Categories
creativity

Creative Cognitive Semantics

From the article: “participants with higher creative activities and achievements had semantic memory networks that were less segregated and more efficient”. So, creative utility is a function of a globally-distributed semantic potential (as memory, encoding, storage). The more semantic combinatorial possibility, the greater the potential creative “depth” of a cognitive system. If “creative cognition involves […]

Categories
Philosophy

Corporate Responsibility and Ethical Consequence

Context: Juukan Gorge inquiry: Rio Tinto’s decision to blow up Indigenous rock shelters ‘inexcusable’ Wittgenstein at one point identified meaning as a function of use. From a social constructivist perspective, this follows quite naturally as a corollary fact of epistemological (as much as linguistic) self-reference that all integrated information-processing, meaning-generating or socially-constructed contexts embody. It […]

Categories
communication

The Consolation of Etymology: Pugilistic Spell-Checkers

I am engaged in an unrelenting death-match of Greco-Roman wrestling with mobile device spell checkers. I have had some very near-misses on social media. The spell checker on my phone recently tried to insert Gestapo instead of gestalt and circumcision instead of circumlocution; needless to say – this would have dramatically re-framed the intended meaning […]

Categories
culture

The Uncertainty Zeitgeist

Substantive, meaningful content in our shared information spaces is suffering from an information-systems evolutionary selection mechanism that is implicitly biased towards continuity over coherence.

Categories
culture history Philosophy politics

On Stupid Ideas and Clever Solutions

Countering stupid ideas proves to be a matter of some subtlety and intelligence…

Categories
culture

Semantic Drift

The extent to which errors of replication are responsible for longue durée cultural, subjective and semantic metamorphosis remains an intriguing possibility…

Categories
culture

Product

We are all products…

Categories
Philosophy

Circular

“…human knowledge must always be content to accept some terms as intelligible without definition…:

Categories
communication Philosophy

Communication: The Problem

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein identified some interesting problems of language. Language is a logical system through which we communicate. Language is also that through which we very often fail to understand what is being conveyed to us, that is – it is that through which we fail to communicate clearly…