This website has just started. It’s just got a short video at the moment. In the near future we are going to have to go radical. Most people haven’t twigged yet and can’t see the obvious facts. My own research has been in defeasible and informal logic systems. If you’re prepared for the pain you can get a bit of a grip at:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-informal/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-defeasible/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-nonmonotonic/ (particularly heavy).
I don’t do philosophy – but want to find some means through which we might get over the exploitation of thinking by the clever as functionaries of the powerful. Urging lumpen sections of our societies to get into critical thinking are a waste of time and most people can’t hack this at all. I’ve been seeking ways to automate argument so that doing it might be more like, say, driving a car rather than designing and building one.
My early research was into expert systems (we hoped to replace wasters like lawyers and accountants) – but the stuff we produced didn’t really work. Others were successful in producing ways to ’embody work’ in manufacturing processes – many skills such as spraying were thus copied into machines (the term embodiment might be better as disembodiment as the skills are taken out of the human body). My work at this stage was practical and concerned welding. The embodiment of skill is an old Marxist term, incidentally.
I hope its obvious even to the numb-skull that apparently solid argument can be put forward for almost any point of view. Our piss poor politicians are full of this when not full of themselves. I used to think the best idea was to establish more ‘objective and considered’ argument – but I think differently now – it’s too easy to pretend such shit and we end up thinking the likes of Thatcher and Blair do something other than just mug us.
So I’m after something that could help replace argument as we generally experience it and make many of the dodges used so obvious even the stupid would see through them. A reliable lie detector would be good, but much of what distorts argument is not lying but rather a form of mimicry – a pretence of argument.
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