what do we mean by creative?:

People will often censure ChatGPT, DALL-E, and other AI products for stealing human intellectual and creative output without compensating the sources of their data. As this line of thinking goes, the works generated by these programs are purely derivative; they take advantage of human originality to generate infinite renditions that then compete with and cheapen the value of the works they were trained on.

My concern is, if you compare AI authorship and human authorship, it seems like this attitude penalizes behavior in AI which we consider harmless and ordinary in humans, not to mention foundational to human creative practice: Like generative AI, people absorb large amounts of writing and artwork corresponding to their disciplines; interfacing with that existing world of intellectual output develops our mastery of language and understanding as writers, or of craft as artists and designers. I think producing “original” work then consists not of working from a clean slate, but rather making new connections and observations, remixing, reframing, challenging existing material, intermingling it with our individual experiences. Looked at this way, human work is ‘derivative’ in the same way AI works are derivative.

You might justifiably challenge me on this: you could argue that even if people do similarly start from an existing corpus, they grow it into work which is more inventive, more rational, somehow more “original” than AI output. And aside from these doubts, I obviously grant that today’s AIs don’t have personal histories and experiences that inform their work. But the first response I have to this kind of skepticism is that it feels like philosophical hedging to me. That is: it draws a line around the state of the technology today and uses that as an essential delimiter of what AI is capable of, and of what differentiates human and AI creativity. I think this is an ill-advised position to take, not just because the technology is evolving rapidly, but because at a fundamental level I don’t believe there’s any categorical boundary barring machines from becoming as creatively competent as professional human authors.

My second response to this skepticism is that regardless of AI’s actual capabilities, I’m actually more interested in what the mere possibility of genuinely generative, creative AI means for the way we understand our own work. What if the only thing that significantly distinguished the quality of the output of a machine from that of a human was the fact that a machine can do it a lot faster, and with far vaster resources and references than any human can gather? Like a piece of good science fiction, that looming technological threat allows us to reframe our preconceptions about the world: it allows us to reflect on creativity and creative value not as essential qualities, but as concepts formed out of contingent social, economic, and human conditions.

Something I think I’ve noticed about myself is that I slip into different states of “flow” where my attention and decision-making become bound to particular patterns. For example, when I establish deep focus on a particular task or activity, I become obsessed with it — even my absent mind gravitates towards it, and it becomes difficult to think intentionally about anything beyond it. At other times I just succumb repeatedly and absent-mindedly to habits, like listening or watching something while I brush my teeth (I’ve done this for long enough that I now find it uncomfortable to brush my teeth without any auditory accompaniment).

This connects to a confucian idea I heard a while ago (ironically on a podcast, which I probably listened to while brushing my teeth): people tend to naturally fall into patterns of behavior; it’s the role of ritual to break those patterns. So although rituals can feel forced and arbitrary, they disrupt rather than maintain the status quo — I really like this framing.

My problem with the “it’s all subjective” line of thinking isn’t necessarily that it’s a position with no merit, but rather that it masks a lack of understanding, and prevents meaningful disagreement or reconciliation of different points of view.

Matters of artistic taste, matters of ethics, these things can’t be reduced to differences in personal preference, like your favorite flavor of ice cream. Again, that’s not to deny that they are relative in an important sense. But their relativity is contingent on shared culture and a shared human condition.

Something I would like to think about more intentionally is serendipity, and particularly the role of serendipity in the techno-capitalist age we live in.

A conflation I would like to explore: we typically use “narrative” to mean a chronology, but we also use it to refer to representations of people or things at single moments in time. Maybe the meaning has expanded in this way because we pull from our pasts to generate unified representations of our present selves?

People often use the term “philosophy” to describe a set of rules or guiding principles for how to behave, but I like to think of it as almost the antithesis to this: philosophy is what you do when your rules cease to make sense or fail to account for your present circumstances. This is similar to the distinction that John Dewey marks between “customary” and “reflective” morality.

some thoughts on designing collaboratively:

One thing that it has taken me a while to wrap my head around is how designers work collaboratively; design seems to depend on the execution of a single coherent vision, and I wasn't sure how you could bring multiple people into that process as equal creative partners.

In my first forays into the professional world, I've gotten exposed to several approaches to this, and I’m tentatively forming an insight about what works well for me: it’s ideal to avoid situations where multiple people independently tackle the same asset. This forces a team to try to consolidate and litigate between different concepts that each author feels creatively invested in. In my experience it’s far easier to build on a single concept, driven by one primary author, through discussion and debate with backseat collaborators.

As a primary author, I’ve really appreciated this model because it allows me to address my collaborators’ feedback in a way that feels unified and coherent with my own ideas. And on the other side, I was surprised to find that as a backseat collaborator I don’t feel creatively disempowered (although this is partially to the credit of generous collaborators). On the contrary, I feel creatively empowered because I can spitball ideas and amendments to the design without putting the primary author under any pressure to accept them directly, and the end product feels like something which I share authorship in.

I should probably make clear that this is by no means a categorical rule: there are probably many cases, such as a preliminary ideation phase or a particularly large project with many components, where working simultaneously is useful or even necessary. It just hinges on being and working with collaborators that don’t invest too heavily in their own ideas, and possibly having a hierarchy where lead designers set the direction and adjudicate disagreements.

Contrary to Wittgenstein’s famous dictum, I’m now of the attitude that ideas do transcend language: you can believe something without being able to articulate it. But I think his basic point was that ideas don’t live in some untouchable mental realm; they manifest themselves in our everyday practices and dispositions.

I think there's something to the idea that we read not only to open our minds to new ideas, but also to find better articulations of the ideas that resonate with us, words that give form to our existing attitudes.

Foreword to The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2023 exhibition at Pratt Institute: a conversation between Gaia Scagnetti Hwang, Chairperson of the Pratt Graduate Communications department, and Scott Vander Zee, Adjunct Assistant Professor

Gaia on bookmaking as an act of inquiry:

At the core of our MA in Communications Design at Pratt lies the foundational idea that the program serves as a space for students to learn not only to manipulate design as a mode of production but also as a mode of inquiry. This educational framework shifts away from traditional academic paradigms.

When bookmaking is approached as a mode of inquiry, rather than simply as a means of dissemination, the relationship with the production chain undergoes a significant shift. The goal of bookmaking isn’t just to produce, but to investigate, experiment, and explore. As such, each specialist involved in the design and production process becomes a collaborator in the research itself.

In light of this, a provocative question arises: If the act of bookmaking is itself a form of inquiry, how does that redefine the relationship between the graduate students and the specialists involved in the production chain? Given your expertise in the field of book design, I am keen to hear your insights on this question: Does the reframing of bookmaking as a practice of inquiry alter the stakes when graduate students engage with the entire production process?

Scott on production as R&D phases:

Bookmaking—as an art and /or craft—can only truly succeed through multiple forms of inquiry. They (books) are investigations into language and its formulation; systems, hierarchies, and dramaturgies; printing and binding techniques; and various aspects of materiality they are formal objects; sensory experiences; and capsules of physical presence, time, and thought. They are a technology, etymologically speaking. Within this framing, the best-case scenario is for students to become as much of a specialist as possible with the production processes of bookmaking and its impact on design.

The production process, despite typically being associated with mechanical finalization, actually begins (or should) at a book’s conception—inquiring into what’s relevant and appropriate, captivating, affordable, ecological, etc. From the beginning of any book project, designers undergo a series of R&D phases. The reason being, that production cannot be an afterthought in bookmaking. This is why students’ engagement with them plays such a crucial role in understanding the full spectrum of design and its processes and, within the context of a school, why it’s important to see them explore and experiment with all such possibilities.

Gaia on books without arguments:

You raise a compelling point. What intrigues me is the notion commonly held by students that research and production are separate phases, or at least distinct skill sets. This perspective seems to relegate research to an optional, purely intellectual process that operates in a vacuum and is needed mostly for innovation. On the other hand, production is often perceived as a vocational process—reliant on the dexterity of skills and developing from a concrete objective and outcome.

This false dichotomy lies at the heart of many of the failures in our discipline. It often prevents design projects from communicating through an argument or a point of view.

And to take a step forward in our conversation, I feel it’s worth exploring those failures in this context. Specifically, what types of books do we end up with when production is merely an afterthought. What do books look like when they are designed without an argument? Or, maybe even further, do books always communicate a point of view regardless of production choices? This reminds me of the 1972 edition of Learning From Las Vegas designed by Muriel Cooper versus the 1977 paperback edition. I feel that the two editions live in two parallel universes

Scott on designing with intentionality:

The types of books we end up with when the production is an afterthought and /or they are designed without an argument, is what we see 85-90% of the time. One thing I always try to get across—about design in general, but typography and typesetting specifically is that it should have an attitude. That’s not to imply it has to be an aggressive, brutal, or bold one; however, design decisions should feel intentional. Intentionality functions as the argument in design and the forethought of production.

Agreed. Most editions do live in parallel worlds-especially if redesigned. This is what makes editions interesting, regardless of which is perceived as having a higher value or better design. Kind of like re-issues of recordings in music, etc. Regardless, there’s an inherited conversation between them all. Similarly, this newspaper sets in dialog with the official catalog related to the exhibition of The Most Beautiful Swiss Books as well.

Gaia on “the magic”:

Building on our earlier discussion, it’s evident that the design process can yield unforeseen narratives identities that are sometimes unexpected even to the authors. Books are such good examples of the revealing power of design, the ability to show us more evidently what we might have intuitively perceived but now is presented in front of our eyes. This is the magic that happens at the intersection of intentionality, argument, production, and inquiry.

Selina Kehuan Wu:Nico! I just discovered that you actually have a webpage on your site made from this inbox. That's amazing. Do you physically copy paste every note, or write codes that automatically take text and apply to the site?

dani bloop:nico!!!!!!!!!! thank u

the commitments we make:

Following up on my takeaways from an interview of Masha Gessen:

I think what I find compelling about the idea of a “liberatory” framework for gender — as opposed to a “rights-based” or deterministic one — is that it moves us away from fraught metaphysical debates that never resolve, and towards conversations about the recognition we humbly ask of and depend on from one another. In other words, the rights-based framework forces our discussion of gender to be argumentative and combative, whereas the liberatory framework turns it into an open social dialogue.

And more broadly, that seems to me to be a good way of thinking about morality in general — it’s about the commitments we make to each other, not what we categorically owe each other.

dani bloop:going around doing my fall edition of guestbook signing! tell me about someone u love!

My dream is for consumers to move away from using many different subscription-based, web-hosted services, each with their own cloud storage feature, and shift to a model in which each person uses just one or two services like Dropbox to sync local files across multiple devices, editing them with software installed locally and purchased through one-time or update-based payments.

One wrinkle in this that I see is that online collaboration depends on a centralized server host, typically the company providing the service. So my further dream is that we find a way to decentralize server hosting and empower ordinary users to host their own servers.

Where does a fact live, if not in a true statement?

In “operational coherence” (to use Hasok Chang’s not-so-catchy term). That is, in the successful actions taken and predictions made based on knowledge of that fact.

There is a lovely parallel that I’m starting to see here between Chang and Wittgenstein: where does the meaning of a term live, per Wittgenstein? Not in a single brittle definition, but in its use.

Maybe, just as the diverse and infinite uses of a term mean you can never reach a conclusive definition, the diverse and infinite actions you can take to validate a fact mean you can never exclude it completely from doubt. This points back to Chang’s idea of truth in degrees rather than a binary.

the pastry baker and the doctor:

I’ve heard linguists say that for all its success, the lack of mechanistic interpretability in LLMs means they don’t really help us understand how language works, and to that extent it’s more of an engineering innovation than a scientific one.

But within a pragmatist conception of knowledge, where truth is grounded in applicability and direct contact with experience, how do we make sense of this? Would AI not be a model of good science? Here is maybe one way of making sense of this: AI technology can produce impressive results in the contexts that it was designed for, i.e. simulating coherent human behavior, but unlike a typical scientific model, it doesn’t provide concepts and methods that you can apply in other contexts, and connect to other domains of knowledge. The “knowledge” it provides is very brittle.

To use an old example from Socrates, it’s like comparing the pastry baker and the doctor: a good pastry baker knows how to produce things which bring people pleasure in the short-term, but they can’t relate that to things like the chemistry of the food and the functioning of the body, and they can’t predict the impact their goods will have on the health of a person in the long term. This is what doctors can do: bring knowledge from anatomy, medicine, chemistry, etcetera to bear on our everyday activities and diet, interrogating and explaining the behavior of the body.

But now, what is truth? It’s easy to talk about truth in terms of language, of course: statements are true when they accurately describe reality. But what about reality, truth itself? The best we seem to be capable of saying is this: reality is “the way the world is” (monistic), or “the way things are” (pluralistic). Reality is “what’s true” and truth consists of “what’s real”. But what is it for crying out loud? This is the noumenal question at the bottom of it all, and I have the inkling of an intuition that the reason I have trouble answering it is that the question doesn’t make sense. It’s somehow malformed.

Here is roughly how I make sense of the correspondence theory of truth: facts are built out of basic grammatical components, each referring to features of the world. You combine them like lego bricks to create complex representations of reality. It’s the idea of a kind of isometry between representation and reality, like making a map of a territory: different symbols represent different things and their spatial relation to one another, and we assess the map’s accuracy and fidelity by comparison with the real thing, using the key and the scale.

I’ve been feeling like at least part of the correspondence theory is built into the very idea of a “representation”: a representation is a representation of something. It is not the thing itself, but it refers to it in a very special way. It says “I resemble the thing that I’m referring to, if you interpret my features in a certain way”. A challenge for anyone wanting to do away with the correspondence theory, I think, is to reconcile with the inherent notions of correspondence in the idea of representation, and in our everyday language.

As I write this, what is at least clear to me is that the correspondence theory is a theory about the relationship between truth and language. Specifically, what constitutes a fact and determines statements as factual. So it likely involves either a silent assumption about what truth is, or a definite theory about it.

Dominant user interface conventions are functionally useful for website visitors, but also a source of homogeny across the web — maybe the right mindset for a designer (in a commercial context) is that breaking them is okay, even if they cause some initial confusion for a visitor, as long as you provide cues to guide people on how to navigate a page.

tools both constrain and expand the field of possibility:

Some thoughts re: “the designer and the engineer must be able to work by drawing with a stick in the hand”:

There are ideas here I really agree with: we should strive to be independent of proprietary software, and at a basic level, I don’t think you should identify a designer’s ability with creative cloud proficiency. But I don’t think we ought to trivialize the significance of tools either.

As I’ve come to understand it, design is a field constituted by shared conventions, both internal to the designer community, in that we share common tooling and methodologies, and in public, in that we all share visual and cultural reference points. When technology and culture shift, we may pick up and discard various tools and skillsets — hot metal type exchanged for phototypesetting, etc. But this does not mean that our roles can be conceived entirely independently of our tools. Rather, the meaning of the role changes along with changes in tooling.

My perhaps divisive view is that the “embellishment, commercialization, and industrialization” of design is really all there is to design. There is no platonic design mindset or skillset outside of the contingent technologies and cultural practices which ground our work.

Some of the skills that I picked up from my own design education — e.g. the ability to articulate and justify my ideas, the ability to visually order information, the ability to research, etc — are indeed not dependent on any tool, but my role as a designer still hinges on tool proficiency and familiarity with the designed surfaces of this day and age. Typography, and the availability of typefaces, for example, are a technical skill and a tool, but also something integral to my sense of self as a graphic designer.

I can say the same of “engineering” from my background as a web developer — what I’m capable of, what I can even conceive, depends on the constraints of the html/css/js.

In design as well as engineering, I think tools both constrain and expand the field of possibility. None of what we do makes sense without including them in the picture.

I think there is something to the idea that, in order to persist in a long personal project with no outside pressure, you have to be as in love with your process as with the desired output.

Finally got around to adding a guestbook to my website! It refreshes daily from none other than this are.na channel, using the magic of eleventy fetch, the are.na api, and netlify scheduled deploys.

In the past I’ve debated with people about the efficacy of bullets (as designers are oft prone to do in their free time), and as a “pro-bullets” person, something I’ve just realized is that my affection for them comes from their value not as reading aides, but as writing aides. The conventions around bulleted text are such that in using them, there’s less pressure to write complete and well-constructed sentences. That makes them ideal for getting your thoughts out on the page. One might even say, “I think in bullets”.

update to goby.garden:

Changing the facts can change which facts are intelligible. For example:

If Peggy is a person (fact), then it makes sense to ask “how many toes does Peggy have?” or “what is Peggy’s favorite color?”. But if Peggy is a plant (alternate fact), then these questions no longer make much sense, ordinarily speaking.

Selina Kehuan Wu: <3

hey nico, just stopping by to say i'm honored to be in your "hyperspecific collection channel" <3 i've been loving this channel for a long time. it's like a happy gold mine.

In re-designing the goby database architecture to address earlier limitations, I’m learning new things about what my original idea entails logically (things which the old database architecture failed to capture adequately).

The idea that I should be “discovering” new things in trying to map a logical schema is really amusing to me — it’s logic, so in a sense it’s all there from the start, waiting to be deduced from fully available information. But of course there’s only so much I can hold in my head at a time, so things never occur to me or I assume they’ll work out at first. As a result, I have moments of ‘discovery’ when I realize implications of what I’m trying to do.

Commercially viable websites often seem to have the weight of the world on them: they’re a big investment and the public face of an organization, and to that end they have to be extremely robust, functional, refined, and cohesive.

Accordingly I’m finding it’s a joy to be able to work on small, one-off editorial web projects, where the room for play and experiment is much broader, although the design decisions still have to be well-considered.

leslie liu:re: spinny cloud on mix-blend-mode: multiply

yes! I was thinking of setting it to multiply but the way the white background changes was compelling hh

When we say the only way to get better at something is practice, I don’t think “practice” can be conceived as merely doing it the same way over and over — practice makes permanent, not perfect, as is said.

What we want to capture when we say that, I think, is that by doing something enough, doing it poorly many times over, you (hopefully) start to scrutinize and validate your own methods, course-correcting over time.

There’s an idea from Dan Michaelson that has always stuck with me, that a website can be a really interesting place to begin an identity system, because it asks you to think about how (typo)graphic elements apply to different content types and formats. But in recent work I’ve been realizing that the constraints of web aren’t always generative — it feels like they sometimes confine my thinking to treatments that are easy to templatize and build in code. I’ve been conversely deriving joy from starting first with static compositions, and then challenging myself creatively and technically to adapt them to dynamic surfaces like the web.

I think philosophy papers, produced as they are under the pressure of answering all possible objections and staying within a well-defined scope, sometimes trade clarity and persuasion for accountability and exhaustiveness.

I don’t know whether that’s a good or a bad thing, but it at least informs my decision as a non-academic about what kinds of philosophical prose I ought to invest the most time in reading.

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I wonder if one solution to this would be the approach taken by Edwin Curley in Behind the Geometrical Method, which, as the description states, is “actually two books in one”: first, a clear and explanatory account of Spinoza’s arguments geared towards first-time readers of the Ethics, and secondly a text comprised entirely of the footnotes to the first section, which defend its interpretation of Spinoza in richer detail for other academics.

“out-thereness”:

When I think of “objectivity” or the question of what makes something an “object,” I often intuitively lean on the idea of “out-thereness”: that is, the idea that objects are those things which are out there, being as they are independently of us grasping them so.

This is, I’ve found, an incredibly fraught notion. But maybe one worth holding onto and expounding nonetheless.

Through the cyclical retracing of lines of inquiry that this platform enables, one observation I’m making is that my interests over time have gravitated towards the interplay or tension between what is ‘objective’ and what is ‘subjective’ (or how we should even conceive of those properties).

Thinking particularly of the trains of thought represented by

the ground we presently stand

and

out-thereness

Are moral questions matters of fact, matters of convention, or a secret third thing?

It’s not that I think LLMs are conscious — only, I haven’t seen any good arguments for why on principle they couldn’t be, although this is often treated as a hard fact.

I started cleaning my are.na index and pruning some defunct channels (it is spring after all), but I find myself wondering if it makes sense for me to do this, given the way I use the platform:

Oftentimes I make throwaway channels with 1 or 2 (or 53) blocks. These channels are less like collections and more like expressions: jokes or commentary in channel form, made for the purpose of self-amusement.

I don’t really consider these to be in the same category as the channels that I more regularly add to and modify, and which are more reflective of patterns in my thinking. But I don’t want to delete the throwaways, and unfortunately are.na doesn’t currently give me the tools to represent and place them differently.

There is, of course, the trick of preprending symbols and special characters to the names of channels. I used to do this and stopped because of a few reservations: it feels a bit untidy, and it interferes with the act of authorship involved in naming the channels, which is a big part of what I find fun about making throwaway channels in the first place.

But maybe I could just use special characters to organize my more central channels, and then leave the throwaway channels without any characters, that way they’ll stay together in an undifferentiated stream.

One idea that has been coming up a lot in my work and in conversations with people is that the effectiveness of an interface is often a function of the context in which it appears and is used, rather than its formal qualities.

For example: when someone is casually browsing, they have a lower tolerance for friction, complexity, and unexpected behavior. On the other hand, when someone seeks to be empowered or challenged — e.g. when they install a tool, follow a learning guide, or play a game — they might tolerate or even expect a learning curve in order to unlock the full capabilities of the interface.

Maybe this is just a rehash of the idea of “user journeys” but it’s been a useful thing for me to keep in mind.

I’ve been thinking about how to open up the time and conditions in my life for self-driven work and activity: “personal” projects, careful reading, research, and so on.

“Routines” seem to be one typical way of approaching for this kind of thing: setting aside fixed amounts of time each day or week, perhaps at certain opportune times, to work. I think there are some merits to this. One of the most valuable suggestions I was ever given in this vein was from my thesis advisor, who suggested we spend at least 15 minutes a day working on our projects, just to keep them in our minds and prompt us to make progress. That task of pushing yourself to stay in the right mental spaces, encouraging yourself to think along interesting lines and resisting the many distractions of our world, is really important and generative.

But I’m starting to think that particularly for more creatively oriented work, routines are the wrong organizational framework, or at least an insufficient one, for making really tangible progress and meeting goals on tasks without any deadlines or pressure. At least in my experience, working in small tidbits and dividing my attention between multiple high-investment activities keeps me from getting anywhere with anything — I need to focus for extended periods of time on individual tasks, sometimes reinventing my approach during the working process.

Setting goals and self-imposed deadlines for yourself seems to be another common approach, but I find it has its own issues. What happens when these goals and deadlines start competing for your time with important professional benchmarks and deadlines? You don’t have much choice but to set your personal goals aside, because there are no (immediate) repercussions. And in this process the act of self-imposing deadlines becomes less and less significant, less and less obligational, at least in my own practice.

So at the end of this, here is the idea I just had: what about instead of trying to distribute my time between many high-investment projects, I focus on one external thing at a time, see it to completion (with no deadline) and then move to the next? I keep each activity at a scope which makes it more than trivial but still surmountable. Some examples:

• reading a difficult text carefully, i.e. multiple times over, and taking the time to write notes/responses/reflections (I find this is necessary to get a substantial return on reading)
• a “tiny project” along the lines of the Tiny Projects blog
• researching and writing an essay (keeping a partial list of ideas for this here)

I could also try to split larger project ideas that I have into smaller, standalone projects that can later be combined, e.g. designing a book collecting essays I’ve written over a period of time.

One thing that occurred to me from a recent conversation is that reading behaviors aren’t solely based on the reader or the text in question: clearly the intended function — i.e. the relevance of the content in a specific context of use — has a large bearing on how someone will navigate, such as whether they need a linear guiding structure or whether they’ll be more inclined to click/flip around on their own.

For example, a student in a history class versus a researcher navigating a historical database: the former might find some sort of curation more useful, whereas the latter might just want to quickly identify specific pieces of information.

When I read things online, I often find myself pinching to zoom in on the text column in my browser. I’m not sure why I do this — I don’t think it’s a vision problem (although I do suspect I may have some very slight nearsightedness).

But regardless, I’m not inclined as a designer to design websites where the text is large and spans the full window — this can feel a bit claustrophobic for long passages.

I think there’s something in the act of pinching to zoom: it exerts some control over the page, changing the viewing frame from the one that has been anticipated and chosen by the designer for that window size. Maybe there’s an analogy there to the sense of freedom, when reading a physical book or article, to position and navigate the pages in a way that is not necessarily prescribed by the designer, although it may be suggested by them.

definition as explanation versus definition as identification:

A definition may be useful in explaining the sorts of thinking and activities that go into design, and at the same time be useless in differentiating design from non-design.

I still hold to the idea that a conceptual scheme acts more as a way of discovering/predicting facts than a form of knowledge in itself — I'm not sure where Goodman would stand on that.

When a categorial scheme fails, it does not mean that it is “wrong” or “false” so much as irrelevant within a particular context, while potentially still relevant in other contexts.

I think this holds true in the case of the form/content distinction (whether you’re talking about Kant and Quine or Beatrice Warde and Michael Rock).

I was first enlightened by James’ squirrel parable in that it explained how ontological questions could be resolved into questions of semantics or conventions rather than matters of fact. But the realization I have come to more recently is that matters of fact are just cases where the semantics are undisputed, or at least not recognized as disputed.

In managing/planning a project, I often find that I begin with a set of categorical distinctions but then as I take notes they quickly break down — e.g. I divide notes on the “content” and the “design treatment” but in writing things about content, I find I need to expand on relevant aspects of visual form and materiality.