ThinkingAboutTheThinkable

Just out from Harvard U. Press, Piore and Schrank provide a nuanced account of the modern labor economy, and how the systemic economic account misses important phenomena. Namely, there is real flexibility and choice in our economic relationships, and that choice allows for very different outcomes. You can read the Introduction on amazon.com.

Michael Fried, the art historian and critic, describes his work as "motivated description." The term comes from Svetlana Alpers. "You're just saying what you see....I'm trying to describe and account for what is actually there." [from Earnest: What It Means to Write About Art , 2018] I find this makes sense of what I am doing more generally, as described in the previous posts. By the way, such "subjectivity" is not at all arbitrary, for the world is you fiduciary--as Kant would have it, judgment is a claim that you should agree with me, or at least appreciate how I am judging. MK

4. Out of Brooklyn: Wanting to be Let In to the City Productive Themes My work is driven by my curiosity and a sense of where I can make a contribution. When I look over that work, of course my training as a scientist plays a big role—mostly in giving me ideas about how to think about phenomena. The other pervasive theme is mixture and pollution, that no matter how much we might like perfection and purity and simplicity, there is always violation of that perfection--impurity and pollution. If we have some idea of how the world is organized (whether we are Hegel or the modern physicist), we are likely to be chastised by actual phenomena and their variety and persistent peculiarity.   Design is just provisional, again perhaps by a committee that “botched and bungled” it (as Hume would say) until they had something that sort-of worked. Whatever we might see as sacred has a history, and in that history it was once not so considered as sacred, and a great deal of effort ...

3. Some Ideas a. Balance and Layers Imagine a world of rubberized sheets layered upon each other. On any one sheet there are attractions and repulsions, tensions in various directions, so that at each point there is a balance of forces if there is some sort of equilibrium, or if there are changing forces there is ongoing stretching and compression trying to keep up with the changes. Since the speed of sound is quite finite, it is quite likely that the ongoing stretching and compression may lag behind the changes. Moreover adjacent layers are connected to each other, so that adjustments in one layer will affect the layers above and below it. Now the layers might be notional, for example on one layer are the masses and energies of matter, and on the other is the rulers that measure the distance between points, both in space and time. Such is the account of gravity provided by general relativity, a measure of the mass energy is on one such layer, and a measure of the spa...