folk theories for folks on a ship

Folk theories can be more or less explicit; this also depends on whether or not they are challenged. They are a form of expectations, based in some experience, but not necessarily systematically checked. Their robustness derives from their being generally accepted, and thus part of a repertoire current in a group or in our culture more generally (Swidler, 1986; Rip and Talma, 1998).

Clouds are not spheres, theories are not truth, folks are not rational.

inspired by Benoit Mandelbrot

The Fractal Geometry of Nature

Clouds look like spheres, theories are confusing, and folks are driven by rationality...

Chaos and order represent our efforts of trying to make sense of it all.

The idea is to present a perspective of what folk theories are and how we make use of them to navigate the incompleteness of our understanding of the universe.

It is an intellectual adventure, but is it fractal?

reductionism

Along the way we discover, and we invent.

after billions of years of sex, living creatures had evolved all sorts of methods for getting and processing information - eyes, ears, and brains, to name a few.

Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe - A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos (2006)

Arie Rip. Folk theories of nanotechnologists. Science as Culture (2006) vol. 15 (4) pp. 349-365

Stéphane Mallarmé

folk theories for folks on a ship

all methods are fiction and useful for demonstration purposes

@dannie

hamburg

13.02.2011

Rainald Goetz

Karl Marx

you can only find out if it works, if you try it

the philosophers only interpreted the world in different ways, what matters is to change it.

le monde, 11 février 2011

Andy Warhol

Oedipus does not describe the truth about our instincts and desires, but it describes a constraining system to which the truth discourse in western society has been subjected to since ancient Greece

someday everybody will think just what they want to think and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening.

reality

Michel Foucault

the link between the intellectual's knowledge and that of civil society is the condition necessary for the emergence of a truly democratic discourse capable of reversing archaic sovereignties

Michel Foucault

there is no idea, however ancient and absurd, that is not capable of improving our knowledge. the whole history of thought is absorbed into science and is used for improving every single theory. nor is political interference rejected. it may be needed to overcome the chauvinism of science that resits alternatives to the status quo.

should we not also have to examine what emerges in the society, including the kinds of lives that people can actually lead, given the institutions and rules, but also other influences, including actual behaviour, that would inescapably affect human lives?

Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975)

Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (2009)

the surface plausibility of both disciplines was maintained through a tacit reliance on folk beliefs that were recast in professionalized jargons.

folk- frames and folk-ontologies

(theories; ex ante)

Pierre Schlag. Commentary: Law and Phrenology. 110 Harv. L. Rev. 877 (1997)