conscious superstition. It’s the way for philosophy to embrace the obscurity of poetry and culture, by treating it as simultaneously a trifling game and the most important thing there is.

Mobile scroll detection is the bane of my existence.

There’s a philosophical catchphrase, originated by Rodney Brooks, in describing behavior-based robotics:

“The world is its own best model”

This is the idea that in order to be versatile and robust, robot behavior should be designed out of simple and direct responses to the world, as opposed to having a robot store and act upon an accurate representation of its environment in its memory bank. The problem with the latter approach is that it a) is really programmatically costly and b) ends up being really brittle (the robot fails to respond dynamically when faced with some new thing that it can’t analyze well).

I think a similar motto can hold in web design:

“The DOM* is its own best model”

As I’ve built more websites, I lean more and more towards not storing data and instructions in JavaScript unless absolutely necessary, because that requires you to account for every scenario where the values or rules change, which is on the one hand a strain for the programmer trying to anticipate every condition, and on the other it’s a strain for the computer doing all sorts of checks in JavaScript rather than at a lower level. It’s usually possible and much more efficient to store data directly in the HTML/CSS. Some examples of this I’ve found:

• If you have a lot of elements and you need to record some piece of information about each one of them, you could make an array of items with some way to match an item to an element, but storing it using data attributes is more straightforward and less error-prone in most cases.
• If you need to make a calculation based on an element’s dimensions in order to set the value of something else, CSS’ calc (usually in combination with CSS variables) is going to be more reliable and less costly in most cases, particularly if it’s something that would otherwise need to be updated on resize, and which instead is handled dynamically by CSS’ variable units (%, vh, vw, etc).
• If you need to update a lot of styling on an element dynamically, don’t modify styles directly in Javascript. Create a CSS class with all the relevant changes, and apply the class using JS as needed. Way more efficient.
• In tandem with the above bullet, CSS transitions and animations are the best way of doing simple animations 90% of the time.

I think a new goal of mine is to be less of a curmudgeon in all domains of life.

§1 I’ve noted here in the past that connecting a text you’re reading to previous authors you’ve read is not the deepest way of really engaging with what someone is saying. I’m having this temptation with something I’m reading right now - I think the issue is I keep sniffing out places where it seems the author is falling into traps that the other things I’ve read have (I think) taught me how to avoid. This spoils the process of chewing through the point they’re making, because I see well-trodden paths in front of me that lead me out of the danger the author faces.

So I think my trouble comes from approaching a text as if I was just having a conversation with someone, where it makes sense to bring all my past experience to bear on any topic of discussion. This is really a paradigm of philosophical exploration to me: pulling on many texts and sources without being completely loyal to any of them, and using them to construct a holistic point of view that can be applied to real contemporary, everyday questions.

But with texts, especially as you get further back in time or further from your tradition, it makes less sense to do it this way. This became evident to me recently when I was doing some reading/writing on Spinoza. I had to completely adapt my approach to emphasize interpretive work as much as if not more than the “philosophizing”. Rather than taking his position seriously as a way of looking at my world, I ended up feeling more like I was entering his world and trying to understand his arguments through its internal logic.

§2 So in a way, reading texts becomes another language game. Maybe I can connect this to another thread of thought I had a while ago: that there are certain social contexts, like discussing art, where I don’t feel as if statements ought to be taken seriously in an epistemic sense. So just as I shouldn’t be a curmudgeon when someone says “the colors convey such-and-such”, I shouldn’t be a curmudgeon when an author starts praising the virtues of metaphysics as comparable to science.

However I also shouldn’t dismiss these sorts of discussions as “just a game”; if the pragmatists and Wittgenstein have taught me anything, it is that the only criterion for a true statement or a “real” thing is that it functions in context. It’s just that there’s one level at which things are true just because of our shared norms (intersubjectivity), and there’s another level at which things are true in that they also predict events outside of those norms (even if it’s only within those norms that we can articulate the prediction).

If you tug too hard on any thread of conceptual analysis, it collapses into nonsense. But I suppose that doesn’t mean the superficial order of it is senseless or useless; it just means there’s not a definitive way to settle a disagreement.

There’s a way in which working on these papers makes me lose sight of what I really love about the subject. They demand so much of my attention and energy that I don’t have space to take care of myself as a full human, or (much worse) I feel guilty when I do. The task is extremely rewarding in the long run; it forces me to come into critical contact with a set of ideas, and I find that the outcome of the investigation stays with me. But it is excruciating in the short run of working on them.

I suppose it’s appropriate that it’s in moments of non-academic life — conversing with wonderful people I know, tuning into public discourse, enjoying works of art — that I come back in contact with my own fascination, with the things that make the nose-grinding worthwhile in the first place.

Buridan’s donkey conjures the image of an organism acting as if by calculating the vector sum of all the desires and dislikes pushing it in different directions. But my sense is that this is not how action works for most creatures; we don’t necessarily begin, continue, or stop activities in reaction to conscious impulses, and even when humans have a conscious justification for what we’re doing, it often doesn’t completely explain our behavior (e.g. see experiments on cognitive dissonance).

That’s not to say I have a good alternate account for why creatures act the way we do, because I think that’s a question of particular intricacies of the brain, to be studied psychologically or neurologically. My thought is just that the “desire” framework is an over-simplistic one.

Here is a place where I feel hard-pressed to escape my contingency:

Do I see the world in terms of objects which have properties because this is something inherent to my psychology, or because centuries of philosophy have embedded it socially into our relationship with reality?

The image of philosophy as foundational or fundamental has been, to me, convincingly demolished*. I wonder if it would be right, then, to say that rather than coming before inquiry, philosophy comes after it: it helps us make sense of what we have learned, relate different domains of learning together, and relate it all back to our human experience.

lina l.:love your "went to the museum" channel! I do the same (take photos of artworks I like when I visit museums) but then I end up forgetting about them 😬

This new blogpost from Pirijan speaks to something I’ve been mulling over for a while: often the value of good or innovative software can’t be described solely in terms of its feature set or interface, or at least to do so would be to overlook the reason for its success. I’ve previously reflected that I think this is the case for Are.na. As Pirijan notes, a sustainable funding model makes all the difference, and to that I’d add things like the scale of the company, its approach to growth, access to user data and developer APIs, responsiveness to user feedback, transparency, and the community that gathers around the software (which is in no small part a function of the previous things mentioned).

Some tentative insights about listening to music while writing a paper:

• no music is ideal for the read-through(s)
• classical is ideal for thinking through a problem
• jazz is ideal for writing the prose

I’m noticing that I run into a dangerous cycle when I try to write a philosophy paper:

1. I take great pains to understand a nuance in a philosopher’s position on my own
2. I get excited about using my paper to explain said nuance
3. I read some commentary and realize someone else has already explained said nuance better than I ever could
4. I feel as if my understanding is too basic, and return to reading the primary text, in order to come up with a more original viewpoint
5. Return to step 1

I guess I need to come to terms with the fact that in my first time engaging with a text, there’s no way I’m going to come up with a highly unique insight about it, and that can’t be the objective of the paper. The paper, in the context of a class, just is to achieve a basic mastery over the material. Or at least I can’t omit that mastery or try to breeze over it, because that just makes it seem like I don’t get the basics, and it makes it much harder to get to 15 pages.

A couple days ago as I was waiting for the L train at 14th st, a performer was singing something with a familiar tune, but I couldn’t place it.

Then today, as I walked down to the same platform, a song began playing my mind: “my blue jeans…”. It took a few moments before it dawned on me that it was the song from the other day, which I now recognized as “Japanese Denim” by Daniel Caesar.

Maybe this is mundane, but there’s something special about it to me. It speaks to the hidden gears churning in my head, continually running and retrieving information without my conscious willpower or understanding.

Should I consider these mechanisms a part of me? On my end it’s just as if information “pops into my head” — so I might be tempted to think of these cognitive functions as a sort of prosthetic enhancement. But on the other hand, it would likely be impossible to extricate a “self” as something apart from all these mechanisms.

When teaching programming, we sometimes personify computers as pedantic rule-followers: all your instructions have to be stated explicitly, and with perfect syntax, or else the computer will get confused and fail at the task.

I think this reflects one of the greatest lessons that computing has for philosophers. It shows you the precise limits of logic, once you can’t rely on the hardware built into our brains to explain ambiguous concepts like “idea”, “intuition”, “essence”, and so on.

This is absolutely not to say that human cognitive functions and consciousness can’t be manifest in a machine. I think recent achievements in deep learning are proving the former, and the latter is perfectly conceivable to me as well. The point is we can’t appeal to vague notions in explaining how our minds work, and these recent achievements in AI are demonstrating how malleable and logically imprecise a mind has to be in order to cope with the contingency of a natural environment.

nonlinear =/= disorganized:

I wonder why people seem to associate ‘linear’ with ‘organized’, whereas they associate ‘nonlinear’ with ‘disorganized’. There are plenty of data structures which aren’t “linear” but which are still logically organized. Linearity is just one way of organizing. Maybe this misconceived connection comes from the fact that writing and proofs follow a linear structure. But I think that has more to do with how we process information; it’s easier to follow something in ordered steps with a clear starting point.

How do you show someone what to do, without giving them a rigid formula that is dead-on-arrival?

The great Wittgensteinian* insight on this is: offer examples.

Something just dawned on me:

Maybe, for a dedicated pragmatist, the idea of existence simply loses its special relation to truth. Existence is just another tool in our vocabulary, terminologically useful only insofar as it helps us accurately predict experience, and discardable beyond this point like any other part of our epistemological vocabulary.*

*this may be entirely wrong, but it's the most compelling resolution to the "riddle of non-being" that I've yet discovered.

I love the practice of revisiting the same questions and discussions over and over, finding better and more nuanced ways of articulating my point of view in each pass.

on problems and solutions:

What I don’t like about problems/solutions as a framework for what design is about is that it seems to suggest that designers are especially good at solving problems (we’re really not), and that the best metric to evaluate good design is how “effective” it is at solving some problem (this does not capture what is special and interesting in many projects).

Nonetheless as parts of our design vocabulary, as parts of the “language game” that is design, I think “problem” and “solution” should be welcome terms. Designers create our own problems that exist only within the game, for example, how to make a part of our design system conform with the rest of the system (or what Tiger Dingsun has called “internal logic” as I interpret him). You often won’t be able to articulate such problems in any absolute sense of how they relate to profit or human flourishing, or if you try, you’ll only be able to do so in an indirect form that completely misses the point. Moreover what is often more interesting than “how well” you solve a problem is what creative output comes out of your attempt to solve it.

Although the “back-end”/“front-end” distinction is on the whole pretty useful, there are times where it feels like an inadequate way of describing questions I’m thinking through. Here are some reasons for that:

• ‘Front-end’ problems aren’t always about how something looks or is represented — usually what I want from the distinction is to separate those aspects of the project which I do or don’t want users to pay attention to. This sort of separation is particularly relevant in an application like Goby, where a user is prompted to design a system that can be visually presented in more than one way. The tools for designing that system include structural affordances as well as an actual visual interface — I consider the former equally front-end-related because it's about what power Goby gives to a user.

• In addressing any ‘front-end’ problem I’m not only thinking about these things, but also how it’ll scale, what repercussions it’ll have on the rest of the design system, and of course how it can or can’t be achieved in code.

• In addressing any ‘back-end’ problem I’m also thinking about what limitations will be imposed by my solution on the (broadly-defined) ‘front-end’.

Philosophy is not a subject so much as a way of approaching subjects — a way of “getting clear” about something that on another level you already understand perfectly well.

Nonetheless it’s an activity within a tradition, and like any other tradition has its own internal conversations and canons. To study philosophy — as to study design or any other liberal art — is in large part to become inducted into the tradition.

Something that’s a no-brainer but took me a long time to figure out is that there’s no one-environment-fits-all for working on different tasks.

For example, in cafes I can focus very deeply on tasks which are low mental strain, e.g. write emails, journal, program something simple, read for pleasure, brainstorm projects, etcetera. But with the noise and other stimuli, it’s not the best place for more complicated things, e.g. working through a tough coding problem, designing a visual system, or reading/writing philosophical prose. On the other hand, when I work at home, it’s easier to get distracted while doing any activity because of various temptations that I’m protected from in public spaces: to stand up from my chair, to visit a distracting website, to take a nap, etcetera. Apart from this, I also have a sense that if I work in any space too often, I’m less focused. I think maintaining the sense of novelty in the spaces where I work, it helps “keep me on my toes”, because otherwise I get lax and I start treating the workspace as a home space.

One idea of therapeutic philosophy is to show why the sorts of “what is X” questions that the Greeks were so fond of (‘what is beauty’, ‘what is justice’, etc.) are not difficult questions, they’re just bad questions.

A mission of mine is to bring this sort of therapeutic treatment to discourse around design. That is, show that “what is design”, “is this design”, and all correlates are just bad (read: meaningless, confused, unnecessary) questions.

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Related:

Mindy Seu on the important of recognizing your own contingency over trying to redefine terms https://www.are.na/block/12796396

Jarrett Fuller on moving past the age of wall-building between disciplines: https://www.are.na/block/12848136

A medium as a tradition: https://www.are.na/block/15415005

My conversation in blocks/comments with Kristian/Leslie/Patrick: https://www.are.na/block/10063082 https://www.are.na/block/13817473 https://www.are.na/block/13821203 https://www.are.na/block/13959957

antonymous definitions?:

It’s common enough for people, particularly young people, to close themselves off from an activity, e.g. “I don’t like math” or “I don’t like writing”. I wish we didn’t do this — it usually just reflects the difficulty of learning or a bad learning experience. Generally I have the sense that it’s possible to develop a fascination with anything, given some dedication. I think if we approach disciplines with this sort of open-mindedness, we cultivate a richer relationship with the world and we create networks of knowledge across different fields [1].

That said, I think can be unfair in my absolutism about this. I don’t think you can realistically think of all people as capable of becoming interested in anything. Our natural aptitudes play a really important role in what we are “interested” in; if we don’t have an intuitive talent for something, the barrier to entry becomes much higher, and the effort we exert trying to get it right can take away from the enjoyment.

It strikes me that this also gets at what I don’t like about the idea of a “calling” or “passion”. I don’t think there’s any person who is really destined for a particular job or role which will fulfill their identities. All we have is a bundle of natured or nurtured aptitudes and tastes. Our task is to find any activity that we’re good at, that we enjoy, and that will support a living.

writer as guide:

One of my former professors uses the metaphor of “being a good host” and “showing someone around” in reference to giving a good presentation; I like this a lot, and I think the same holds for writing. That is: writing for an audience involves hand-holding: you have to guide a reader carefully and patiently at each step.

With this in mind then, learning to be a good writer means learning how to be a good guide. Obviously to improve as a writer you need to practice, but it’s not enough to just write for yourself. Writing for yourself is a really valuable practice for personal clarity, but it’s very different from writing for an audience. When you are your only reader, you can freely omit context and abbreviate things that would need explanation for anyone else.

This channel varies in how accessible it is to onlookers. I don’t spend as much time crafting the writing here as I do when I write a paper, for example. Mostly I chain together my sentences and paragraphs in the first order that surfaces to my mind, which is usually not the clearest path through the idea. I also don’t bother explaining academic terminology, although I try to avoid it wherever possible. But I do attempt to write coherently, so what I say is at least accessible to a guest that is patient enough to slog through bad style/organization.

Some related ideas:

writing for the author rather than the audience

writing as a toolkit to reproduce a thought

writing to stay engaged

I admit I use too much technical language

organizing as a grounding practice:

I really love the idea of philosophy as a therapeutic practice which untangles us from the confusions we naturally fall into as contemplative beings [1]. This resonates with what I think I’ve gotten out of philosophy, but I think it also gets at something important about why “tending”/“organizing” is so valuable and pleasurable.

Organization, as Are.na’s ethos has reflected [2], is a kind of grounding practice that we revisit over time, making sense of our lives by ordering our physical and virtual surroundings.

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1: This is commonly associated with Wittgenstein and the quietists, but I think you can also draw connections to how Kant approached philosophy, as well as contemporary “deflationists” like Daniel Dennett.

2: for example, consider this quote from Cab in his interview in the Creative Independent:

“Del.icio.us made us realize the importance of archiving casual web (and other) research. That process has a lot of positive effects that are hard to explain until you’ve built a habit out of it. For one, there’s a self-discovery that happens when you revisit things you’ve accumulated over a period of time. You look back and begin to recognize patterns in your own thinking.”

the conscious act of sharing:

On sharing as opposed to merely recording (I wrote this originally as a comment a few months ago on this block; thought it was relevant so I’m revising a bit and adding it here):

There’s something malignant about the conscious act of sharing something personal. I’m prompted to think about how strangers will view this, and how that will transitively affect their view of me; the things I share become merely instrumental towards that end. In this way if I publicly share things that are typically limited to my friends and family, it feels almost as if I cheapen those moments, artifacts, and relationships.

A lot of the sentimentality I encounter around platforms like Instagram stems from how it serves as a place for recording, and it adds motivation to record moments in our lives that we can later revisit. My suggestion here is that in turning recording into sharing, something a bit insidious happens.

That said I also think there’s a significant difference between ‘sharing’ on a feed-based platform like Instagram or Twitter versus on something like a personal website. When you disclose something on one of these aggregate platforms, it is a request for attention from your followers. There’s an implicit expectation when you post something: “I want you to have a reaction to this”. And that drives the social dynamic towards something more superficial and impersonal. On the other hand, a personal website is more like leaving something out for people to visit and interact with at their leisure. That makes it much more special, I think, when someone makes a positive remark about the things on your website.

I wonder if this is accurate:

Whereas skepticism says that none of our beliefs can be accepted as given, pragmatism only says that all our beliefs have to be recognized as fallible. In the latter case, if you have no reason to doubt a belief, you don’t reject it merely because you don’t have a way of grounding it.

Now if you accept the pragmatist approach, the next question becomes: what counts as an adequate reason to doubt?

I have an argument spanning several years with a good friend about whether there is such thing as a distinction between “high” and “low” media. She lands on the side that all media is in some sense equally ‘valuable’. Or more accurately, my impression is she’s annoyed with the elitism that claims the opposite, that some things are better than others. My current standpoint is a bit mixed:

• In terms of my immediate intuition, I do find myself siding with said elitist who believes in the possibility of making distinctions. It seems from my ‘subjective’ experience that some things have more “substance” than others. For example I think Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved is conceptually rich and engaging in a way that, say, the TV show “My Cat from Hell” is not. That richness, that substance, is what I’m naturally (which is not to say biologically) inclined to think of as the metric of value.

• One lesson I’ve learned in studying philosophy is that wherever we find ourselves looking for a rigid boundary between two concepts without any practical consequence, we’re going amiss. So from the recognition that I have this notion of “substance”, the right step forward is not to try to draw a definition around it, but rather to try and understand why delineating it feels important to me. Why is that?

• Here is my admittedly indefensible way of addressing this question: The activity of engaging with something thoughtfully feels more valuable to me than engaging with something thoughtlessly. There is no ambiguity in my mind about what thoughtful versus thoughtless engagement looks like. But I could do no more than identify which is which on a case by case basis. Accordingly I more highly respect media produced by an author that in my eyes "thoughtfully engages" with something. The same media typically (but not always) induces its audience to thoughtfully engage as well. I think it’s important that the infrastructure of the spaces we inhabit, both physically and digitally, encourage us to thoughtfully engage. The alternative seems to me to be the shallow hedonism of Brave New World.

One clear fallacy in our initial visions for the WWW is that we thought access to an infinite plurality of ideas and culture would be an inherent good in our making and learning practices. Instead it’s encouraged us to approach new media, at least online, with a level of disinterest and restlessness. It’s almost a cliché at this point to say, but attention has become a scarce resource. It feels like we no longer treasure / repeatedly return to the things we come across, as Robin Sloan discusses in Fish.

language games and epistemic commitments:

I’m very compelled by one of the themes that emerged in the discussion after my ‘channel walkthrough’ of Against Narrative Identity:

There is some necessary element of hypocrisy in our social norms and practices, simply as a part of what it means to live amongst others in a community.

Although I haven’t taken it seriously enough, it connects with some other ideas I’ve been working through:

• Ritual, although it may feel inauthentic, can in fact make you more authentic by forcing you out of toxic patterns in your ways of relating to those around you. [1]

• A moral education is a matter of picking up a shared vocabulary, rather than following a set of doctrines. [2]

• We can think about certain social contexts, e.g. discussing a piece of artwork, as a sort of language game: a way of engaging with others and with ideas through a particular mode of speech, without making any strong epistemic commitments. [3]

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Following off of these points, I’m led to the thought that maybe we can think about spirituality in the same way. I tend to be unimpressed by religion because of its epistemic commitments, which in my most hostile moments I see as subscribing to an absolutism that defers your personal moral and intellectual responsibility. But if I instead think about spirituality through the lens of ritual, it becomes more agreeable to me. It still seems important to me that we don’t grant scientific validity to religious notions, but spiritual practices can be a way of bringing people together and developing one’s moral sensibility. This is the way Tim Crane speaks about religion.

Reflecting on the way I discuss artwork with people: When we make a statement phrased as a description within a particular context of conversation, e.g. “this piece evokes a feeling of so and so”, it doesn’t necessary lock us into any strong epistemic commitment. I see talking about artwork as a sort of language game — a way of engaging with others and with ideas through a particular mode of speech.

This trivializes it in a way that actually feels correct to me. I guess my intuitive bias is that I’d like certain kinds of scientific and philosophical discourse to be epistemically privileged in a way that the above context of discussion is not. However I’m in the minority there among most philosophers who use the ‘language game’ metaphor. Indeed I find myself thinking science has a “God’s eye view” which (for just one example) Rorty would vehemently deny.

Here’s a thread between design and philosophy which I’ve been teasing out for a while, but that I’ve just started to gain the conceptual vocabulary to describe:

In both disciplines we begin with a notion that you can produce work that is, in an absolute sense, original and innovative. But as time passes, it becomes clear that there’s no such thing as linear progress in either field. The work is always contingent, always in response to/dialogue with a tradition that shapes the way we practice and understand our own practice.

Some related blocks:

Rob Giampietro on design being cyclical and bound to tradition

mediums as characterized by tradition rather than form or function

empty slates are the enemy

…as I read/revisit Rorty, I will probably add some links to quotes from him here (and maybe make a channel devoted to contingent practice), because he and Cavell are the source of my thought on this.

Things in the extension of X may exist. But does X exist?

I think I ought to continually remind myself that making connections between the text I’m currently reading and other texts I’ve read in the past is just one way to engage with it, and not the deepest way.

What this activity does do is help you process new ideas, because you can situate them in an existing body of knowledge; often knowing the background of philosophy in which a text is situated is really necessary for understanding it. So in that sense it’s a good “way in” to a text. But when you’re not careful it can also become a crutch — you start reducing the ideas of the new author to those of the ones you’re already familiar with, rather than inspecting the new ideas in their own right from every angle.

Data normalization is beautiful

knowing an author's 'vocabulary':

I remember reading a chapter from a certain philosophy text in my freshman year and not understanding a word of it. Now, 4 years later, I’m reading from the same text and I feel much more comfortable with it. Although my baseline ability as a reader has probably increased in that time, I think the improvement is more to do with having acquainted myself with the space the author worked in. I know their “vocabulary” now, not just in the narrow sense of technical terms, but in the broad sense of the references and ideas that everyone who is part of a particular subculture shares and can call upon to communicate.

Texts aren’t just vessels of knowledge that you can hand to anyone and expect them to understand, with the only barrier being your “reading level”. “Reading level” is a thing for middle schoolers doing book reports. Something can be seemingly written in plain English, and an able reader may still find it completely unintelligible as a result of not being a part of the author’s community, not knowing the touchpoints and values embedded in the language.

Interesting questions/ideas brought up in the comments of this block, made me want to chime in with a couple things:



1) Unmentioned by the paper is a lot of work from pragmatists like Quine, Rorty, Putnam, and Kuhn, who (similarly to the progression Weingart charts) reject the idea that there is any “first philosophy” or fundamental ontology, and argue that we ought to treat our body of human knowledge as contingent rather than absolute. Here are a couple quotes I like from Quine’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism:

“As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries - not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer.”

“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”

2) The other thing that drew my attention was Leuy’s question at the end of their comment:

“Ultimately, the question arises, if there is no fundamental order, how do we then create meaning. Maybe it is like in religion? Where your believe constitutes your believe [sic]?”

@leuys I wonder if you’re familiar with Camus? You’ve formulated this question in such a way that it immediately made me recall The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, as I think here Camus takes himself to be solving just this problem. His solution, which I’ve always cherished, is to embrace the absurdity! Forge your own meaning! (On the other hand taking refuge in faith, on his account, is just another way of avoiding the confrontation of meaninglessness — he goes as far as calling it “philosophical suicide”)

Optimal conditions for design noodling, as discovered by self-observation:


• patience and playful attitude
• no immanent deadline
• begin with hand prototyping, refine digitally
• quiet surroundings
• caffeine
• start early in the day, natural lighting
• listen to ambient, repetitive, melodically uniform music (example)
• sit in a straight-backed chair

Spread from Karl Gerstner's design for Capital Magazine:

“do patterns exist”, a second refrain:

To say “triangles don't exist” is as nonsensical as to say “triangles do exist”, because neither side has sufficiently explained what it means for a triangle to exist in the first place.

What is the ‘mark’ of existence? What follows from the fact that something exists? These are the pragmatic questions that need answering.

"do patterns exist": a refrain:

One of my philosophical fascinations is trying to clearly explain things that are at once completely obvious and utterly confusing. An example is an old riddle of existence:

I am looking at two different plants and notice there is a pattern between them: both have serrated leaves. Now it seems that I can say with relative confidence that plant #1 exists, and plant #2 exists. But the question is, does the pattern itself exist?

This might seem trivial, and if it does, the weight of the question hasn’t hit you yet. I can describe the pattern without saying “there is a pattern”, like so: “Plant #1 and plant #2 are alike in that both have serrated leaves”. But the question is whether “having-serrated-leave-ness” is a thing in its own right.

If you lean towards no, consider that the same problem happens with shapes: I can describe an object in the world as triangular. But are triangles real?

If you still lean towards no, now consider that the same problem happens with computer programs. Let’s say computer #1 and computer #2 both have a copy of the same program. The program just consists of some coded instructions, which can run identically on any CPU.

What I’m trying to make obvious is: the leaf shape, computer programs, triangles, and so on are all kinds of patterns. You could even make a case that colors are a kind of pattern. The shared quality of patterns is that they don’t “exist” in any one particular spatiotemporal instance.

---

There are some very concerning implications for our understanding of the world if we admit that patterns can “exist” in the same way regular material things like trees, people, and so on “exist”. I want to write a paper some day about how this commits you to the ontological argument, ie., the idea that you can define things into existence willy-nilly.

There are also some concerning implications if we deny patterns exist. It might mean that statements like “there is a pattern between A and B” or “this object is triangular” or “send me a copy of your program” and so on don’t make any sense.

I lean towards denying patterns exist, at least in the strong metaphysical sense that some would like to say they do. I think that we can escape the potential implications of denying the existence of patterns. But I’m still not sure how to frame that argument.

lina l.: hi

re: your block on time spent on thinking tools (this was meant to be a comment but then I got rambly lol)

I've never used Notion before but I've watched a video or two on people's set-ups & I wonder if the procrastination could be because (1) there's a lot of different functionalities available for the user to play around with and (2) some amount of public sharing/focus on the aesthetics of their Notion board (do you call it that? haha).

At least based on personal observation I find that (1) in other avenues has in the past led me down the rabbit hole of finding the "best way" to organize things (spending hours looking at the internet for layouts, videos etc), or left me to fiddle with setting up some structure/set-up to try a feature which ended up not being something useful for me. That freedom to do anything you want with a multitude of features often leaves me anxious & stumped that I'm not going to get it right, or I'm not going to be 'effective', which ironically leaves me procrastinating and spending more time thinking about how to organize. vs doing something in a disorganized manner first, then thinking about how to organize things later.

And for (2), I think there's some amount of "showing off" (for the lack of a better phrase) involved with Notion boards where people share their layouts, but I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing! I'm a sucker for looking at pretty and organized things. It just reminds me a lot of when (physical) bullet journaling was a big thing and everyone spent hours decorating their pages (including me) thinking that's what a bullet journal should look like, only to spend a fraction of the time actually using the bullet journal for... what the original bullet journal was made for.

Anyway, as an aside I think that's also why I've grown fond of are.na: it whittles down the amount of decisions I have to make in terms of what to do, in the sense that it's always either (1) connecting a block to a channel or (2) commenting on a block. It's simple to use, and I'm always confronted with the information first, and organization later. And its simplicity means I can always restructure the way I organize (like combining channels, deleting them or creating new ones) with ease. But I've never felt limited by it because so many ways in which to use this function comes out very organically (like using it to collect research material or using it to make a guestbook like this for us to have conversations or even games!!!!) which is pretty neat.

As to your point about productivity: I agree, although these tools are often sold as "productivity" tools and probably why people expect efficiency out of the tool. I like to think 'organizing' my life (like hand drawing a calendar for myself in my bullet journal rather than using a virtual calendar) has as much value to helping me slow down as it does to being productive. I think drawing that calendar to me, or maybe setting up some kind of macro in Notion for others, gives me a chance to take time away from work without feeling bad about not being ~ productive ~ in hustle culture while we unlearn that anxiety to be productive all the time. idk!!

This is going to be a rather “meta” block:

I was just thinking that over my 20-months-and-running time on this platform, it has cultivated a kind of “holism” in my work and research practices. And then I remembered reading Cab talking in the Creative Independent about how that was one of their explicit missions for the platform:

“Del.icio.us made us realize the importance of archiving casual web (and other) research. That process has a lot of positive effects that are hard to explain until you’ve built a habit out of it. For one, there’s a self-discovery that happens when you revisit things you’ve accumulated over a period of time. You look back and begin to recognize patterns in your own thinking.”

And here’s the “pattern-finding/self-discovery” in action: I realized I’ve reflected on this same thing on here in the past, and I made a book for school last Fall which was explicitly about tying together four trains of thought that originated or at least seriously developed while using Are.na.

One point of emphasis that Cab doesn’t make here, but that I think is important in my case is that Are.na encouraged me to do a lot of writing, as well as have some stimulating discussion, all in public. I think both on the philosophy and design side of things (which in keeping with this theme are not at all mutually exclusive), this practice has really helped me articulate myself and synthesize my ideas/opinions/interests on many topics.

Some day I’d like to devote a channel to the way that 90% of graphic design is noodling around on something for hours until you don’t hate how it looks

my ‘takeaway’ from the are.na nyc meetup:

How would someone wayfind in space? I assume there's no such thing as absolute spatial coordinates, which means they would have to be relative to some celestial body.

It can all make perfect sense and still be meaningless (that is, devoid of meaning).

In retrospect, spending weeks and weeks buried in Kant’s First Critique until I began to understand him was one of the most rewarding things I've done in my college career.

lina l.:Nico, thanks so much for your channel duplicator tool! it's so handy!! :-)

two kinds of representation:

"Representation" has two different meanings as I've used them in discussion of Goby:

1. The more familiar meaning for artists and designers is the idea of an analogy — that is, taking a concept or feeling in one medium and translating it to a new medium — that is, to "represent something as".

2. On the other hand, the meaning familiar to programmers and logicians is a structural representation, that is, the process of formalizing information (data) into a discrete format of some kind. This is also known as formal or symbolic representation. That might sound intimidating, but when Papanek talks about imposing meaningful order in our everyday life, he is roughly talking about this.

By separating these meanings, I can identify two separate functions that Goby serves.

1. In the first sense, Goby lets you visually represent the same information using different visual mediums (a table and a space).

2. In the second sense, Goby lets you create a single symbolic representation of something, be it a domain of knowledge, a collection of files, a project, a world, etcetera.

a medium is a tradition:

Here's a way of thinking of "mediums" that I like: they are characterized by a tradition that you work in and respond to. This is to be placed between two alternate conceptions of medium:

1. On the one hand those who think of a medium as a particular formal quality. To say this is wrong doesn’t mean mediums have nothing to do with formal qualities, either. At any single moment you can usually (not always) define a medium in terms of formal qualities. But if you look at its history, you realize those qualities have evolved over time, while we still consider it as a single medium across that span. Painting is an excellent example of this.

2. On the other hand it’s also opposed to those who want to define a medium in terms of some ridiculous abstraction, e.g. saying that the medium of music is “sound”. You totally alienate yourself from the practice this way.

In my opinion, thinking of graphic design as a tradition is the best way to understand it. And important to this idea is you cannot define a tradition in any terms except historical and cultural background.

(Note: I didn't want to drive people away by making the reference at the top of the block, but this is Stanley Cavell's idea of a medium, as described in his essay A Matter of Meaning It)

An interesting design school assignment would be to have students design an interface that intentionally breaks one (1) of the rules in the Google Material Design guidelines in an interesting way.

Google’s rules in sum make up a really coherent and cohesive system, which is great — but at the same time the system ends up being a prescriptive clamp on most web interfaces.

The assignment would give students a chance to both learn what the accepted best practices are, and make their own contribution to the tradition.

An interesting question is what it can mean for a statement of possibility to be “true” or “false”. If in reality nothing is merely “possible” but only actual, and statements of modality are simply the product of our finite knowledge, then a description, say, of some scenario being “75% likely” seems at first meaningless. Unless you’re David Lewis, anyhow.

But this is just another way of getting to Kant’s point that descriptions of modality are “second order predicates” (only roughly in the formal logic sense), in that they describe something about the concepts not the objects. That is, it’s not that the scenario happens in 3/4 of all “possible worlds”, but that our current (incomplete) body of knowledge points to this scenario with 75% certainty.

I feel certain that it is possible for any of my beliefs, even my most strongly held, to be false. But taking any one particular belief in isolation, I find myself faced with Moore’s paradox: if I truly believe it, I don’t merely believe it, I know it, and I cannot more than superficially entertain the possibility that it is false.

Our world may not be innately populated with objects and properties. But from our standpoint, it sure feels as if experience is given to us that way. Nevermind that we can parse the same patch of "stuff" in many different ways, we do have to parse it somehow, make it discrete in some way.

I recently heard a professor describe seminar-style classes as a “tasting” of many ideas, i.e. a short encounter with each author without really having time to clarify any of their concepts in detail before moving on to the next author.

This seems accurate to me. My contention has always been that you can’t base a robust education solely on shallow “tastings” — I feel I’ve developed my ideas and understanding the most when deeply engaging with a text or author, preferably over an extended period of time and with fellow interlocutors to discuss the issues with.

Radical doubt in the 21st century:

As an academic question, what kind of sound epistemological argument can you make against conspiracy theorists who don’t trust the scientific establishment and legacy media companies? There has to be a better response than our typical scoffing and eyebrow raising at this sort of person.

Of course the underlying question is how do we for ourselves justify taking science and well-respected publications as authoritative sources of truth? This is a particularly hefty question when it comes to reported phenomena that are not directly verifiable by us, like covid. I think it’s tenuous to suggest that we trust what we trust because we’ve taken time to reason through what is trustworthy. Yet we feel justified in our judgement of this, and we also necessarily rely on outsourced information because of our society’s immense domain of knowledge.

This is a sort of updated version of Descartes’ radical doubt, just as the brain in a vat is an updated version of the evil demon.

The phrase “makes sense” occupies a funny space between two different connotations:

— “sense” as in intelligible, i.e. “do you understand this?”

— “sense” as in sensible, i.e. “do you agree with this?”

I found out recently in conversing with a friend that I’m not the only one with a dread of blank digital canvases, and it prompted me to reflect a bit:

1. It’s uncomfortable to have my laptop open in front of me when I’m still thinking through an idea. In those moments I prefer to sketch/note-take on paper and print out any references I need.
2. On the other hand it’s nice to have my laptop open when I already have a clear idea of what I’m making, organizing, writing, etcetera.

There’s been a movement for some time in opposition to JavaScript frameworks and general JavaScript predominance, both in design and development-focused crowds. I’m very sympathetic to at least one aspect of the criticism leveled again JS development, namely the complete flouting of Occam’s razor: frameworks, compilers, and libraries often overly abstract code and weigh it down with dependencies, so it becomes a pain to debug and forces users to download tons of data. think 90% of websites don’t need them, and I have successfully avoided them in most of my work until now. I also understand that JavaScript has performance and structural issues that make it at times sub-par.

Nonetheless I’m using a Node/Electron/Vue architecture in Goby, and I think it’s warranted given several practical considerations:

• Frameworks are not necessary for most pages. They are however extremely useful when it comes to the thing they were designed for: complex UI systems with a lot of data flowing through each page. As I’ve learned the hard way, you end up having to do pretty lengthy and convoluted vanilla JS if you build an interface without a framework. So I’m trying Vue.
• Although Node and Electron have their issues, they have made it extremely accessible to design applications that will work quasi-universally, using the web technologies I’m already familiar with. I think at the level of building a small desktop application, it’s a good place to start.

I want to add that I’m sometimes frustrated with how hostile people sometimes are to building websites that employ substantive JavaScript or even CSS. This “back-to-the-land” strand of web culture can get sort of dogmatic, and close off forms of creativity just because people get antsy at the prospect of complexity in web design.

I think as a baseline JavaScript on the web is … very cool. By introducing sophisticated logic statements, it opens up sooooo many possibilities for what we can do in the browser. I also think, as has been noted about P5, it’s a really great way to ease people into coding, because you can get immediate visual feedback on everything you write.

I don’t understand why people think analytic philosophy is incapable of handling non-pedantic topics like value and aesthetics. I see Stanley Cavell as producing some of the most engaging writing in these areas, and although he is 1) not exactly a paradigmatically analytic writer and 2) in dialogue with continental traditions, he manages to produce his insights without resorting to abstruse terminology and sweeping claims.

I like reading and writing prose in an aphoristic style because it enables each aphorism/fragment to be self-contained, and there’s no need for an overarching textual organization.

That lack of an overall system is a general theme in analytic philosophy; Anglo-American philosophers tend to prefer working on problems at a microscopic level with a high level of rigor, and there’s an aversion to the tendency in other kinds of philosophy to tie everything together in a unified theory.

People criticize analytic philosophers for that disinterest in the super macro level but… I find I simply don’t care much about this flaw. The “analytic” mode of philosophical inquiry, broadly described, is the one I find most engaging and impactful to my understanding of the world.

I want to be clear that my disinterest in work outside the analytic tradition, with the exception of the enlightenment philosophy that had an enormous influence on its development, grows less out of a methodological problem than an aesthetic one. I really want to take a pluralist stance and acknowledge that these works are insightful and meaningful. But merely as a reader I have a low stylistic toleration for writing that doesn’t conform to the values of the analytic tradition, i.e. an attempt at clarity, detail, and precision.

All this means is that as someone really just venturing into the discipline, I want to first pursue the kinds of work that speak to me the most, spending less time on work outside of that, and coming back to revisit it later on.

Does the law of noncontradiction require a correspondence theory of truth?

Contradictions are nonsense because noncontradiction is the condition of possibility for sense!

I’m not sure how I feel about the imitation of diagrams and models in artwork.

It’s been a trend more recently, and I get uncomfortable with how these artworks seem to legitimize the information they depict, which is often pseudo-science or folk psychology. However in other cases I find them interesting to look at and think through. Maybe it’s a matter how visually and informationally original the diagrams are.

I have to admit the irony in the fact that, as much as I harp on the excessively technical language and intentional obscurity in continental traditions of philosophy, some of my own notes here have descended into a terminological nightmare.

I’ll strive to make things accessible wherever possible in order to spark interesting conversations, but on the other hand these writings are only half-meant to be public-facing.

lina l.:Nico, saw your channel on ambient music. Have you played A Short Hike before? You might like their original soundtrack. My favourite is Somewhere In The Woods. :-)

A shallow linguistic relativism:

Wittgenstein doesn’t affirm the level of linguistic relativism which is put forward in Villeneuve’s Arrival, where learning an alien language allows a character to transcend temporality. That is to say, languages can’t fundamentally change the way we reason and experience reality.

A related idea, following from James Conant’s essay, The Search for a Logically Alien Thought: it’s not that the axioms of logic can’t be proved or disproved, but it makes no sense to doubt them at all, because it is only through logical thought that we draw the distinction between truth and falsehood.

So what kind of linguistic relativism does Wittgenstein endorse? Not an epistemological relativism, but a normative relativism. By this I mean: Wittgenstein thinks our values and forms of living with one another are propped up by the fabric of language. But belief and forms of judgement cannot be enforced this way — language would stop making sense to us if it was attempted.

The genius of the refutation of idealism is that it uses the very fact that we can think of things as possible (rather than simply actual), to show that there’s something real outside of us.

Another thing that I think supports this is the fact that I can’t just will reality to change any way I want, and it changes independently of my will. For example, I can’t just stare at something and make it spontaneously change color, I can be surprised by events, I can learn new things, … in short, the fact that I don’t control everything in my experience, already proves there’s something outside of me, at least as “I” is conceived in Kant as a unified consciousness.

Representing our reasons:

Often philosophers [1] explain the difference between human and other forms of intelligence through our distinctive capacity to “represent our reasons”. This idea always struck me as interesting and I knew it had some connection to Kant, but it only just started to make sense to me:

What is it to think of something as true or false? We are representing some aspect of the world to ourselves, some rule that reality is supposed to follow, and drawing a conclusion about whether or not the world actually corresponds to our representation.

Presumably this is something most animals can’t do; animals respond directly to their surroundings, and can be conditioned to associate stimuli with other stimuli (e.g. Pavlov’s dogs), but they don’t evaluate representations, look for justifications.

I’m skeptical of the idea that we can trivially deny the law of non-contradiction and claim four truth values (the usual ones plus “both true and false” and “neither true nor false”).

If something admits of a truth value at all, it is either true or false. If we say of something that it is “both true and false” then that can only justifiably mean that it is true in one sense and false in another. If it is neither true nor false, that can only mean it is too ambiguous to conclude, or it’s simply not the kind of thought that admits of a truth value.

To be a unicorn is to be a horned equine, it is presumed. But this generates some paradoxes:

If a unicorn breaks its horn off, is it no longer a unicorn?

If someone glues a paper maché horn to a horse’s head, is it a unicorn?

the ontological argument:

An observation after rereading §58-61 of Wittgenstein’s Investigations, in the light of my recent readings of Kant/Frege/Russell/Quine:

Wittgenstein isn’t completely denying the compositionality of grammar, which is what the linguist would like to maintain, but only objective compositionality, or the idea that (for example) the word or concept of a broom is equivalent to the concepts of the broomstick and brush fixed together.

A logical ‘definition’, formulated as a biconditional statement, allows you to infer in all cases what is and isn’t in the class defined.

It does not, however, necessarily coincide with the ‘meaning’ of a concept. To use Quine’s example: the groups of “creatures with kidneys” and “creatures with hearts” may 100% overlap, such that if you know a creature has a heart, you know it has a kidney, and vice versa. But that clearly does not mean the two phrases are synonymous.

This is basically just an elucidation of things I’ve written in here in the past.

lina l.: hello nico!

Per Kant, I surmise, reason compels me to either ground (condition) or falsify a judgement!

I’m not sure that’s a correct interpretation, but there’s something very exciting about it in its relation to the underlying assumption in Hume’s skepticism.

The form and content/matter distinction is evident to me in the way that certain things are pretty much impossible to represent syntactically (qualia), whereas other things are impossible to represent pictorially (logical connectives).

I haven’t quite puzzled out the relation of this idea to Wittgenstein, but it certainly connects with ideas from Collingwood and thoughts I’ve had (inspired by the latter). It has to be carefully interpreted though, because it could indicate a kind of transmissionism.

Actually, no one receives anyone else’s thoughts directly in their minds when they are using language…Nor can anyone literally ‘give you an idea’ — since these are locked within the skull and the life process of each of us. Language seems rather to help one person to construct out of his own stock of mental stuff something like a replica, or copy, of someone else’s thoughts — a replica which can be more or less accurate, depending on many factors. If we could indeed send thoughts to one another, we would have little need for a communications system.

— Reddy’s The Conduit Metaphor, 166-67

If you make no effort to unify your identity, it comes as a pleasant surprise when patterns are discovered between your disparate activities and projects.

Pleasant as in the pleasantness of clarity in something that was previously opaque.

What designers call modularity is a quite similar concept to what developers call abstraction/decomposition, and both have a striking resemblance to what linguists call syntax and what philosophers call a symbolic representation or formal system.

I think this is the best way I’ve yet discovered of unifying my seemingly existential fascination with all of the above.

What’s occurred to me just now is that formal systems aren’t fascinating just by their being formal systems. There is a kind of aesthetic beauty to a system that is built elegantly, i.e. decomposed in such a way that all the parts feel not only inter-compatible but also non-extraneous.

And in order for me to bring the normative concept of utility into the analysis of a system, it has to be addressed to some content. Form without content is boring, or if not boring, then only interesting because of some immediately sensory characteristic.

Design as dialogue with a tradition:

Empty slates are the enemy! I feel most like a designer when I’m reacting to given or self-imposed constraints and conventions, rather than defining entirely new forms.

This may seem like a contradiction with my other polemics, but I certainly don’t see it that way. Others use this idea as a moral claim, as if it lends an additional quality of utility to design, whereas art is supposedly self-absorbed. I think that is silly, and it fails to accurately characterize either art or design.

But the way most design practice involves reacting to existing forms is worth remarking on. It indicates to me that design is typically outwards-facing, i.e. in dialogue with a tradition and a community, even more so than art.

However the postmodernist movement (in design) is a testament to the fact that both art and design can sustain an avant garde, i.e. a rejection of tradition that simultaneously claims to still be a part of the tradition.

In my experience, the key to picking a good challenge for either a paper or a project is to find something that is substantial but at the same time seemingly unambitious. As in, rather than trying to do some kind of magnum opus, pick a problem/question you can at least see the boundaries of and that seems doable.

Problems always expand in depth and complexity as you embark on them, and starting with something concrete keeps you from becoming overwhelmed by this sort of scope creep.

Of course it shouldn’t be a trivial challenge you choose either — but for most dedicated students I know, underpromising is rarely an issue.

At the beach I look out across the waters towards the horizon. From this standpoint, I could imagine the ocean going on infinitely. But this — the absence of an observable limit — is not an empirical proof of its infinitude.

This conclusion makes me further inclined to believe there is no possible way to empirically prove something to be infinite. Put another way, I can’t conceive of a way in which I could experience infinity, and “therefore” (there’s the tricky bit) infinitude can’t be proved empirically. In absence of positive proof, I am doubtful that this is possible.

But how do I know that I won’t tomorrow experience something that proves conceivable an example that simply didn’t occur to me today?

Conceivability seems unique this way — it’s as if I can tease out its boundaries a priori. It is inconceivable to me that the shortest distance between two points would be something other than a straight line. But can I give positive proof of inconceivability?

Or perhaps I can find a way to frame all my claims of inconceivability as analytic truths. Could this be done? Would it help? I don’t know.

digital liner notes:

I wish digital music albums had description fields — I often find myself wondering what the story behind an album is, or what the artist would say about it given the chance. I guess that’s a loss that accompanied the end of commercially viable CDs and records, but I don’t see why descriptions couldn’t be brought back — user-created playlists have descriptions after all.