Tag: pragmatism
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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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Précis for an action-oriented theory of language
What is a word, or message, or utterance? It is a move by an agent (~superorganism) undertaken in order to transform the environmental state, in a desired direction, by means of altering another agent’s information state. This transformation may occur directly, if the targeted slice of environment happens to be that agent whose informational state…
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Linguistic fit
Previously, on communication as manipulation: “All Communication is Manipulation,” “Is strategic interaction Machiavellian?” and “Economics Thinking.” When I say “All communication is manipulation,” it is sometimes protested that many utterances are advanced without a clear goal in mind. The first issue here is that one need not hold a desired outcome consciously in mind in…
Suspended Reason 