A search for meaning

Alun Politics 3 Comments , ,

Around Christ­mas time I found a dic­tion­ary of post­mod­ern terms, which I didn’t buy on the spot. I planned to buy it later as it defined Lin­ear Think­ing as “Unfor­tu­nate, con­trolling, impov­er­ished, male vari­ety of think­ing that’s all hung up on logic, evid­ence, chro­no­logy, caus­a­tion, and pedantic in-the-head stuff like that.” Unfor­tu­nately I for­got the title and couldn’t find it on Amazon. It turns out the authors of the book edit a site I’ve been vis­it­ing every so often for the past few months, But­ter­flies and Wheels, and the book is called “A Dic­tion­ary of Fash­ion­able Nonsense”.

The dic­tion­ary is avail­able on site. The book has over 500 entries but I don’t think that many are avail­able on the web. I don’t know for cer­tain. I could count them to find out, but that would be an appeal to Empir­i­cism (absurd notion that obser­va­tion and meas­ure­ment are use­ful in get­ting to know about things).

I am open to the idea that post­mod­ern­ism might have some­thing use­ful to say if it’s done well. How­ever the appeal to obscur­ity that is tol­er­ated in aca­demia means that there’s no par­tic­u­lar need to do it well. In fact for many, doing it well and mean­ing­fully would be miss­ing the entire point. I was temp­ted to try and prove this, either by adapt­ing the Post­mod­ern­ism Gen­er­ator to pro­duce archae­olo­gical the­ory, or else give a com­puter gen­er­ated con­fer­ence paper. How­ever, I’ve been beaten on this last point by a couple of people who cre­ated a CompSci paper gen­er­ator and got one ran­dom paper accep­ted at WMSCI 2005.

Is it any good? You can try it out for your­self at SCI­Gen.

This could poten­tially have very pos­it­ive uses. I’ve got an exper­i­ment run­ning which I hope to report on in a couple of weeks.