The+Muddle+Ch.+2


 * Ryan Jenkins**

Articulation has to deal with the basic problem of saying things exactly, and not so much how to say something exactly but the understanding that saying something exactly is a somewhat far fetched "half-assed" goal.
 * Articulation**

The act of trying to define the "real" puts the "scientist" ( but honestly this can be applied to almost anyone talking about anything" in to what is called a double-bind: knowing that one cannot fully answer what is asked of them but knowing they must say it anyway.

what is theory? Often times we hear statements like, "well that is just a theory", or "sounds good in theory", or the use of "it is just a theory…" as a means of separating the theory from the realistic. It is what //muddling// calls "not of this material world. Theory is just a set of statements, diagrams and equations in a manuscript, words on a page representing ideas in the air".
 * Transparency/theory**

Our current experience of science enacts theory to enable us to view an unmediated account of the real world and the truths therein. This is why the sciences hold an elevated position as far as "truth finding" is concerned. The hard sciences are believed to be unaffected by subjectivities, cultures, and interpretations.

muddling asks, why? what is the fear of interference or mediation? For something to be mediated instills a feeling of impurification. Muddling references here the subtle force of religious cutlure being part of the reason we have developed this inherent disdain for intervention and mediation in purity*. To mediate in effect, is viewed as impeding. Scientists are bred on this and it has always prompted scientists to "do their best work, making them obsessed with proper functioning of their instruments. A good scientist is dedicated to getting instruments to "work properly" and produce "good data". We can see in a way that from the start, this process inherently enforces a sort of blinders-on approach to pursuing "exactivity", ignoring potentially vital information along the way.

on the topic of mediation and purity, in regards to the revamping of the hubble telescope:

"but why do we think that, tens of millions of dialers and a space shuttle mission later, an enormous array of photodetectors, computer software and hardware, and thousands of other hard and soft components suddenly turned transparent and allowed us to see exactly, directly, watt the edge of the universe really looks like?"

Let us not also forget we are dealing with things light years away, what we see, in a way, is a great example of my current interpretation of realitty… there, but not.

A meaning that revolves around language:
 * Articulating, articulate**

Articulate: To articulate is to gives worlds to, to try and express or describe. In a way, to try and invent into the understandable tangible world an idea, concept, or feeling. An articulation is something spoken or described, not physically seen in its true nature.

a meaning that revolves around anatomical or structural sense: Objects being brought together to be jointed into a larger, segmented structure. think rube goldberg.

the sciences are very much articulated like these rube goldberg machines. A sort of kludge job of mashed together ideas, theories, formulas, equipment, etc… that enable us to arrive at a mediated articulation. this is in a way a much more feasible approach than an approach that aims at arriving at a clean cut transparent theory.

Copernicus is an interesting study in the articulation of findings. Our 8th grade science class self was taught of copernicus and his stand against the traditional erroneous viewpoint of the church, but his story was much more one of intense articulation of ideas, and the common understanding of his role is grossly simplified. He actually was one of many who were involved in the process of changing the intellectual climate of that era, and he obtained a dense network of people and of personal skills while working with these people at the universities of cracow and elsewhere. He also held a role within the church, and had friends within that system to help him put a positive spin on his ideas. Copernicus opened De revolutionibus aiming to convince the reader of the legitimacy of his argument, catering its contents and writing style to the liking of the pope at the time, Paul III. Robert Westman described it well as...
 * copernicus revisited:**

" Copernicus sought to bring the individual parts of the universe into concordance with a sun that he described to his ecclesiastical audience in the most classical, pagan images, not as the generative or emanative force of the neoplatonists but rather as a properly placed lamp or lantern, an eye, a mind, an enthroned king, a visible god. His choice of language and imagery pointed the church away from mediative, astrological influences and instead returned it ad fonts, to an ancient truth: the primitive order of the creation."

here we see that while copernicus was great at many things, he also was a great articulationist. He did not discover something new and apply it as theory separate from its cultural world, instead he "joined together old observations, traditional notions of order and symmetry, new humanist rhetoric and new physical mathematical concepts, the pious life of a believer, and appeals to papal patronage and protections.

Copernicus knew how to present, and articulate, in a way that provided success.

Once we breach the concept of absolute truth being impossible, clarity also falls under question. This is exemplified in Richard dawkins work that aims to dumb down, for lack of a better word, scientific topics to the laymen. People often walk away feeling they understand the topic, but in order for their to be clarity in these topics, we often sacrifice immense complexity. "the fluff" holds in it immense complexity. The way we metaphorically compare and explain the scions is vastly important but it also constrains the sciences. the idea of the metaphor itself, suggest a lack of exactness.
 * Clarity as illusion:**

The differences of language and culture operate in all aspects of the sciences, even the harder sciences. Sharon Traweeks work "beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists" goes deeply into the cultural norms of the physicist world. She asks the important question of how we arrived at singular generics, science, man, woman, evil, god, where are the "s's"? The japanese also for instance also do not use the definite articles of a, an and the. She states, "I knew that the japanese had done perfectly interesting physics for a century without recourse to the singular generic, the indefinite article, and the definite article. obviously, it was not necessary for science."
 * A culture Of no Culture:**

The world of science is run in many ways by its theories and experiments, probing outside the really of measurement into "why?", often gets the response, "because thats the way it is". This is a learned and cultured form of ignorance on the part of modern science, a culture of absolutes and extreme objectivity.

- how does this compare to objectivity in human emotion/experience?

Harraway further develops this idea of scientific knowledge into "situated knowledges". Situated knowledges harness their own hypocrisy, or when A and not-A are simultaneously true. To understand these knowledges as situated within a specific framework in each use, and to situate them differently for different uses helps prevent one from viewing them as direct transparent truths.

PET (positron emission tomography) scans are a prime example of all of these different facets brought together. PET images producenot only data, but actual images that aim to "represent" that data. PET information has been used in courtrooms and as justification for actions over the last years and there has been numbers studies comparing normal brain activity to schizophrenic or psychopathic brain activities. All of these studies produce a plethora of images to represent this data, in which they attempt to falsify a sense of transparency into how the brain functions, as well as biologically define the differences between normal and abnormal functioning.
 * PET scanning / articulation / clarity / illusion**

But, these scans are not the absolute that they claim to be or that they take the role as in society. Describing the brain function and color association Michel ter-pogossian ( a physicist and director of PET at washington Univ.) said "All at once you go from green to yellow and you see a boundary of some sort and it is just a small increment one way or another. Still, in general we try to show them in color because they are attractive".

he later even says: "They signify whatever you want them to signify. This is the pitfall, of course. You can emphasize, for example, a given phenomenon, very artificially so, if you want to do it with color. It is dangerous, too. You have to be very careful when you are using it… Parenthetically, the pictures that are particularly attractive that you have seen in general are doctored, in the sense of making them more attractive than they are at first."

PET is in itself an articulation of data pulled from a machine that is then articulated into a visible computer generated image. On top of that, this is articulated into what the technicians view is of the "attractive" data, and then again in how the image is described and presented. The example is given that if 20 pet scans were given to a doctor, 10 of which were of schizophrenics and they were all shuffled up it is highly unlikely they can be properly sorted. This, relates also to the false clarity that is given because of the scientific development of PET.


 * The Peircean Triad: Who's on Third?**

Some of the most interesting work within the philosophical realm in the last years has been around the study of language, and it is fairly obvious by now how our use of articulation depends so heavily on it as a tool. It is the general trend in both the sciences and philosophy to attempt to simplify everything down to where meanings are plain, and factual. The center of this argument as far as language goes is the signifier and the signified, A believed to be exact unshaking bond between the name and the thing.

signifier ->signified

but, in recent years this exact relationship has been questioned ( Ferdinand de Saussure, benveniste, whorf, sapir, etc….), the idea had thus shifted from being a singular signifier-signified relationship, to an understanding that "the meaning of individual words and terms is constituted not from the things to which they refer, but from they linkages to other signifiers in an entire system of signifiers, and the differences within this system. All meaning and therefore knowledge is constituted out of chains of signifiers" (66).

Yet a third more open system has also been brought to the table, and is more fitting for the muddled science. It is called the "semeiotic system of analysis" developed by Charles Sanders Peirce. This system consists of a sign, object and interpretant, which Pierce sometimes referred to as Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.

/ Thirdness (Interpretant) Sign---< \ Secondness (Object)

For the most confusing explanation ever, T.L. Short described it as, "Nothing is an object which is not signifiable; nothing is a sign which is not interpretable as signifying some object; and nothing is an interpretant that does not interpret something as signifying an object".

I found Isabel Stearns definition much more helpful, which is " Firstness for Peirce has the status of a dream, a quality in itself unanchored to any laws, being a mere 'may-be', fugitive and evanescent. Secondness on the other hand represents the encounter with hard fact, the undeniable shock of contact with the outer world. secondness is the category of effort, of struggle and resistance." this covers first and secondness, but thirdness Stearns defines as "The category of thirdness is above all the category of mediation… thirdness is the factor of final causation which manifests itself as a 'gentle force' bringing together in a certain measure all that which without it must remain in arbitrary and unmediated opposition." Thirdness in essence is the tool used to bring together our brute force reality with our mental dream in order to muddle together some kind of resolution we can handle.



A usually working but makeshift system, modification, or repair. It is apparent how almost, well, all of this in a sense is a sort of kludge job. How science in itself is a giant fuddling with "what we got" to put together some type of functioning system that when we hit the switch on makes a desired result, or at least a result we think makes sense. Peirces semeiotic system is perhaps the best to be using and talking about because it seems to harness the fact that it is a kludge job in itself, something left open and ready to be used and interpreted however it is needed, and perhaps thrown out when it is not needed anymore ( hopefully recycled).
 * Kludge**