Postscript

[j4]

Thesis: The more accurately we try to describe something, the more distorted and unrecognizable it becomes.

Discuss, with reference to post-impressionism, postmodernism, and/or postcodes.

Comments

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

"dilettantalised" - excellent word.
I tend to concur with the thesis; consider a glove described in structural terms without reference to anything else, for instance.

[claerwen.livejournal.com]

No, postcodes are great!

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

There are things I believe because they make sense, there are things I believe because they feel right, and there are things I choose to believe in order not to be dragged back into unhealthily depressing places; my position on your thesis is to reject it on those last grounds.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry if it does that to you. I think it's only depressing if taken to ridiculous extremes; I think there's a lot of grey area where a) we can achieve pretty accurate descriptions of things without just resorting to carrying things around with us and pointing at them, and b) we can have a lot of fun with the alienating effects of overdescription. (Otherwise I'd just be waving my nineteen hands in a state of agitated cubism, rather than having hopefully-meaningful conversations about stuff...)

[bjh21.livejournal.com]

I noticed something like this last night. The CSS2 (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2) spec is a lot more precise and detailed than CSS1 (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS1), but it's almost impossible to work out how to actually do anything with it.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

Also, I believe that your thesis is supported, to some extent, in the physical world. Firstly, if measurement is analogous to description, then the more tightly you try to pin down a measurement on one parameter, the more you make ambiguous the measurement on a paired parameter. Secondly, the more closely you look at a thing, to describe its constituent parts, the less recognizable the whole becomes. It is a glorious chaos that provides an eternity of contemplation.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Firstly, if measurement is analogous to description, then the more tightly you try to pin down a measurement on one parameter, the more you make ambiguous the measurement on a paired parameter.

Yeah, but this feature of the physical universe doesn't really do all that much at the scale for which human senses are optimised.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

Agreed, but it shows that we are talking about something fundamental. The shapes of things at one scale are reflected in all scales, like sand dunes in a desert.