Language, Thought and Reality (revisited)

Benjamin Lee Whorf once wrote an important little book of linguistic studies titled, 'Language, Thought and Reality'. It ranks with the work of Dewey and Kuhn as seminal American thought. However, Whorf wrote instrumentalism somewhat out of the picture in his study of how language and reality influence each other. In fact, language and thought are interactive but significantly not the same thing. Thought is influenced by our perception of reality and subject to critical failure driving aberrant cognition when that thought and that perception are demonstrably incommensurable, i.e. when there is a low degree of coincidence.

Faced with three disjunct systems, one is forced onto a central dichotomy, thought and reality which are arguably incommensurate , and an information calculus, language, which is, as Wordsworth brilliantly put it, 'the language of the sense', disjunct from both but relational to both which is identical to perception. Perceptions, the senses, are not thought and neither, as simple experiments show, are they reality. Language, however abstract, is rooted in perception and reflective of the interaction between whatever is 'out there' and cognition. It informs both our thought and our perception of reality and there is the genius of Whorf.

Do good and be well.

Derivatives as Deficit Spending

There is much talk in Washington these days about reducing deficits in order to manage the public debt. However, there has been insufficient processing of the recent recession and no mention of derivatives increasing the marketability of questionable loans and therefore the liquidity of the credit markets has been made. Essentially, taking a junk mortgage and tranching it at AAA is printing money. The underlying economic conditions that would normally be reflected in a AAA instrument do not exist so essentially the difference in marketing the AAA from the junk is new money. Nobody has noticed that.
It is, in fact, borrowed new money since the consequences of mortgage default are amplified and must require extra reserves and possibly public financing. We learned that lesson in the last five years. We just haven't managed to adequately characterize the phenomenon. It is a form of deficit spending.
Now, the Federal Housing Agencies, which effectively are what Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac represent have proposed a derivative for multiunit housing to shore up demand. If it bubbles and bursts we'll all be liable for it and it's completely off ledger. When Pandora's Box was opened, derivatives were found inside.
Driving this insanity is the postindustrial concept of magic money. Everybody should have a nice house in a gated community. Therefore, everybody will have a nice house in a gated community. This is Disneyland after all, isn't it? We do, as a nation, prefer trial and error to doctinaire approaches and we are in the process of proving absolutely that Disneyland is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. You have to pay for those rides and, as the old saying goes, money doesn't grow on trees.
Be well and do good.

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American Postmodernism and the Consumerism Ethic

Consumerism is a household god in America and increasingly the world, the more money you spend the more money you have to spend. It's a simple ethic. However, like the economics of Keynes, it only operates in certain phases of the economic cycle. If you throw money at a recession, it improves. If you throw money at an innovation cycle, a rolling recession, it lasts longer and cuts deeper.
This is the conundrum facing postmodernism everywhere but especially in America. We are not doctrinaire and we are not socialist and we have clearly reached the limits of the transfer of wealth that drives Keynes, postindustrialism, and consumerism. We are pragmatists and we are, economically, at our wit's end as to what to do next.
I have no answer. The answer fairly clearly lies in Game Theory and Schumpeter but the one is embryonic and Schumpeter is at least two different people, Mark I and Mark II. That leaves us with a trial and error best guess problem solving process. We will undoubtedly make huge mistakes and pay huge prices. That is not an unusual scenario in the American dynamic. We must be as humane as possible. We are all a lost paycheck or a bad investment away from needing some comfort.
Be well and do good.

If you're looking to consume some original synthesis, this gun's for hire. Check my website.
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Markets and Intervention

First off, I want to be emphatically and absolutely clear about my personal, philosophical, and analytical position that the invisible hand of the market is NOT the hand of God. In the long run, and never ever forget Keynes' 'In the long run, we are all dead', markets are efficient but they are given to episodic insanity. A market is a lot like a pit bull, a magnificent animal but sooner or later it bites you.
There is no such thing as an efficient and friendly market. It one intervenes to make a market friendlier, less unstable, one reduces the efficiency of that market. Making a market really friendly puts it in Fantasyland and in Fantasyland markets fail massively as we have recently seen. There is no nice solution to the instability of markets. It is just the way it is. If we ever get a Game Theory model powerful and sophisticated enough to handle the stock market then rational adjustments can be made. If. And when.
Be well and do good.

If you're in the market for some original synthesis, this gun's for hire. Check out my website.
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Unemployment and Real Estate

Unemployment is at 9% and has been high for years. The housing market is being made on oversupply of existing homes and decreasing prices. The relationship is clear. The situation, as a monolithic market, will remain in this dynamic until unemployment drops into the 5% range.
Anything over 6% unemployment constitutes a rolling recession. The term has been used before. A rolling recession is no more than creative destruction at work. So the net effect of the last 4 years is a severe general recession followed by a rolling recession. This, given the technology being implemented, could last the next ten years.
While the pattern is a natural innovation cycle, I cannot help but think that it is being made worse by the pyramidal effect of the machinations of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac in the housing market. I cannot prove that but I have a sneaking hunch that it's true.
Be well and do good.

Postmodernism and Romanticism

What is Romanicism? It is quite simply the denial of the superiority of Reason. I am a NeoKantian postmodernist. That makes me by definition, a Romantic. I believe that there are defining conceptual arguments contained in the brain at birth. Kant called these arguments, forms. These forms define our existence. To my mind, there are definitely three of these: God, game, and language. All of these preexist experience. I would entertain the notion that Love is a form but I'm not certain of it. The key to a form is that one cannot 'know' it. Therefore, if I am correct, one cannot know God, but one still must behave to His standards. That's difficult. Perhaps occult phenomena are simply a manifestation of God and a confirmation that one's brain is wired correctly. I would also entertain that notion. Be well and do good.

Pragmatism and Postmodernism

Americans are pragmatic, not as devout practitioners of a philosophy, but rather as an aspect of a national personality. We do not love idea for the sake of idea. We love idea for the sake of utility. Plato might have written, 'The Republic'. We created one. We are pragmatists. Pragmatism does not hold dogmatic Truths, only tentative truth. What is is what works. It is a perfect fit for postmodernism. It is a fit so perfect that cultural postmodernism could be said to be an occult codification of pragmatism. There are many manifestations of postmodernism, philosophical, cultural, economic, and political. They differ from each other and internally are not the same for all people. There is no large Truth to them. We all have our personal myths, our truths, that drive our psychological spaces and so our behavior. Do occult phenomena exist? Postmodernism answers, if they do for you. Pragmatism answers, if they do for you and your behavior is successful for you. We cannot ask more of a philosophy than personal success. Be well and do good.

Instrumentalism and Postmodernism

J.M. here. The single question dividing postmodernism and postmodernist philosophy from the rest of creation is that of instrumentalism.
Instrumentalists believe, in a vast oversimplification, that we do not know reality. We only know our perceptions of it. Taken to the Nth degree, this fairly undeniable fact, tempered with inherited cognitive predispositions, gives rise to the radical position that human thought and reality are incommensurable in the terms of Thomas S. Kuhn. Given his explanation of and exceptions to incommensurability such a position is tenable with only one constraint, probability.
Is a construct a model or a flight of fancy? Is it possible to say something about reality when that reality is disjunct from human thought? The history of observable fact is a picaresque journal of events exhibiting probability constraints. The narrative of thought conserving these observations is punctuated by moments of extreme re-invention of systems of thought. It is not a grand narrative, as documented by Kuhn himself, but, in his words, an evolution and speciation. Any attempt at convergence across disciplines results in that one constraint, probability.
Any attempt at thought in terms of explanation and/or prediction, which is why we think large thoughts, must, in order to conserve the events of our individual lives, reference probability.
Can the occult constructions common to postmodernism and the bizarre constructions of paranoid minds have validity in philosophical argument? Only if they exist as an exception to an expectation of probability within the laws of probability.
'Tunneling', the well known phenomenon predicted by the probabilities of quantum mechanics has been described as 'spooky' by sober physicists. That is case enough to argue that reality really is disjunct from human thought and we cannot 'know' reality and that truth is a probability variable and the occult, as explanation, is simply a reflection of these facts.
Any system of thought that has a significant degree of coincidence with observable facts is explanatory and predictive of that incommensurable reality. If it references probability even as exception then it has validity in postmodern philosophy. We are not talking about Truth as the end result of a Grand Narrative. We are talking, to continue Kuhn's metaphor, of adaptive versus maladaptive behavior. It is not for us to 'say' what is true. It is for us to 'do' what is true.
Do well and be well.
'Chances Basil Brylcreem' on http://www.amazon.com/books

A Moment's Reflection

For those of us who have a generalist background, who lack a dogmatic loyalty to any political doctrine and who are paying attention to the large picture, there is present in these troubled times a sense that this is a critical moment in Western Civilization.
It is not a radical intrepretation of the history of Western Civilization that when the complexity of the social norm is raised, as the Greeks with mathematics and philosophy, it essentially raises the bar to meaningful participation in one's own society. When people find that the bar is over their heads, their knee jerk reaction is to do the limbo, to be a player in a game that is negatively referential to the social norm. They do this because they find themselves aggressed against by what is represented as civilization. Being the target of social aggression, they exhibit a counter aggression in a sort of psychological self-defense. This is the problem that all political address with the exercise of powers we have come to call counter-insurgency.
This is all comprehensible. What is not particularly comprehensible is the reaction of what we call liberals in Western Civilization, people who honestly care about the dispossessed. Their knee jerk reaction is to raise the bar further as though people doing the limbo to a higher bar would improve their social performance. The net result is that more people are dispossessed, aggression in social behavior is increased and at some level of significance, society endures but civilization is lost.
We have now empowering technology. We have the essential element in the construction of a society of minimal aggression, Game Theory. It will take twenty years for incremental advances in our knowledge of this paradigm to reach a critical mass sufficient to a General Game Theory. Which means we face twenty years of social aggression and counter-insurgency.
We are at a critical moment in Western Civilization, let us behave temperately, rationally and with compassion. It's for all the marbles.
Do well and be well.
'Chances Basil Brylcreem' on http://www.amazon.com/books

Time goes away and the world with it.

'There is more day to dawn.'
Henry David Thoreau

I can think of very few moments in that memoir and museum we call Western Civilization that is so defining and differentiating as the moment we are now expecting in five years. In that moment, an experimental fusion power reactor will flash into life and a new world will be born.
Costly and difficult in its initial implementation, it will someday power the world and the hybrids the world will drive. I cannot imagine a more momentous occasion in the whole of that lore and lexicon that generates our institutions and values than when that reactor generates its first few kilowatts.
We are twenty years away from a coherent and comprehensive postmodernist model and twenty years away from a first generation of producing fusion power reactors. That is the kind of coincidence that is driven by inspiration and drives large events, such as a new world being born. We are so close to doing that that even a reclusive, provincial Southwestern writer can see it.
It is a huge moment.
Do well and be well.
'Chances Basil Brylcreem' on http://www.Amazon.com/books

Postmodernism and the 'L' Economy

J.M. here. Don't forget to check out the new video trailer on Amazon.com for 'Chances'.
Watching the CNBC crew puzzle at the new market is extremely entertaining for me. They have become so used to following large trends that a stock market doing what it is supposed to do, interest rates doing what they are supposed to do, and creative destruction proceeding inexorably puzzles them.
We live in a technological age. That may sound trite, but the technology in question, while empowering, is extremely capable, more capable than some people. This is raising the bar and driving the 'L' recovery. As Basil writes in the book in process, 'You can't make a market on the backs of dead people.' The gigantic market driven redistribution of wealth is triggering a significant governmental response of a countering redistribution of wealth. People are the essential element in markets. Robots don't buy cars.
So here we are in the midst of the definably final chapter of the Grand Narrative that is Industrialism, large events driving large responses. And the economy is in 'L' mode. Unless you share the conceptual basis of postmodernism that will confuse you.
So postmodernists watch as trends vanish into normal market operations secure in the knowledge that we are functioning at a high level in a critical and difficult moment.
Sooner or later, the CNBC crew will solve this puzzle and focus on individual stocks on a value basis while factoring in that complex equations drive economies and markets and the ability of any one person to understand what is going on in the world of finance is very limited.
This scenario is extremely amenable to the rise of a rational postmodernism and as sure as the sun rises that will occur.
Do well and be well.
'Chances Basil Brylcreem' on Amazon.com/books

Postmodernism, Civilization, and Creativity

J.M. here.
When you see a multiform culture that is in Being not Becoming, you see Postmodernism realized. It is the Modernist view of Civilization as Grand Narrative that colors our perceptions of what social existence implies. The Western Canon is a fairly recent invention, a Modernist attempt at Order out of Chaos and successful in the establishing of a baseline of reference in thought and communication, a baseline that must exist and which Postmodernism seeks to define by convergence across disciplines and by a community of personal myth.
However personal the demon of creativity, one ultimately plays to an audience. It is the nature of the thing that it be experienced. Writers write because they are driven to do so. They write to make to money. Ultimately and essentially, however, they write to be read. We write in shared symbols out of neccessity, not convention. I may reject the legitimacy of a Grand Narrative and embrace the timelessness of Being, but I cannot reject that Becoming is a state of existence in its own right. Post is not 'after', it is 'beyond' and must coexist with narratives of large and powerful extent however limited one considers them to be in a true existence.
Multiform culture includes Modernism and its Grand Narrative. It's an uneasy peace we keep in a complex world, philosophically and geopolitically.
Do well and be well.
'Chances', available on Amazon.com.

The New Industrial State

It does not exist. J.K. Galbraith did not dream of the conditions that exist in today's world when he penned that interesting volume. It is about centralization, economies of scale and regimentation of behavior and it informs modern liberalism to an unfortunate degree.

Today we are global, flexible and empowering of the individual. We are, in dialectical terms, in pursuit of the antithesis to the thesis stated by Galbraith. The world we live in today is a dynamic synthesis of those two exclusional conceptual frames of the nature of existence.
J.M. here. Basil has the day off, drinking his espresso, listening to Corelli and generally doing his impression of a carrot or some similiar vegetable. When writers shut down their conscious mind, they really shut it down. Creativity is so much an unconscious process that to write requires retreat. It is a solitary and anxious profession. Writers are, by nature, postmodernists. They do not appreciate regimentation. Basil likes the new synthesis.
It goes well with the world.
Do well and be well.

The Postmodern World

Basil here. I'm going to let J.M. have a turn at blogging so get ready to think
What characterizes the postmodern world? Relative truth? I would argue with the radical view of a personal myth that social existence requires shared language, relevant to and descriptive of phenomena, shared databases, for lack of a better word, and shared experience.
I would argue that truth is a variable related to strategy in game theory and constrained by the rules of the complex multi-player game we call existence. The bold statement that delusion has truth value, that insanity is a legitimate reality, hasn't been openly stated since the 1950's. The EEG, the CT scan, and the MRI have all checked in on the question with the exact same observation. Without proper medication, the cerebral cortex is dysfunctional in the insane mind.
Of course you could hold to the radical view of relative truth if you think that very large lizards are capable of legitimate performance in legitimate human games. It's up to you. It's your quarter. You can call it anyway you want. That's the way of postmodernism, isn't it?
Do well and be well.