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An Ecosystem of Effects
Let us posit a simplification, which will hopefully seem less arbitrary and less reductive as we further describe it. The simplification is this: that the two poles of concern, when it comes to what we call “art,” are the production of pleasure and the production of models. This is a bit what Gabriel Duquette has…
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Response to Galen Cuth on Magic & Pragmatism
Galen recently wrote a wonderful response to my “Fool’s Gold” essay, trying to pinpoint where he and I disagree about when it comes to pragmatic theories of representation. This letter won’t make much sense unless you’ve first read his salvo. Epistemic status very much “Fumbling around in the dark”—lots of ideas and discourses invoked that…
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Open Questions 231011
Here’s a list of questions that I’m looking for leads on! If you think you can answer any, or are able to point me in the direction of writing that deals with similar issues, please reach out in the comments or over email; my contact is suspendedreason(at)gmail.com.
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Lewis & Clark Linguistics
This is a lightly edited version of a talk given at Fluidity Forum in September 2023. Expect scattered transcription errors. A few years ago, some friends and I started a group called The Inexact Sciences, or TIS for short. We run a group blog called tis.so that some people might know. And we took as our…
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Fool’s Gold (Notes on Lodge 49), pt 2
Last time, on Suspended Reason…. Prophetic revelation involves for both the prophet himself and for his followers… a unified view of the world derived from a consciously integrated and meaningful attitude toward life. To the prophet, both the life of man and the world, both social and cosmic events, have a certain systematic and coherent…
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Against “Self-Expression”
This is the tenth installment in a ten-part series. Information and emotion ripple across the social, transforming members’ attitudes and behaviors. Stress breeds stress; anger transfers; to paraphrase Buddha, the only moral imperative is spreading good vibes. This is the idea behind the phrase “all communication is manipulation”: to emphasize the effects of utterances—and similar…
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“Peacemakers” sidebar: Eliot’s egoic ontology
A short post to accompany the Primitive Peacemakers series, with some quotes from Middlemarch that otherwise wouldn’t make it in. Eliot repeatedly returns to the observation that individuals’ sense of the world—from morality to category to truth—is by default egocentric. This, in my read, is a logical extension of pragmatism from the level of cultural…
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Primitive Peacemakers, pt 1: The Fall of Jordan Peterson
This is the beginning of a 5-part series, whose alternate titles might run: “Metarationality & the Frame Problem,” “Function/Form/Fluidity,” and “Cultural Relativism for Rationalists.” It aims to trace a throughline in taoist, pragmatist, and postmodern thinking, and to introduce a certain meta-systematic school of blogosphere philosophy which has crystallized around the frame problem in microsociology,…
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Maq III
Dear X, So the bad news is I have no easy way to explain what I’m working on/have been working on/will be working on for a while. I’ve been asked about the MS a few times now and every time my answer is very different and radically misleading. The form I’m working in does not…
A D Jameson all communication is manipulation Alva Nöe ambiguity chords compression Erving Goffman fashion fitness games generalized reading hermeneutic circle institutional theory Interpretation Jürgen Schmidhuber Karl Friston language games linguistics literary theory literature Maggie Nelson maps meaning music music criticism New Sincerity nostalgia opticratics Peli Grietzer Pierre Bourdieu pop music poptimism pragmatism predictive hermeneutics predictive model predictive processing Sarah Perry selection games signaling strategic interaction surrogation the inexact sciences Thomas Schelling vibe theory visual art
Suspended Reason 