Categories
Philosophy

The Logic Beneath Logic

A system becomes brittle when it treats its own representations as a complete account of the conditions sustaining it. Its categories continue to organise decisions while the relations through which those categories remain useful are changing. The difficulty lies in the loss of responsiveness to what the account leaves unrepresented. Formal logic describes how conclusions […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Structure of Absence: How What Is Missing Holds Systems Together

When people speak of nothing, they usually mean emptiness: no matter, no signal, no information. Yet absence is never encountered in isolation. Something is absent only in relation to an organisation for which it could have made a difference. Absence is not an object or an empty region waiting to be filled. It is the […]