Adventures in Metaphysics 2: Information vs. Stories
  • schopenhauer1
    10k
    It seems to me that we can make some dichotomy between a sort of realism/analytic approach on one side and post-modernism/critical approach on the other. The analytic approach favors ideas like "information", "networks", and "semiotics". The post-modern approach seems to favor "stories", "text", "deconstruction".

    At first glance you might assume that one theory can subsume the other because both superficially deal with information-sharing. However, they seem less able to synthesize then one would at first think. Information theory has a "there" there. Information can successfully transmit to each other thus combining and recombining into novelty.

    Information theory proposes there to be a sort of "objective reality" to the information. It has "efficacy" and can be seen in predictions, observations, and experiments. Post-modernism poses everything as text, so that there is no universalizing nature to information. If anything, information is always a part of itself and has its own idiosyncrasies that allow it to not universalize in a grand informational way that something like a biosemetics or other totalizing information theory would have it.

    Post-modernism seems to emphasize the incommensurability of information. It focuses on where information breaks down. One is a sort of unifying force, the other is a sort of totalization of disparate and non-intelligible informational algorithms.

    I don't know what to make of what I see to be this distinction but it seems that perhaps (ironically) one can inform the other. However, how can it be so?
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  • Paine
    2k
    Ray Brassier, from that collection of essays, The Speculative Turn, you posted in the other thread, calls for a relationship between the extremes that seeks to avoid the either/or between 'ontology' and 'epistemology.' It is interesting to see him included in the collection because he has a bone to pick with all the other views presented. The lovely rhetorical hit on 'post-modernism' aside, this chapter neatly captures one problem balancing the points of view:

    18. However, in the absence of any understanding of the relationship between ‘meanings’ and things meant—the issue at the heart of the epistemological problematic which Latour dismisses but which has preoccupied an entire philosophical tradition from Frege through Sellars and up to their contemporary heirs—the claim that nothing is metaphorical is ultimately indistinguishable from the claim that everything is metaphorical. The metaphysical difference between words and things, concepts and objects, vanishes along with the distinction between representation and reality: ‘It is not possible to distinguish for long between those actants that are going to play the role of “words” and those that will play the role of “things”’. In dismissing the epistemological obligation to explain what meaning is and how it relates to things that are not meanings, Latour, like all postmodernists—his own protestations to the contrary notwithstanding—reduces everything to meaning, since the difference between‘words’ and ‘things’ turns out to be no more than a functional difference subsumed by the concept of ‘actant’—that is to say, it is a merely nominal difference encompassed by the metaphysical function now ascribed to the metaphor ‘actant’. Since for Latour the latter encompasses everything from hydroelectric powerplants to tooth fairies, it follows that every possible difference between powerplants and fairies—i.e. differences in the mechanisms through which they affect and are affected by other entities, whether those mechanisms are currently conceivable or not—is supposed to be unproblematically accounted for by this single conceptual metaphor. — Ray Brassier
    Paine Options
  • schopenhauer1
    10k
    Ray Brassier, from that collection of essays, The Speculative Turn, you posted in the other thread, calls for a relationship between the extremes that seeks to avoid the either/or between 'ontology' and 'epistemology.' It is interesting to see him included in the collection because he has a bone to pick with all the other views presented. The lovely rhetorical hit on 'post-modernism' aside, this chapter neatly captures one problem balancing the points of view: — Paine

    Indeed I think that is a good dichotomy. On one side the ontological "thing" and the other, the epistemological "word". Information Theory ontologizes information as real, and not simply representational. Not something that is a sort of stand-in for what is real, but is actually the thing-itself real. Post-modernism epistemologizes information totally that one cannot get to the real. I think Brassier's quote is contra Latour's attempt to legitimize the post-modern epistmologizing as ontology par excellance with his idea of "actants", but I'd have to look more into that.
    schopenhauer1 Options
  • Paine
    2k
    ↪schopenhauer1

    An aspect of 'information' theory that I am not sure fits with your dichotomy is the emergence of cybernetic processes and system theories. That does make it a part of the 'realist' camp but does not necessarily render the components by which we build models 'commensurate' in contrast to the "incommensurability of information" you ascribe to the post-modernist.

    Maybe approaches like biosemiotics are not as 'totalizing' as they may appear because the grammar projected upon them may be a good use of metaphor but is not like logic as 'rules of thinking' in many other ways.
    Paine Options
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