PTSD

Genealogy, part the sixth

P: Hope judging is going well...

btw, have you read Charles Tilly's new work? I am re-writing Hobbes as "REAL-ising Realism" (yes, a bad attempt at a play on words) and using relational realism to do it. Hobbes is a relational realist, I shall claim :-)

E: um, okay. which new tilly do you mean? still having trouble with tilly as a realist of any sort...

P: It would be good if you could read the article over when I am done. If you have time, that is.

E: sure. just working on the system dynamics theory stuff, so it's not like I'm going to figure anything crucial out soon

P: I don't think it will be as exciting as raccoon rabies though. Let's start an article! Let's! Let's!

PS: Did you read the CofI lot's blog? How about a Priya/Elizabeth/anybody who wants to join blog :-)

E: the what? and yeah, I'm all for a blog.

P: this is what happens when you realise that your usual non-uni reading of crappy john grishams and useless mysteries cost $20 each here in denmark and are reduced to re-reading "classics" from the library

E: heavens no, not the classics. read jane eyre. or peter hoeg. grisham's not fun, anyway.

P: my next ventures are either jules verne (haven't checked if they have him in english at the library) or h.g. wells.

E: wodehouse! wodehouse!

P: take care and judge fairly :-) (though what is "fair"?). oh and they don’t have wodehouse in the library here. Sacrilegious, I think.

E: fair is a four letter word in the law.

P: am sure you are doing hideously imp judging stuff while i sit here making grandiose plans for blogging.

E: nope. back in dc, doing same old, same old

P: how about it, eh? www.blogger.com, we choose user names, etc and go on from there. i vote for phd will never end...haaahhhaaa but that might be too long. or deconstructed systemic selves. this proves i have no creative capability so you should come up with a name.

E: ummm...have to think about it.

P: off to irish pub again to spend another huge amount of money to have the priviledge of drinking one beer. grrr. bloody danes and their expensive beer. but i guess that means i can't drink too much. though how much is too much is a question yet to be resolved. along with the many other questions yet to be resolved.

E: have fun. drinking on wed--not sure how much is allowed. suspect that it's less than on, say, a friday. positional drunkeness

P: am reading why quantum physics is relational realism, according to this one physicist. back to it now

E: which physicist? having trouble with quantum physics as relational. and realist, for that matter.

P: don't have any idea on what the man's name was (physicist, that is. he was from some indian uni so prob no one's ever heard of him. yes, that was my imperial tendencies coming out). and i think his argument was that quantum physics means we have to look at the world, in everyday life and language, as being relational.

E: huh. interesting. i really would like to know who / what--just for my own interest

P: Or, he said something like the realist would see a book as having length, height, etc as independent of observation whereas seeing a book as relational (and real) would mean that you can conceive of its real properties as being part of it in relation to something else (ie a book in relation to papers as a paperweight). but he also said that this relational property means it also has the potential for other properties within (hence showing that some two-slit experiment in quantum physics can be possible).

E: umm. so he's saying the light as a wave / light as a particle issue is relational? not sure if he's using relational in the same way as relationalists do.

P: i saved it for further perusal and for potential use in my new (revised) reworking of Hobbes as a relational realist :-)

E: forward! forward!

P: btw, does social construction mean you don't believe in foundations? i wanted to ask WeberMan this but thought i should know it by now. have been reading rom harre's work and he seems to think that social constructionism does not rule out universal aspects of human life or even essential attributes. i thought it did?

E: I think they haven't decided--WeberMan would probably argue that foundations are right out, but others don't go that far. but wait, if there are no foundations, doesn't that make them postmodernists? that can't be right.

P: (unless we are looking at language as being essential but then we can't because witty already said language only had meaning in its use and hence wasn't essential).

E: that would be my reaction: the language, and how it creates reality, is foundational. But you're right, it's a different (more fluid, relational) notion of foundations

P: the more i read, the more confused i become.

E: welcome to my world. stocks, flows, and influences, oh my...

P: off to do more reading of harre...confusion awaits

ps: blog! blog! blog!

E: working on it...we have to think this through, to avoid looking like nitwits with too much free time.

P: c'mon! blogging IS for nitwits with too much time on their hands (ie me) so think we should set up a blog soon-ish though we should be working on other things. but I am not. and that will make me feel like i accomplished something and can also put down my views of the world. which are v imp.

E: um. okay. still needs a cool name

P: thought (and you most likely already know of this but) you would find this useful: Conference Alerts
we should really go to some of them.

E: I'll take a look. Busy worrying about Turkish economic policy (SystemGuru, don't ask), but I should have time this weekend

P: and the article on relational versions of reality w/r/t physics is attached. let me know what you think

E: cool. again, Turkish economy, but as soon as that's caught up...

P: off to look at the sun, which has come out for the first time in nearly two weeks. makes me want to burst out "here comes the sun...toodoodoodoo" but will resist (except on email)

E: I'm sure the danes thank you for restraining yourself.

Hey--found the kind of blog we should write (although not about social networks), Notional Slurry

also, very fond of crooked timber.

Have spent some time looking at blogs, and decided that we can definitely do this. if I think of it as practice (without the research redirection of a chat w/ WeberMan), I can almost justify it as contributing to the phd experience. And that's enough for me. Now, what do we call it and where do we sign up? SystemGuru uses blogspot, which has to be fairly easy to use, bc everybody’s on it. there's also a clearinghouse for phd-related blogs that could be useful in getting additional readers (and comments, thereby building an epistemic community that is entirely virtual--too bad neither of us is working with social network analysis!)

so, next job: interesting blog names

As inspiration, have found this on a pastor's (yep, teacher at a seminary school in IL) blog...

Wittgenstein Blogged
Nietzsche Blogged
Paschal Blogged
I Blog

Or we could just do what this guy does, at Blinkorama

P: yay for epistemic community possibility. am in full favour.
have been wasting time looking at others' blogs...

E: yeah. me too. I think it's some version of procrastination. I'm especially fond of hitting the "next blog" button from blogspot. amazing the random things you can see.

P: Dear Future
i liked the paranoid tendencies of this one. reminded me of me. though i will obviously tone that down in my blog contributions...

E: scary. not for me. I get enough scary without reading about somebody else's paranoia.

P: Dull Name
this just because he seems to have had the same trouble we did with naming it :-)

E: yeah. but his really is dull. ours won't be. so we need a better name. besides, he already took dull.name

P: Drinking about Life
yes, useless but note his march 6 entry on american newsletters about being a new dad

E: tell the truth. you only read this because you thought it was about beer.

P: i was going to try find some more better examples but realise that we have a bloody awful seminar on lifelong learning or some such rot (we are expected to attend all seminars, probably because otherwise there would be a vast empty space around the speaker in most of them) so have to be off...write back with an appropriate (or not) name!

E: have fun with that. I have to clean my carpets, if that makes you feel any better.

posted by Elizabeth @ 1:11 PM