The core point I want to make here is: The Art of [Truth-seeking] Discourse lives in the territory, and we community members attempt to discover it and practice it.
This one feels wrong. Discourse has the map-nature.
First, I will admit the triviality that maps are also things that live in territories. Brains run on physics; software runs on hardware. The Venn diagram is {things in territories {things in maps}}. But though we use the same word, the meme of the mythical unicorn in our books and art and brains is distinct from one actually made directly from atoms, though books and brains are made of atoms too.
(Truth-seeking) Discourse is about improving maps by using other maps. If we were using the territory to improve the maps, we might call that an “experiment”, or suchlike.
Innate and universal human psychology might have the territory-nature, because we can improve our understanding of them via experiment, but culture lives in the maps, and unlike innate human nature, is quite mutable. Norms are also mutable. Social rules and laws are mutable. Should we be mapping these, or engineering them instead?
Principles and abstractions and theories have the map-nature. They’re lossy compression models (i.e., maps) that throw away the irrelevant details. This includes socially relevant mathematical models. E.g., Game Theory is made out of models, i.e., maps. Mathematics may be “discovered”, but theorems are towers of meta-maps. The results depend very much upon the axioms.
I think the point being made in the post is that there’s a ground-truth-of-the-matter as to what comprises Art-Following Discourse.
To move into a different frame which I feel may capture the distinction more clearly, the True Laws of Discourse are not socially constructed, but our norms (though they attempt to approximate the True Laws) are definitely socially constructed.
This one feels wrong. Discourse has the map-nature.
First, I will admit the triviality that maps are also things that live in territories. Brains run on physics; software runs on hardware. The Venn diagram is {things in territories {things in maps}}. But though we use the same word, the meme of the mythical unicorn in our books and art and brains is distinct from one actually made directly from atoms, though books and brains are made of atoms too.
(Truth-seeking) Discourse is about improving maps by using other maps. If we were using the territory to improve the maps, we might call that an “experiment”, or suchlike.
Innate and universal human psychology might have the territory-nature, because we can improve our understanding of them via experiment, but culture lives in the maps, and unlike innate human nature, is quite mutable. Norms are also mutable. Social rules and laws are mutable. Should we be mapping these, or engineering them instead?
Principles and abstractions and theories have the map-nature. They’re lossy compression models (i.e., maps) that throw away the irrelevant details. This includes socially relevant mathematical models. E.g., Game Theory is made out of models, i.e., maps. Mathematics may be “discovered”, but theorems are towers of meta-maps. The results depend very much upon the axioms.
I think the point being made in the post is that there’s a ground-truth-of-the-matter as to what comprises Art-Following Discourse.
To move into a different frame which I feel may capture the distinction more clearly, the True Laws of Discourse are not socially constructed, but our norms (though they attempt to approximate the True Laws) are definitely socially constructed.