theory: useful definitions
Graeber, D., and Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything.
Chomsky, N., Roberts, I., and Watumull, J. (2023). The false promise of ChatGPT. NYT, 8 March.
Graeber, D., and Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything. , pp. 21 - 22.
“...social theory always, necessarily, involves a bit of simplification. For instance, almost any human action might be said to ahve a political aspect, an economic aspect, a psycho-sexual aspect and so forth. Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would otherwise be invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, or Claude Levi-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point. One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.
“Hobbes and Rousseau told their contemporaries things that were startling, profound and opened new doors of the imagination. Now their ideas are just tired common sense. There’s nothing in them that justifies the continued simplification of human affairs. If social scientists today continue to reduce past generations to simplistic, two-dimensional caricatures, it is not so much to show us anything original, but just because they feel that’s what social scientists are expected to do so as to appear ‘scientific’. The actual result is to impoverish history - and as a consequence, to impoverish our sense of possibility.”
Chomsky, N., Roberts, I., and Watumull, J. (2023). The false promise of ChatGPT. NYT, 8 March.
Perversely, some machine learning enthusiasts seem to be proud that their creations can generate correct “scientific” predictions (say, about the motion of physical bodies) without making use of explanations (involving, say, Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation). But this kind of prediction, even when successful, is pseudoscience. While scientists certainly seek theories that have a high degree of empirical corroboration, as the philosopher Karl Popper noted, “we do not seek highly probable theories but explanations; that is to say, powerful and highly improbable theories.”
The theory that apples fall to earth because that is their natural place (Aristotle’s view) is possible, but it only invites further questions. (Why is earth their natural place?) The theory that apples fall to earth because mass bends space-time (Einstein’s view) is highly improbable, but it actually tells you why they fall. True intelligence is demonstrated in the ability to think and express improbable but insightful things.
David Graeber: Beyond the Monastic Self
An intellectual provocation, as we all know, usually consists of a statement that makes sense from a certain theoretical perspective that so clashes against received wisdom that it will inevitably spark a debate from which new richer understandings are likely to emerge. An example might be: poetry is an impoverished form of speech.
