The point is that in the blinding flurry of chat and discussion we are mostly spinning our wheels, sending up showers of mud … lots of heat, but not a lot of light.
The intention is to safe-guard the individual narrative that validates communication by giving it meaning in a way that rescues it from “spin” … rhetoric and sophistry whose aim is to convince (or conquer) by manipulation and (yes, dear friend) even deception.
Let me give you a “for example”: my experiences in civil society no less than those from my days in the military and my years in industry have made it more than abundantly clear how action “collapses probability waves”. That is, it “disambiguates situation” … in the fuzzy mass of motives and perspectives, we are driving the present out of the past and into the future; when we come to a cross-road, that mass of motives and perspectives gives rise to debate and discussion concerning our trajectory … perhaps even argument … perhaps even discourse! But one thing for certain: we decide to either hold our course or we decide to turn. Having decided to turn, we are then confronted with a choice of direction … another decision is called for.
Though there is, given the plurality of human experience (do we want homogeneity? shall we surrendor to the forces of hegemony?), no likelihood of profound agreement, there are foundations for harmony through concensus: with each of our own particularly embedded story lines we can harmonize our actions.
So: what are the points of contention? how do these points come to be lines of conflict? by what set of tactics can we highlight whatever there is to agree on?
There is not an infinite number of decisions … there are only an infinite number of rationalizations, and justifications, and explanations.
This project seeks to set out the lines of tention in order to at once bring to light the foundations that bring us together as a people at uncovering the ways of seeing, the “strings of marks and sounds” that make us individual persons.
That’s all.
🙂
“Science is an essentially anarchistic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.”
— Paul Feyerbend, “Against Method” (1975)
FWIW: it took me 9 minutes to write this, off the top of my head. I need a laptop!!