Pynchon & Politics( Lacey essay)

[Markekohut]

Misc. on Lacey essay. His words on Slothrop becoming " invisible" .

I ran across this tidbit on Richard Burton in Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold movie. 
The Director wanted his character to be " anonymous" in the film. At one with the background, the atmosphere so to speak. ...Le Carre's long-suffering Smiley, another reason besides the
Espionage, betrayal and double-agenting themes of Le Carre that P might resonantly like his work? 

( Burton feared--how do you act No Self? --and  chafed under the Director's desires but turned in a masterful performance all agree) 


Sent from my iPad

On Jan 31, 2013, at 7:32 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:

> On 1/31/2013 4:28 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>> We are speaking of Peirce and Pragmatism.
>> from Wiki,
>> 
>> Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere
>> verbal or hyperbolic doubt
> 
> 
> Rules out Descartes.
> 
> P
> 
>> ,[10] and said, in order to understand a
>> conception in a fruitful way, "Consider the practical effects of the
>> objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is
>> the whole of your conception of the object",[11] which he later called
>> the pragmatic maxim. It equates any conception of an object to a
>> conception of that object's effects to a general extent of the
>> effects' conceivable implications for informed practice. It is the
>> heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental
>> reflection arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable
>> confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances — a method hospitable
>> to the generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the
>> employment and improvement of verification. Typical of Peirce is his
>> concern with inference to explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual
>> foundational alternative between deductivist rationalism and
>> inductivist empiricism, although he was a mathematical logician and a
>> founder of statistics.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Scientists are free to use whatever resources they have — their own
>> creativity, ideas from other fields, induction, Bayesian inference,
>> and so on — to imagine possible explanations for a phenomenon under
>> study. Charles Sanders Peirce, borrowing a page from   **Aristotle
>> (Prior Analytics, 2.25)**   described the incipient stages of inquiry,
>> instigated by the "irritation of doubt" to venture a plausible guess,
>> as abductive reasoning. The history of science is filled with stories
>> of scientists claiming a "flash of inspiration", or a hunch, which
>> then motivated them to look for evidence to support or refute their
>> idea. Michael Polanyi made such creativity the centerpiece of his
>> discussion of methodology.
>> 
>> William Glen observes that
>> 
>> the success of a hypothesis, or its service to science, lies not
>> simply in its perceived "truth", or power to displace, subsume or
>> reduce a predecessor idea, but perhaps more in its ability to
>> stimulate the research that will illuminate … bald suppositions and
>> areas of vagueness.[56]
>> 
>> In general scientists tend to look for theories that are "elegant" or
>> "beautiful". In contrast to the usual English use of these terms, they
>> here refer to a theory in accordance with the known facts, which is
>> nevertheless relatively simple and easy to handle. Occam's Razor
>> serves as a rule of thumb for choosing the most desirable amongst a
>> group of equally explanatory hypotheses.
>> 
>> --------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On 1/30/13, Bled Welder <bledwelder at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Al: Not AI, get your head out of the gutter:
>>> 
>>> "Just because a person uses logic, or computation, or even if she works to
>>> revolutionize logic, does not mean that her method is logistic."
>>> 
>>> You can say that only because "logistic" is a word that that's not actually
>>> a word.  It could possibly benefit from an 's' or on 'al' tacked to it's,
>>> very square, hind-end.
>>> 
>>> Anyway the whole statement is absurd.  Imagine some poor sap, oh say Lord
>>> Russell, who works to revolutionize the whole industry of logic without
>>> ever once being the least bit logical about the whole business.
>>> 
>>> I think form his Analysis of Mind, something around page 467ish:
>>> "That which has hitherto been called, 'logical', is really it's opposite:
>>> not logical, or as we like to call it down at The Lords' Pub, it is absurd.
>>>  In other
>>> words, that which is absurd, is logical, and that which is logical, is
>>> absurd.  Which is logical by virtue of its being, well, absurd.  Cheers."
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 5:58 PM, alice wellintown
>>> <alicewellintown at gmail.com
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> Pierce is very logistic. That is the nature of his " analysis". He
>>>> revolutionized Logic.
>>>> 
>>>> OK. But I stick to what I wrote. It's a matter of terms. Just because
>>>> a person uses logic, or computation, or even if she works to
>>>> revolutionize logic, does not mean that her method is logistic.
>>>> Descartes' method is logistic. He, like Peirce wrote about his search
>>>> for and use of his method. Peirce, pardon the pun, doubted Descartes
>>>> doubting, and this because he disentangled it, he used his method, not
>>>> computation or logic, but analytic.
>