Why? Why not?

Wow, I didn’t realise I hadn’t posted in so long.

c’est la vie, I guess.

The essay was completed, handed in, and returned to me to be modified, and it looks like it will be around 5000-6000 words.

Today is Trang’s birthday, and I’m taking her to The Italian Village at the Rocks. Large amounts of spending ahoy!

In other news, (heh, I’ve always wanted to say that…) Dr J and I have roughed out a very basic plan for my thesis.

Basically it goes:

• Summary of Barnes and Ravetz, and a comparison.
• Leading into a discussion of my own ideas about concepts.
• Followed by a study of the field of AI research, and how some of my stuff is reflected there.

My own ideas concern how we as human beings acquire and manipulate concepts. Basically, I think that a lot of the confusion about this results from the vestiges of postivist philosophy, and the idea that concept membership is a binary function.

Well, I seem to have missed the deadline on my essay. Sigh. Ah well, 3500 words in two days is pretty good in my book. Hopefully I should be able to do the last thousand or so in the next couple of days.

Hi again all. Posts are a bit infrequent at the moment, but it’s been nuts the last little while.

Stuff I’m working on at the moment:
Leveraged v2.0, my new job,
CPS, my other job,
building a new desk, harder than you might think,
and writing, writing writing, about all manner of craziness.

Sometimes it’s weird to be thinking thoughts like ‘Language is not thought’, and there being a serious chance that I could defend that as a position in academia. I won’t say much more for the moment, but I’m really looking forward to a chance to write a real polemic. I’ll probably tear it up straight away, but there you go.

If I’m being incoherent, I apologise.

Thesis update: I’m writing the first paper for my subject this session: a textual comparison of Barry Barnes and Jerome Ravetz, and how the finitism and implicit knowledge theses of the first support the craft knowledge theses of the other and vice versa.

To do at some point: Finally post something to the ‘musings’ page. Maybe I’ll post my reading option paper, and the paper I did for the Cosmology distinction course I did in year 12.

Who knows.