Source: Facebook

IN SEARCH OF APHORISMS – CREATING AND REPEATING ORDERED SETS.

It is incredibly difficult to take novel ideas, especially revolutionary ideas, and reduce them from intuitions, to analogies, to causal relations, to communicable narratives, to something close to an aphorism that is self evident and easily digestible by its mere construction as overlapping sets.

One technique I’ve used extensively is to try to articulate and enumerate, all ideas as a spectrum rather than as an ‘ideal type’ – a single term. This tends to solve most problems of conveying novel or complex ideas. It’s more burdensome to write and argue, because it requires a lot of repetition of sequences, but it’s much more effective to compare points on a line (ordered set), with points on another line (ordered set), than to rely upon less precise terminological ‘blobs’ open wide to interpretation – which is what most ideal types are: uselessly imprecise.

When comparing concepts you can generally talk in supply-demand curves, even if the reader doesn’t understand that’s what you’re doing. But he can understand the intersection of two concepts using two lines, arcs, or distributions as CAUSAL rather than as analogistic, if you give him the tools to.

It’s just brutally hard work. I’ve been sort of keeping track and it takes me at least ten attempts at writing to do it, sometimes many more.

If you write empathically that’s one thing. But if you’re whole endeavor is to not rely on intuition, then you have to write in some way that contains information without relying on experience external to the argument. The relationship between members of an ordered set (sequence of term) tends to do that for you. Comparing two or more ordered sets is much more effective than any narrative. The mind does the work for us, that reason would have to do otherwise.

Back to breaking verbal rocks…. 🙂