Theme: Science

–Q: “Curt: Does your work tie into or run parallel to Langan’s work at all?”–
In abstract terms the way I explain it, is that he is trying to produce the unification of math, science, philosophy and theology with a narrative analogy. Whereas I treat those different disciplines as grammars of degrees of precision in systems of descriptive measurement dependent on ability, experience, and knowledge – just as with the sequence arithmetic, mathematics, geometry, and calculus.
My work is a unification of the sciences into a universal paradigm using the spectrum of measurements we call language. So it provides a scientific logic that explains all grammars (paradigms) with a single paradigm.
His project satisfies those with a bent toward continuousness, narrative, mysticism and myth. Mine with a bent toward causality, discreteness, science and parsimony.
He’s telling a story. I’m writing a description.
I understand what he’s doing and consider it silly – but its not a bad ambition, and so much any more wrong than Kant or Heidegger as an interesting experiment in the phenomenalist tradition – but one that is likewise a similar dead end because such explanation and legitimizing of intuitions while comforting does not produce falsification or decidability required of such a theory.
I dont like being compared to him but given the total absence of attempts at unifications coming out of the postwar academy, the vast set of sophistry, pseudoscience, mathiness, and supernatural fictionalisms out there, and the complexity of our work, and that we are outside the academy, its logical that people would look to guys who offer solutions – even if the knowledge required to understand and judge them limits anyone’s ability to do so.
I would work in the academy if I could. But you cant put a dissertation committee together for my scope of work, nor spend this many years in development of the work, nor refuse to publish along the way for fear of anchoring, nor state the painful truths I do without being tossed out as a heretic. And its not as though there are any surviving criticisms of my work other than the apparent complexity (which isnt really true as much as it requires a revision in though on the scale of previous leaps) and the objections to the findings – which are greater than those of Darwin, because they are more threatening to present powers of the cathedral complex than Darwin was to the church.

— Cheers