Post Category → Language & Writing

Eristic

“Eristic, from the ancient Greek word Eris meaning wrangle or strife, often refers to a type of argument where the participants fight and quarrel without any reasonable goal.

The aim usually is to win the argument and/or to engage in a conflict for the sole purpose of wasting time through arguments, not to potentially discover a true or probable answer to any specific question or topic. Eristic is arguing for the sake of conflict as opposed to the seeking of conflict resolution.” via Eristic – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

See also “The Art of Being Right: 38 Ways to Win an Argument (1831:

The Art of Being Right: 38 Ways to Win an Argument is an acidulous and sarcastic treatise written by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in sarcastic deadpan.[1] In it, Schopenhauer examines a total of thirty-eight methods of showing up one’s opponent in a debate. He introduces his essay with the idea that philosophers have concentrated in ample measure on the rules of logic, but have not (especially since the time of Immanuel Kant) engaged with the darker art of the dialectic, of controversy. Whereas the purpose of logic is classically said to be a method of arriving at the truth, dialectic, says Schopenhauer, “…on the other hand, would treat of the intercourse between two rational beings who, because they are rational, ought to think in common, but who, as soon as they cease to agree like two clocks keeping exactly the same time, create a disputation, or intellectual contest.” via The Art of Being Right: 38 Ways to Win an Argument

Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity

VUCA is an acronym used to describe or reflect on the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of general conditions and situations. The common usage of the term VUCA began in the late 1990s and derives from military vocabulary[1] and has been subsequently used in emerging ideas in strategic leadership that apply in a wide range of organizations, including everything from for-profit corporations[2] to education.[3]

via Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Keywords

Last night I had a deeply irritating problem with synching nvAlt and Simplenote. It forced me to look through my hundreds of note fragments looking for the problematic note.

I came across an old note about Raymond Williams’ book “Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society“.

Williams is a fairy extreme leftists (sympathised with Pol Pot) but the book is wonderful.

Here are a few excerpts:

Aberrant decoding:  An anti-structuralist term that recognises that audiences et messages in different ways to the ones intended.  ‘Encoding’ is the term used to describe the way in which media practitioners construct messages so that they can be understood by the widest possible audience, almost always the aim of media professionals. ‘Decoding’ is the term used to describe how people read these messages.  In communication theory there is an approach which claims that messages are encoded (produced) through one set of meaning structures and are therefore necessarily decoded (received) in the same linguistic framework and with the same meaning structures

Anomie:  Normlessness (a product of socil disintegration).

Aporia:  A seemingly irresolvable logial difficulty or serious perplexity.

Canon:  A list of approved texts, orginally of a religious character.

Civil society: Everything in society that is not government

Cultural capital  The transmission of privileges from one generation to the next.

Dominant/Residual/Emergent : The factions wlthln cultures that are always in a state of conflict.

Doxa:  A broader term than ideology, meaning somethihg close to comnon-sense or everyday assumptions.

Enonce/enondation : The distinction between speaking and the effects of that act.

Episteme:  The dominant mode of organising thought at a given tiistorical time.

Essentialism:  The belief that people, groups or objects have fixed, ate characteristics. A combination of social and cultural characteristics that together form a distinctive socal identity.

Feedback:  A term describing the reception and response of a message.

Flaneur: The observer.

Governmentality : Michel Foucault devised the term ‘governmentality to describe the increasing tendency over the past two centuries for the state to intervene in the lives of its citizens

Habitus:   A system of shared sodal dispositions and cognitive structures.

Hegemony:  The exerdse of cultural and social leadership by a dominant group.

Hermeneutics:  Understanding how understanding works: a theory of interpretation.  Its basic philosophical meaning refers to translating something not understooda textinto a comprehensible form. We might say it refers to the process of interpretation, and it was generally used to describe the interpretation of biblical texts. Its current usage refers to our understanding of how understanding takes place, particularly in relation to how readers understand the meaning of works of art and literature.

Metanarrative:  Stories about stories (Jean-Fran ois Lyotard).

Metaphor/metonymy:  Metaphor: the substitution of one term for another.

Metonymy: the substitution of an element of a term for the term itself.

Moral panic : A media spiral in which sodal control and hysteria escalate social problems.

Phenomenology:  A philosophical approach that concentrates on the meaning of experiences.

Subaltern:  The underclass; the oppressed in colonial societies.

The book is available at Amazon.com 

Raymond Williams on Wikipedia

Excerpts on Culture and Popular