Meta tags:

Headings (most frequently used words):

and, the, recent, emergence, dead, vole, comments, posts, blogvoles, linkvoles, meta, subscribe, as, last, maj, attention, science, philosophy, territory, speculative, motivation, ontology, justification, direct, access, drano, entropy, in, cul, de, sac, utile, hurling, causation, reduction, marbles, tomato, skins, nostalgia, holocaust, x2, coherence,

Text of the page (most frequently used words):
the (267), and (128), that (74), this (44), with (34), are (32), have (28), not (27), but (26), what (25), about (22), you (22), posted (20), for (20), things (20), would (20), which (18), some (18), how (17), marbles (17), them (16), #coherence (15), there (15), world (15), know (14), one (13), from (13), say (13), hand (13), can (13), emergence (13), they (13), our (13), because (13), was (13), her (13), she (13), comments (12), all (12), rules (12), drano (12), here (11), has (11), just (11), need (11), your (11), now (10), between (10), sense (10), out (10), reduction (10), like (9), could (9), any (9), its (9), may (9), also (9), philosophy (9), does (9), might (9), way (9), 2009 (9), science (9), life (9), real (9), more (9), these (8), coherent (8), than (8), post (8), into (8), chaos (8), only (8), thing (8), level (8), theory (8), theories (8), get (7), dead (7), work (7), makes (7), been (7), november (7), carld (7), little (7), two (7), helen (7), something (7), system (7), yellow (7), blue (7), marble (7), direct (7), voles (7), vole (6), old (6), sort (6), language (6), ideas (6), anything (6), without (6), turn (6), form (6), think (6), jars (6), access (6), when (6), really (6), people (6), particular (6), place (6), ontology (6), anthropology (6), knowing (6), blog (5), good (5), called (5), idea (5), both (5), game (5), external (5), based (5), those (5), actually (5), other (5), possible (5), explanation (5), rather (5), reading (5), going (5), new (5), why (5), through (5), rachel (5), culture (5), make (5), skins (5), had (5), left (5), being (5), thinking (5), explained (5), will (5), steps (5), again (5), set (5), needs (5), causality (5), much (5), causation (5), even (5), status (5), history (5), plagiarism (5), wordpress (4), com (4), log (4), internal (4), perhaps (4), their (4), become (4), speculative (4), once (4), concepts (4), another (4), discussion (4), see (4), example (4), same (4), everything (4), stone (4), ktismatics (4), objects (4), off (4), put (4), made (4), death (4), canning (4), house (4), tomatoes (4), art (4), tell (4), many (4), 250 (4), general (4), reduced (4), given (4), row (4), eight (4), right (4), below (4), take (4), don (4), comes (4), emergent (4), neuronal (4), stance (4), time (4), john (4), asher (4), kay (4), attention (4), human (4), problem (4), else (4), last (4), justification (4), explain (4), recent (4), comment (3), subscribe (3), already (3), find (3), network (3), assembling (3), conceptual (3), higher (3), ways (3), graham (3), harman (3), lot (3), fully (3), relation (3), own (3), whether (3), enough (3), line (3), incoherent (3), least (3), making (3), getting (3), wanted (3), mean (3), arch (3), matters (3), bridge (3), end (3), thoughts (3), farming (3), interested (3), control (3), nostalgia (3), cans (3), exactly (3), who (3), long (3), still (3), holocaust (3), clean (3), room (3), food (3), 100 (3), probably (3), process (3), predictability (3), after (3), answer (3), look (3), initial (3), defined (3), grid (3), each (3), molecular (3), doesn (3), reality (3), mental (3), physical (3), over (3), move (3), leave (3), bias (3), crisis (3), radical (3), posts (3), floor (3), lawn (3), keep (3), someone (3), periodicity (3), entropy (3), doing (3), subject (3), case (3), such (3), ever (3), justifying (3), ontological (3), strong (3), weak (3), masters (3), proof (3), infinity (3), site (2), website (2), name (2), required (2), write (2), content (2), sign (2), subscribed (2), account (2), create (2), entries (2), conversations (2), days (2), according (2), coherences (2), questions (2), then (2), anti (2), within (2), political (2), economic (2), assemblages (2), modes (2), applicable (2), relations (2), concept (2), saying (2), however (2), themselves (2), function (2), open (2), kinds (2), available (2), moments (2), kvond (2), call (2), self (2), knows (2), zeus (2), rain (2), sentence (2), playing (2), explanatory (2), means (2), very (2), frames (2), sing (2), calvino (2), gets (2), polo (2), answers (2), stones (2), kublai (2), khan (2), remains (2), marco (2), second (2), courtesy (2), nice (2), first (2), xkcd (2), hyper (2), tiling (2), attempts (2), worlds (2), overall (2), interesting (2), type (2), bunker (2), filled (2), junk (2), extremely (2), matter (2), were (2), every (2), kind (2), label (2), while (2), woman (2), change (2), etc (2), before (2), knew (2), couldn (2), home (2), small (2), trailer (2), come (2), next (2), collected (2), around (2), primitive (2), strange (2), result (2), following (2), actual (2), tomato (2), although (2), sequence (2), asked (2), pattern (2), sorts (2), cases (2), spaceships (2), well (2), carry (2), configuration (2), okay (2), thousand (2), simple (2), 1000 (2), red (2), exact (2), let (2), neighbors (2), therefore (2), description (2), arrangement (2), molecules (2), nature (2), forces (2), allow (2), pass (2), add (2), question (2), organization (2), operating (2), mind (2), networks (2), inhabit (2), seem (2), smaller (2), area (2), pretty (2), force (2), activity (2), minds (2), seriously (2), behind (2), problematic (2), commentary (2), cognition (2), religious (2), evolutionary (2), important (2), recognise (2), forms (2), metaphysics (2), meet (2), appear (2), humans (2), feel (2), mainstream (2), politics (2), share (2), order (2), action (2), dangerous (2), utile (2), hurling (2), stuff (2), entropic (2), class (2), central (2), schmutz (2), tidy (2), papers (2), dishes (2), laundry (2), wife (2), too (2), chores (2), follows (2), high (2), frequency (2), best (2), less (2), constraints (2), lower (2), anthropologist (2), tasks (2), primary (2), require (2), energy (2), cul (2), sac (2), update (2), far (2), complicated (2), thought (2), affected (2), model (2), interaction (2), tries (2), epistemological (2), properties (2), seen (2), came (2), distinction (2), neurology (2), cult (2), response (2), social (2), translation (2), december (2), territory (2), motivation (2), dyke (2), news (2), slawkenbergius (2), guild (2), journeymen (2), academia (2), maj (2), rss (2), herrick (2), archive (2), journal (2), gramsci (2), global (2), studies (2), research (2), zero (2), total (2), maps (2), blogs (2), mystery (2), whisper (2), edge (2), anthro (2), his (2), ninja (2), existential (2), stigma (2), started, design, email, loading, collapse, bar, manage, subscriptions, view, reader, report, privacy, free, previous, questioning, ideology, critique, naively, confident, master, judge, others, perspectives, orienting, premise, achieves, publicity, likely, incipient, whom, purpose, affectually, feelings, providing, referents, enabling, relationships, feminist, colonialist, asserted, quality, aridly, rationalist, rigor, habits, dispositions, tastes, preferences, follow, bourdieu, fields, larger, mutually, exclusive, aesthetically, hedonically, applied, established, alliances, latour, include, cohere, environments, resources, production, fit, times, effectual, insofar, claim, homologous, capitalism, externalization, barely, begun, standard, logical, consistency, correspondence, outside, benchmark, course, pulled, inside, somehow, serve, barn, door, heavy, lifting, distinguishing, referentially, satisfies, requirement, wittgensteinian, ancient, greek, looks, outward, logic, predicting, coming, rains, accounting, hoc, ask, learn, business, finance, monopoly, wealth, nations, thin, supposed, job, understand, connectives, missing, says, linked, narrow, matching, theoretical, parts, having, criticisms, leveled, neither, qualified, nor, motivated, investigate, true, rigorous, taken, trouble, expand, reinventing, wheels, bear, cracks, orientalism, exotic, silent, reflecting, adds, speak, supported, supports, asks, describes, italo, 1972, invisible, cities, collating, clear, instances, alt, text, kicker, click, sublime, readers, realizing, specifically, anxiety, accompanies, desire, inevitable, failure, tool, discuss, background, affection, crap, obsessive, amounts, controlling, nostalgic, junky, reason, single, said, treating, yet, putting, didn, format, latin, names, weights, sample, weigh, stories, worked, sure, anywhere, copes, anxieties, including, husband, cat, furniture, clothes, winter, spring, household, items, sits, enjoys, person, ready, apocalypse, building, stocking, cold, war, era, bit, experiences, survivor, named, teen, son, hired, under, unique, filthy, stocked, ceiling, handy, disaster, hit, candles, crayons, stacks, newspaper, magazines, half, full, sweaters, animals, strategically, bags, died, eat, body, afraid, done, found, deal, obsessed, totally, charge, accomplish, literally, confines, rarely, never, did, obsessively, ward, ritual, superstition, discovery, archaeologists, uncover, stash, rations, display, public, anthropologists, imperialist, regime, discover, tribe, farmers, hypothesize, tools, used, show, video, footage, customs, watched, documentary, head, shrinking, indians, amazon, prompted, train, canned, dull, daydreamed, different, fictitious, scenarios, daydreams, common, working, installation, project, accumulation, phase, involved, lots, drying, incomplete, written, pursuant, materials, progress, feedback, intimately, related, separable, test, formulating, prediction, behave, gave, confuses, instead, asking, predict, rows, produced, features, exhibit, configurations, produce, weird, repeating, patterns, emerge, impossible, prohibition, lineup, constitute, haven, running, unreduced, applying, wait, catch, allowed, figuring, entities, reductively, manipulated, entire, universe, inception, manipulation, color, directly, looking, rule, five, hundred, eventually, run, ones, ends, placed, where, seems, describe, longer, certain, regularity, photons, absorbed, property, transparency, scientist, perceptual, seeing, multiple, levels, separated, strata, magnification, horizontally, layer, vertically, layers, vertical, horizontal, causalities, causing, usually, efficient, neural, looser, corralled, occupied, inscrutable, mostly, tautological, paradigmatic, metaphorically, hinky, gauge, bosons, virtual, particles, whenever, issues, often, conscious, cause, qualia, experienced, riffing, default, suggestion, compare, gist, metaphysical, cognitive, toward, agency, detection, threat, avoidance, inherent, truth, value, evolution, better, safe, sorry, analysis, undermines, agentic, causal, beliefs, religion, fantastically, debunking, schopenhauer, intended, today, surely, comprehending, addressing, cosmos, actuality, ecological, threatens, ignored, critical, anthropocentric, geocentric, philosophies, realism, monism, family, resemblance, legitimacy, expressed, despite, flaws, abstractly, negate, criticising, address, motivates, alternative, compelling, implicit, suggested, alter, current, path, societies, legitimate, merely, taking, misguided, utisz, series, fulfilled, anthropocentrism, interdependence, waste, vulgarities, ridiculous, irony, entitlement, boring, wonder, try, rare, extraordinary, events, daily, habitual, duties, suppose, match, weber, classy, engage, americans, regulate, start, grad, program, intellectual, strawberry, pickers, grade, delegate, bad, artist, vocation, impressive, doer, awesome, maybe, marry, adopt, older, training, investment, kids, kid, nyone, influence, fool, encumbered, responsibility, thus, division, labor, sexes, principles, frequencies, tend, cluster, complementary, role, categories, differentiate, upward, greater, classic, 1979, mary, douglas, economist, baron, isherwood, argue, marker, non, postponable, describable, specialty, women, children, servants, economically, rational, propose, specialization, goods, towards, consumption, grip, most, keenly, orderly, systems, regular, application, sliding, down, worth, modest, pleasures, empty, bag, satisfying, nevertheless, contemplate, outlay, ideal, tantalizing, happy, sisyphus, noticed, morning, yesterday, bathroom, threshold, leaves, blanket, blankets, corner, bedroom, sink, bagful, student, read, fish, feeding, dog, walking, state, taxes, cars, due, recycling, night, weeks, apparently, evocatively, trip, emergency, musing, upon, selfsame, assuming, damages, apparatus, immediate, ontologically, essential, difference, processes, wash, wasn, instructive, experiment, pour, smoking, sizzling, feeling, pain, burned, manner, flesh, contact, sodium, hydroxide, causticity, structure, severely, damaged, absolute, occupy, sensuous, bubble, intentionality, damage, disfigurement, tempted, burning, knowledge, indirect, calling, since, accused, conflating, epistemology, accusing, conflated, degree, conflate, none, stuck, relationship, doomed, essentially, grounding, noumenal, accept, kantian, limitation, away, purposes, part, necessary, explanations, necessarily, existent, perennial, topic, clothed, rousing, day, joined, thursday, together, fmris, orange, vampires, dismissive, great, pudding, glial, cells, kheer, except, chunky, shed, light, pointing, brassier, wing, reid, kane, thoughtful, reference, several, centuries, defensive, against, natural, sciences, occupies, point, prestige, surprisingly, narrower, brief, glance, shows, always, resume, offensive, reverse, standing, trends, renouncing, speculation, volunteering, curfew, tinier, ghetto, solely, realities, texts, power, talked, essay, takes, specific, initially, dodge, premised, disciplines, levi, minimal, opening, lay, couple, quotes, indefinitely, expect, note, moved, enjoyed, hope, enjoy, location, please, bookmarks, links, accordingly, deadvoles, improved, carl, super, commenter, mccreery, agreed, join, decided, appropriate, url, carldyke, greg, buried, major, profession, organized, medieval, apprentices, industrial, revolution, 17th, 18th, century, fell, apart, completely, proliferation, meant, few, assumption, proletarianization, journeyman, disappearance, independent, precisely, happening, distaste, misplaced, bourgeois, aspirationism, 2013, meta, william, perry, positions, understanding, race, postmodernism, generator, living, candidate, manliness, coop, natalie, dee, mute, monty, python, youtube, marxists, internet, marx, group, pipe, darfur, fiends, photo, popular, africa, kacike, caribbean, amerindian, international, society, interdisciplines, rethinking, interdisciplinarity, foucault, forum, qualitative, finally, feminism, 101, finding, sources, classics, psychology, chaospet, basic, instructions, linkvoles, wicked, anomie, hell, utopian, discourse, drek, three, toed, sloth, psychoanalytic, field, eighteenth, fortunes, dialectic, accursed, spoonerized, alliterations, speedchange, heresy, seminario, permanente, teoría, crítica, scientific, blogging, scatterplot, savage, rough, reassigned, rationally, speaking, prone, laughter, professor, posthegemony, letters, planomenology, pinocchio, perverse, egalitarianism, paragraph, city, overcoming, orgtheory, net, interest, neuroanthropology, rays, outer, space, heart, accra, muck, mccracken, intersection, marginal, utility, lumpenprofessoriat, linguistic, limited, inc, assays, larval, subjects, jon, cogburn, jeff, weintraub, sin, socrates, wake, harmonium, improbable, historiann, hey, jane, heartland, hastac, fractal, fido, yak, editions, west, easily, distracted, duncan, law, disparate, cultural, parody, center, crooked, timber, cripchick, contexts, contaminations, consider, evidence, confessions, dean, complete, lies, cliopatria, cap, caffeine_sparks, brooklynometry, box, spool, bousquet, brainstorm, bat, bean, beam, balkinization, goggles, anodyne, lite, air, pollution, ads, products, acephalous, academic, cog, acadamnit, fistful, euros, chair, apples, budding, sociologist, commonplace, book, quarks, 11d, blogvoles, werewolf, silver, bullet, ant, scale, sustainability, hubert, harrison, temple, drama, radiation, laid, plans, grading, words, proofed, density, big, prof, wonders, college, drinking, wordle, syllabus, picture, zombie, stuffed, favorite, etiquette, dada,

Text of the page (random words):
ible economic principles as follows work frequencies tend to cluster into complementary role categories these differentiate upward the higher the status the less periodicity constraints the lower the status the greater the periodicity constraints 86 it follows that a nyone with influence and status would be a fool to get encumbered with a high frequency responsibility 86 7 no wonder i try to turn the entropic work in my life into rare and extraordinary events rather than daily habitual duties the problem i suppose is that my sense of status does not match my class as weber might say the classy thing to do would be to engage central americans to regulate my floor schmutz and tidy my lawn start a grad program so there are intellectual strawberry pickers around to grade my papers and delegate the dishes and laundry to my wife too bad she s an artist and has no more sense of vocation to keep the house up than i do if only i had a real wife and not this impressive doer of awesome things maybe the two of us could marry someone else to do the chores for us or adopt a kid an older one so someone else has already made the training investment but you know kids these days posted in boring stuff about me chaos entitlement self irony the ridiculous vulgarities waste 10 comments utile hurling posted by carld on november 24 2009 utisz has a series of interesting posts up on human nature interdependence anthropocentrism and the needs fulfilled by metaphysics it would be important to recognise this need not only in the general sense schopenhauer intended but also with attention to the particular needs which particular forms of metaphysics might meet or appear to meet one need today would surely be a means of comprehending and addressing the place of humans in the cosmos given the actuality of an ecological crisis which threatens humans themselves a crisis which many feel is ignored not only in mainstream and even radical politics but also in both mainstream and radical philosophy it would therefore be important for those of us critical of the turn to anti anthropocentric can we say geocentric philosophies in which new forms of realism monism and ontology all share a family resemblance to recognise the legitimacy of the need expressed in this turn despite the turn s many flaws in order not abstractly to negate it in criticising it but address the need which motivates it with an alternative more compelling explanation the implicit need here it is being suggested for a philosophy which can make sense of the crisis and allow a thinking and action that could alter the current dangerous path of human societies might well be legitimate merely taking misguided and problematic form i like this suggestion to take seriously the needs behind problematic thinking compare this to the post and commentary at cognition and culture on evolutionary debunking of religious thinking the gist of the post is that the need behind religious and perhaps metaphysical thinking is an evolutionary cognitive bias toward agency detection as a function of threat avoidance this bias would have little inherent truth value because in the evolution game better safe than sorry the analysis undermines all kinds of agentic and causal beliefs not just religion which may turn out to be fantastically emergent posted in chaos default theories emergence leave a comment causation reduction emergence and marbles posted by asher kay on november 21 2009 riffing off a nice post by john at ktismatics on whether we have direct access to our own minds whenever there s a discussion about the neuronal vs the mental issues of causation and reduction often come up can conscious activity be reduced to an explanation of neuronal activity does the neuronal level of organization cause the level at which qualia are experienced what form does that causation take my stance is that causality is really a much much looser concept than physical science would make it seem over time physical science has corralled causality into a smaller and smaller area but that area is occupied by some pretty inscrutable things things like forces which end up being mostly tautological at a paradigmatic level it s a force because it makes things move it makes things move because it s a force and metaphorically hinky at the level of theory gauge bosons as virtual particles so when we think about the neuronal causing the mental we usually have in mind some sort of physical science like efficient causality because that s what we see as operating at the molecular level of description that neural networks inhabit but the question is why are there multiple levels of organization at all is reality really separated into strata of magnification with causality operating horizontally within a layer and vertically between layers if so are the vertical and horizontal causalities the same kind of causality this is where reduction comes in it seems that a lot of people think that if we can describe something at say a molecular level we have reduced it and we no longer need the description at the higher level because we ve explained everything that needs to be explained let s say that we have a particular arrangement of a certain sort of molecules and we know exactly why the regularity of that arrangement and the nature of the forces between the molecules allow photons to pass through without being absorbed have we reduced the emergent property of transparency a scientist would probably say that we have that the perceptual level of seeing through something doesn t add anything to the explanation but that s just one idea of reduction here s another let s say that we have a game that s defined by the manipulation of yellow and blue marbles on a grid according to a set of rules we re given an initial row from left to right of say a thousand marbles on the grid some yellow some blue and we re given eight simple rules about how to place marbles on the next row of the grid the rules tell us to look at each marble in the row and place a marble below it with a color that s based on the marbles directly to the right and left of the marble we re looking at for example a rule might say if you re on a yellow marble with a blue to the right and a yellow to the left place a blue marble below it or when a yellow marble s neighbors are both blue place a yellow marble below it it will take five hundred steps but eventually we will run out of marbles because the ones on the ends don t have neighbors and therefore don t get marbles placed below them so what we have is an extremely simple system with only two entities eight rules and 1000 objects reductively we would say that we have fully explained the system right we know all of the things that there are red and blue marbles all of the possible ways that they can be manipulated exactly eight ways and the exact configuration of the entire universe at its inception a line of 1000 marbles we know everything there is to know about the system okay so what if i now asked you to tell me given a particular row of a thousand marbles and a particular set of eight rules what the sequence of yellow and blue marbles will be after 250 steps of applying the rules but wait there s a catch the only thing you re not allowed to do in figuring it out is actually carry out the 250 steps why this prohibition well the set of rules and the initial lineup of marbles are what constitute the reduction of the system if you actually carry out the rules to find out the configuration after 250 steps you haven t reduced anything you are actually running the real unreduced system so is it possible can you do it the answer is that in some cases it s impossible now many people would say that the example i just gave confuses reduction with predictability but what if instead of asking you to predict the sequence of marbles after 250 steps i asked you to tell me in a general way if the rows of marbles produced by following the rules would make a pattern and if so what sorts of features in general that pattern would exhibit could you do that the answer once again is that in some cases you couldn t some configurations of marbles and rules produce weird repeating patterns that look like spaceships the spaceships are not in the rules or the marbles they emerge from them but are not explained by them what i m getting at is that although predictability and reduction are not the same thing they are intimately related and not really separable predictability is the only real test we have to tell us if we have explained something fully reduction is a way of formulating a prediction about how something will behave posted in chaos emergence 58 comments tomato skins nostalgia and the holocaust posted by carld on november 17 2009 what do these things have in common rachel is working through an installation art project which in its primitive accumulation phase involved canning lots of tomatoes and drying their skins the following are some incomplete thoughts she s written pursuant to assembling an actual art work out of her materials this is a work in progress she is interested in feedback here s rachel concepts and daydreams i have 100 jars of tomatoes that i ve canned as i ve been canning a rather dull process overall i ve daydreamed different fictitious scenarios that could result in these 100 jars it s a science discovery archaeologists uncover this stash of primitive food rations and put it on display for the public or anthropologists of the old imperialist regime discover this tribe of people called farmers they hypothesize about the tools used etc they show video footage of the strange customs i watched a documentary about head shrinking indians of the amazon that probably prompted this train of thinking an old woman who obsessively cans to ward off death playing with the idea of ritual and superstition a person getting ready for the apocalypse by building and stocking a cold war era type bunker this one and a bit of the one before it are based on my real life experiences with a holocaust survivor named helen who i knew as a teen helen s son hired me to clean her house saying that if she couldn t get her life under control he would put her in a home i had unique access to helen s small filthy trailer stocked to the ceiling with junk that she just knew would come in handy when the next disaster hit candles she made out of crayons stacks of newspaper magazines half a room full of sweaters she also collected animals and strategically left bags of their food around so that if she died they d have food for a while and not eat her body something she was really afraid of canning 100 jars of tomatoes is something helen would ve done if she d found a good deal on tomatoes helen was obsessed with being totally in charge of her world so to accomplish this she made her world very small literally the confines of her trailer which she rarely left i never did get that house clean an old woman who copes with her anxieties about death and change by canning everything in her life including her husband cat furniture clothes etc she cans all winter long and by spring has filled her house with jars of household items and sits with them and enjoys how still they are these are just the stories i made up while i worked i m not sure that any of them go anywhere that said i m kind of into the idea of treating the cans and the skins as science objects one thing i have yet to do for the jars is label them i ve been putting this off because i didn t know exactly what i wanted i could do this in a science format with the latin names and weights of things i could put the skins in little sample jars and weigh them and label them i also think it would be interesting perhaps to make a helen type bunker filled with crap obsessive amounts of junk what i m interested in is nostalgia and how it is a form of controlling our worlds helen was extremely nostalgic about her things no matter how junky they were there was a reason to every single thing in there overall i m realizing that it s not specifically farming that i m interested in but control attempts to control our worlds and those in it and the anxiety that accompanies this desire and inevitable failure farming is a tool or language available to me to discuss these concepts because of my background and affection for farming culture end rachel readers any thoughts posted in conversations the sublime 9 comments emergence x2 posted by carld on november 17 2009 collating two nice clear instances of emergence the first is from xkcd courtesy of hyper tiling the alt text is the kicker but you may have to click through to get it the second is from italo calvino s invisible cities 1972 courtesy of ktismatics marco polo describes a bridge stone by stone but which is the stone that supports the bridge kublai khan asks the bridge is not supported by one stone or another marco answers but by the line of the arch that they form kublai khan remains silent reflecting then he adds why do you speak to me of the stones it is only the arch that matters to me polo answers without stones there is no arch a little orientalism here but it s calvino so everything gets its exotic turn posted in chaos emergence 3 comments coherence posted by carld on november 16 2009 one of the criticisms that s been leveled at the new philosophy is that it is incoherent i am neither qualified nor motivated to investigate whether this is true in a rigorous conceptual sense frames sing has taken some good cracks at it but without getting into that i wanted to trouble or at least expand what we might mean by coherence i m going to be reinventing some wheels here bear with me as kvond says in the linked post ideas can be coherent in the very narrow way of making sense or matching up theoretical parts without having applicable coherence there is a thin line between incoherent and the supposed coherence between concepts does not do the explanatory job the hand of zeus makes it rain is both coherent at least i understand what the sentence means and also incoherent as an explanation all the explanatory connectives are missing kvond does a lot of heavy lifting here by distinguishing what we might call internal coherence from external coherence internal coherence self referentially satisfies the requirement of a wittgensteinian language game that is it makes sense once one knows the rules in this way the hand of zeus makes it rain would have been fully coherent to an ancient greek as both a sentence and an explanation external coherence looks outward to see if the game makes sense in relation to anything but its own internal logic by predicting the coming of rains for example rather than accounting for them post hoc in the same way we might ask whether there s anything or perhaps enough to learn about how business and finance actually work from playing monopoly or reading the wealth of nations the externalization of coherence has barely begun here however once the standard is ...