I also come out of that world, and I may not recognize the extent to which I take for granted its problematics—that is, what it considers important questions to ask. Those questions were mainly overlooked before the Synthesis, and have been mainly overlooked since.
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Replying to @Meaningness @drossbucket
The Synthesis was pointing to the whole cognitivist/analytic tradition and saying “look, the emperor has no clothes,” and everyone before and since has deliberately chosen not to notice this.
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Replying to @Meaningness @drossbucket
Once you notice the nudity, you can ask “why isn’t he cold, what mechanism keeps him warm, this is mysterious” but you tend to get distracted by “why is everyone pretending???” and get annoyed by it. Part I of Eggplant is “look, no clothes,” and I’ve had to work hard to be polite
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Replying to @Meaningness @drossbucket
and as much as possible to work out the rest of the book which is “what keeps him warm?” and “let’s use that mechanism to make clothes adequate for winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains”
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Replying to @Meaningness @drossbucket
Putnam was writing just as logical positivism collapsed. His "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is taken (with Kuhn) as its official tombstone. It was a huge deal at the time, because "no clothes!" but in retrospect it's terribly confused.
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Replying to @Meaningness @drossbucket
"Meaning and Reference" was also huge and points out some more of the problems with the analytic/logicist story, but it's also badly confused. Historically important but on the whole I would recommend skipping it.
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Replying to @Meaningness @drossbucket
@context_ing strongly recommends Liberman’s _More Studies in Ethnomethodology_ as an accessible introduction. My recollection is that it's weak on theory, so maybe it's good if you learn best bottom-up (from examples to theory).2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes -
Replying to @Meaningness @drossbucket
The chapter on boardgames might be the most compelling one for you specifically.
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Replying to @Meaningness @drossbucket
I'm going to try to reply on-site to the questions about "pushing stability out" and also numerical computation. The difficulty is in writing something less than BCS's book.
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As you observed, the book is one big lump, but the worldview is also one big lump. It's densely internally connected, and each part makes sense in dependence on all the other parts.
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Replying to @Meaningness @drossbucket
And since each part individually contracts the whole of the analytic/cognitivist view, each part is incomprehensible or seems obviously wrong taken on its own.
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Replying to @Meaningness @drossbucket
That's why there's this "cognitive flip" phenomenon, where you finally see enough of the interconnections between the pieces that the coherence of the whole thing suddenly comes into focus and you can see the world with it, and you are like OOOOOHHHH I GET IT
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