Meaning and Modeling – Turning Signs

Real economy

Here’s one iconic symbol we ought to be turning to. You can read all about it in Kate Raworth’s blog and book on Doughnut Economics. The doughnut is an icon well suited to “accounting for what really counts” (the slogan of gnusystems).

Economists and politicians, including our Prime Minister, are still chanting the old mantra of economic “growth” as if it were the panacea which would solve all our problems and improve all our lives. But as soon as you ask what the purpose of an economic system is, as Kate Raworth did, you see that growth does not always serve that purpose, and sometimes works against it. And what’s more, the politicians who have relied on this mantra to manufacture consent for their programs have used it mainly to increase the gap between rich and poor.

Kate’s latest blog post presents the choice between economic “paradigms” in its simplest terms. The old one is based on the belief that people are greedy, insatiable and competitive. The new one is based on the belief that “people are greedy and generous, competitive and collaborative – and it’s possible to nurture human nature.” You’re invited to decide which belief you want to live by.

Perceptipation

… we perceive what we are adjusted for interpreting …

— Peirce, EP2:229, CP 5.185

Perception is an act of imagination based upon the available information.

— Frank H. Durgin (2002, 88)

The neural patterns and the corresponding mental images of the objects and events outside the brain are creations of the brain related to the reality that prompts their creation rather than passive mirror images reflecting that reality.

— Damasio (2003, 198-9)

The world appears to us to contain objects and events. This way of looking at the world is so basic as to seem to be a consequence of the way the individual human central nervous system develops in its very early stages. Yet our stimulus world is not partitioned in this way, and certainly not uniquely partitioned in this way.

— Mark Turner (1991, 60)

Whatever we call reality, it is revealed to us only through the active construction in which we participate.

— Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 293

The simple fact is that no measurement, no experiment or observation is possible without a relevant theoretical framework.

— D.S. Kothari, cited in Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 293

The trick of reason

The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world—if only from time to time.

— Annie Dillard (2009, 143)

Theory

The English word theory derives from a Greek root meaning either contemplation or being a spectator or onlooker, as in the theater. In purely theoretical science, one takes on the role of spectator rather than actor, so that he is not “trying to prove” his own idea.

The scientific man is eager to submit himself, his ideas, and his purpose, to the Great Power which, no doubt, penetrates his own being, but is yet all but wholly external to him and beyond anything that his poor present notion could ever, of itself, develope unfructified. The Absolute Knowledge of Hegel is nothing but G.W.F. Hegel’s idea of himself; and it has not taught him the very first true lesson in philosophy, that “whoever shall choose to seek his own purpose and idea shall miss it, and whoever shall abandon his own purpose and idea to adopt the purpose and idea of the Author of nature shall accomplish that, and his own long-abandoned purpose and idea along with it.”

— Peirce, CP 8.118 (1902)

Einstein remarked that ‘the true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.’ According to Gadamer (1960, 124), to abandon of one’s own purpose in contemplation is to participate in that ‘sacral communion that lies behind the original Greek concept of theoria.’

Greek metaphysics still conceives the essence of theoria and of nous as being purely present to what is truly real, and for us too the ability to act theoretically is defined by the fact that in attending to something one is able to forget one’s own purposes.

Like Peirce, Gadamer affirms that losing oneself in this way, either in theoretical contemplation or in the theater, leads to a higher self-development. ‘A spectator’s ecstatic self-forgetfulness corresponds to his continuity with himself’ (Gadamer 1960, 128).