User:RD/9k/non-narrative thinking (Q60,61)
Main entry[edit]
non-narrative thinking
[1] -> so this apparently has a name. (insert gif of Hermione. "that thing has a name??") I would call it a fallacy honestly, not a way to "escape" cognitive biases.
non-narrative thinking + street protest = frog protest. non-narrative thinking + RPG progression as horror = Game worlds are cultural fabrications. non-narrative thinking + Careerist class = Being a waiter is a culturally-fabricated Game.
Related[edit]
Being a waiter is an arbitrary narrative
/ Being a waiter is a culturally-fabricated Game / Being a waiter is a culturally-fabricated Game that prevents an individual having an understanding of self and an ownership of Life (Sartre, Being and Nothingness) [2] [3] ->
no. the narrative of waiters is created by the existence of restaurants as structures. to argue this you'd have to argue that restaurants are a wholly made-up game and it's possible for everyone to spontaneously go "I don't want there to be restaurants" and thus drain the value of capital to zero but also take away any ability it might provide to earn any money. and there's nothing great about money, but it's quite notable that without money humans are still wholly capable of pinning down a territory and doing horrendous things in it and saying nobody can stop them. if there was no money people would have just, come to North America and carved out a micronation the size of Delaware and made whatever rules they want and said "I'll shoot everyone who tries to take this land or change the rules". money had a particular bizarre effect of allowing people to fight over territory and the exclusive right to make rules bloodlessly — instead of shooting murderers we have to demand money, instead of capturing slaves in an international war, now we buy them. clearly the effects did not bring total peace between populations. money took the basic act of two territories of people in tensions preparing to kill each other dead to change the rules and deferred it so that there was some kind of objective criterion by which people could decide when somebody should occupy a territory or not. nobody had to obey the criterion and sell a territory, and in the end this act of making spatial slot hierarchies systematic could be called an act of social darwinism, but it had the dubious advantage of allowing people to kill each other over resources more slowly and nonviolently, ultimately making things like homeless protests possible instead of the king killing all the homeless people before they can do anything about it. (real historical incident.) take that away by deciding that job slots and business territories are a fabricated Game that can be overwritten by a bunch of people banding together and arbitrarily making up new rules, and the results are not going to be pretty. it can work out for the Wampís people, but separable areas of racist White people are definitely going to do it.
- Existentialism equals post-structuralism / The point of existentialism (early-existentialism, existence-philosophy) wasn't actually to say that people's identities and self-perceptions and futures are up to them, but to say that meaning-making itself is identical with things being in flux or constantly breaking and re-forming, and there is not really any such thing as having an identity or a plan, only refusing available choices or making spontaneous choices [4] -> I know somebody believes this but man I don't like it. this feels to me like it inherently leads to anarculture and social instability and just, people constantly bickering with each other and threatening to split from each other and effectively manipulating each other just because they believe that brings them more Freedom than if they tried to get people to cooperate
- Narratives do not exist within the world, and every narrative people intuit only exists within people's minds [5] -> this seems dangerous because like, if you believe this, can't you just go around saying Black history is just a narrative someone put together and you don't want any of it in textbooks because at the end of the day if somebody had to actively compile it then it's made up? what about claiming that the story people compiled about COVID vaccines is just a narrative and therefore you don't have to believe it and circa 2021 you don't have to get vaccinated or wear a mask? people really go around saying versions of both of those and I've seen people quite wholeheartedly believe the second one.
- Correct mental models of real-world objects are not necessary (Richard Rorty) -> you're really going to have to explain that one
- Knowledge is held in linguistic statements that assign models to terms / Knowledge is held in linguistic statements that assign ontological models to signifiers (Richard Rorty, Wittgenstein) -> on one hand I half agree with this because like, you can totally use language to communicate ontology, and as an imperfect way of storing it. on the other, I really don't like when philosophers confuse ontology with language. that implies that it's qualitatively different if I assign the definition "solidly connected network of people that doesn't slip apart" to "socialist transition" versus if I assign it to "gerbleflop" or "[hushed voice] not enough mustard". the proposition should be the same proposition regardless of what word I use to encode it. if it isn't, it seems to be a very prescriptivist way of looking at language that argues for people to have to use a very specific dialect to communicate and go to particular prescribed Debate Arenas with language referees who judge whatever everybody says by what the dictionary says the words mean.
- non-narrative thinking -> so, I went down a tangent reading about Rorty and it looks like I had the context on what he was saying a bit wrong. this only shows the problems with non-narrative thinking, because I really had to go all the way through the narrative of the guy's life and who he cited and who they cited to even have any idea what he was saying. (note: Rorty isn't so much a narrative hater, he's just incidentally here.) that's a whole lot of history to remember. whereas without that history I totally mangled what he was saying even though it was superficially straightforward and universal and the language itself wasn't easy to misinterpret. the context and subtext of a statement are everything but it's impossible to understand them properly and avoid putting words in people's mouths without narratives. like, every act of empathy and some cases of intersubjectivity are just uncovering a pre-existing narrative and taking it as it is without trying to rewrite it.
Ideology codes[edit]
- ES
- Aa
- DG / schizoanalysis