ONT Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry
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Stan Salthe wrote (SS):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):
SS: For me the whole semiotic enterprise is just one piece on a complex
board of many subjects that I am trying to pull together into a whole.
The details do not occupy me as they would a specialist. But I DO want
to get the broad, vague outlines right.
JA: And how does one know if the broad vague outlines are right?
SS: Two ways:
(1) by arguing with specialists like you and trying to find
what seems robust or stable -- this is a fishing expedition.
This is called "Authoritarianism" -- no offense, it's just the name of a book.
(2) by fitting between disciplines. If there would be an aspect of, say,
semiotics, which has no way of being related to other discourses, it
would be ignored. (It could not function as a sign in this context.)
This is called "Coherentism" -- yet another book I find incoherent.
The book that you took these two shortcuts around has far too many titles to list,
but if you had read one of them it might have induced you to think of the answer:
"by looking at the details".
SS: The -ism is a handy shortcut to referring to whole books.
There just ain't time for it.
JA: Now you are just being coy. Empiricism, Formalism, Materialism, Rationalism --
nothing but shortcuts for referring to whole books? Maybe that's how an ism
gets going, but you know as well as I do that the handy shortcut that an ism
always comes round to advising is to skip the reading of the otherhand books.
SS: Well, I have no dearth of books on my plate just now,
but I just cannot redo and redo, say, Formalism,
every day. There ain't no time for it.
I see that you intend to keep up the act.
Perhaps you believe with no dissemblance
That an ism is just another pretty prism,
But I know you know how truly fractious
They are, so I will just drop them here.
JA: What my store of knowledge on the-isms tells me is that any ism worth its
salt probably reflects some interesting and useful facet of what is, but
by no means exhausts the core solidity of what is and stays in question.
SS: This is one reason why I am trying to tie many of them
together under the umbrella of natural philosophy.
JA: Well, if you really mean that, it would be a start,
but all of my sadder-but-wiser experience tells me
that there is just something about an ism that will
never play nice, and so I have come to believe that
a good next step is to drop the epithetical tissue
of the super-sufficial "ism" altogether. Otherwise,
at least, in my sad experience, every time one tries
any sort of integrative, synthetic, umbrella approach
in a community of ismatic characters one ends up being
dismismed under some such name as a mere "aspectualist".
SS: Well, I have been dismissed from the beginning -- no matter what approach I have taken.
I guess it is my "karma", as they say. No one pays me to do anything, so I just do as
I wish (and have fun doing it!).
Yes, if we must split the scene of dys critic-ism,
I can think of no better syzism than Zen Buddhism.
Jon Awbrey
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