roachboy

one of the potentially interesting things that politics can take up as a problem is exactly that question, mike: what is a fact?

i dont think the answer obvious at all. and there is a whole series of other problems that go along with very basic categories that people use to organize their views of the world--what is an event? where does one stop and start? what do you think motivates human action in the world? what roles do ideologies play in that? what are ideologies? how do you dismantle them and to what end? for example.

does anyone seriously think that these questions can be addressed with exclusive reference to their own direct experience?
if you do, i think you are dreaming.

this is one of the reasons why politics detached from philosophy is incoherent--politics is a type of philosophy.
but philosophy is not just pulling claims out of your ass with no reference to anything else--and eliminating supporting information is not a way to unleash creativity--it is a way to avoid central questions and use that avoidance as a pretext for retreating into a private world of private fantasies about a private world that you confuse with the world that other people know about.
that is not philosophy: it is a form of dissociation.
why would you want to encourage dissociation?
if you want that, it is easy enough to find: go to a bar. it is easy peasy to find yourself snared there into some drunken rant that starts of being about some political question but which quickly degenerates into a long tiresome story about me me me.
the problem in a bar is that these tedious scenes are often difficult to leave.
with their written duplicate in a space like this, leaving is easy.

information is critical--but it is also obviously problematic.
so it makes no sense to treat information uncritically.
one problem with debates here is that there is no agreement at all about how to handle information. but that's fine--this is a discussion board and not a political philosophy class--but it also generates problems, and one of these problems is at issue in this thread--there is so little agreement not only about how to handle information but also about what politics is (and what philosophy is) that it has to be chocked up to the creativity of all of us that anything ever happens in here at all.


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here is a definition that i am kind of attached to:

creativity is a matter of interacting with constraints. it is not about the elimination of constraints: it is about working within them/around them/through them and ending up in a place that you did not expect to, that goes beyond what is comfortable.
it is *not* about simply repeating what you already know.
it is *not* about eliminating what makes you uncomfortable.
it is a process of interaction with material that pushes you outside these comfortable internal limits.
information, with all the problems of mediation that come along with it, is a constraint.
processing information can be a creative undertaking--IF you allow that processing to get beyond teh simple repetition of a political line that you are comfortable with.
i do not always manage this in this forum. i dont think anyone does, particularly not during periods where they get the idea that they are talking largely to themselves.
no friction=no creative action.

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i think that pan is right in a way: any statement that gets generated about information provided can have the phrase "i think that..." attached to it--it always implicitly is there--whether you include it or not is just a matter of style, not of content.

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i think this debate supporting information yes/no is a wholly false one.

the question of differing types of information that folk present as if there were no differences in types of information is a problem, but usually it is sorted easily in the course of debates themselves.
problematic information usually grinds debate to a halt pretty quickly because they end up being about the fact that the information is problematic.
that should function on its own as a brake on the types of information that folk post.
i do not see the problem with that either.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite