Inferences
Dec. 8th, 2013 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotThis is an edited-down excerpt from a reply I made to Dave on the Elephant Call thread. In my edits I've taken out some of my sharp opinions because they aren't relevant to the point of this post, but by all means click the link, for the sharpness. And I'm going to sneak the actual point of this post down in the comments, so look there as well:
Suppose Sam says to Chris, "Let's get together for lunch. Are you free Thursday?" Chris replies, "I'm pretty much swamped for the next couple of weeks. How about after that?" Sam says, "Actually, as I think about it, I'm swamped too and Thursday was overoptimistic. Let's say around the end of the month." Chris: "That sounds good."
Now, I would say that they're each implying that they'd like to see the other, though they're also implying that they have more immediate (though not necessarily more important) priorities. Neither of these implications may be true, but each is definitely implied. Even if Sam and Chris are lying — perhaps they're secret embezzlers who plan to see each other the next afternoon to plan their latest chicanery, and the whole conversation is a charade to mislead potential undercover agents — they've nonetheless implied that though they want to see each other they have more immediate priorities.
I'd also say that this interchange reveals a hunk about Sam and Chris and their world. It may not reveal what they really want or need, but it tells me what they want to convey and the social forms they use to convey it. Of course, I myself know something about their world (we'll say it's contemporary America, and Sam and Chris are socially more or less like me). E.g., "lunch" isn't the same commitment as "dinner," the latter implying (again, not necessarily correctly) a stronger friendship.
Okay, we can ask questions of this interchange. For instance, "What sort of friendship will Sam and Chis end up having?" "What sort of friendship would Sam and Chris like to have?" "What sort of friendship should Sam and Chis have?" Is this the sort of thing you have in mind when you [i.e. Dave] use the phrase "implicitly posed question"? If so, "implicitly" is the wrong word, since neither Sam nor Chris implied the question. In some ways, their current and subsequent behavior may "answer" such questions, but that doesn't mean that Sam and Chris are either asking them or implying them. I'm the one who's asking them. I'd say the questions are there to be asked, simply because the world has a future and we can try to predict it, and, barring a sudden calamity or unexpected events, Sam and Chris are likely to at least have the opportunity to interact in said future. (I take it that neither is expected to be sentenced to prison in the next day or so.)
In any event, by changing a few words, we can ask ourselves similar questions about people in the anime and video-game worlds: how will they interact? how would they like to interact? how should they interact? And we can throw in all sorts of variables: race, class, gender, whether people are positioning themselves as fans or critics or intellectuals or geeks, whether they are there just for fun or they're serious participants, and so on. [I'll add that] if anime/VG is implicitly asking and implicitly "addressing" such questions [as Dave says], then the rockwrite world is implicitly asking and implicitly "addressing" such questions too, no matter how bad a botch the latter world's explicit questions and answers are.
To put all this more abstractly, there's a bunch of stuff that I generally put into the category "hairstyle"/"acting out" — I'm using these words as positives in this particular paragraph — that I consider to be at least a rudimentary form of thought, or at least as having the potential for containing thought. The way I put it is that, by choosing my cut of hair, or what shirt to put on, or what tone of voice to use on a comment thread, I'm to some extent answering some questions (what will my relationship be to others given their hairstyles and shirts and tones of voice?) even if I'm not asking such questions explicitly or implicitly, and even if I think the questions are a waste of time (which I don't, but that's a different issue). As I said, I don't see how rockwrite, no matter what it does, can make such answers and their attendant questions go away.
Suppose Sam says to Chris, "Let's get together for lunch. Are you free Thursday?" Chris replies, "I'm pretty much swamped for the next couple of weeks. How about after that?" Sam says, "Actually, as I think about it, I'm swamped too and Thursday was overoptimistic. Let's say around the end of the month." Chris: "That sounds good."
Now, I would say that they're each implying that they'd like to see the other, though they're also implying that they have more immediate (though not necessarily more important) priorities. Neither of these implications may be true, but each is definitely implied. Even if Sam and Chris are lying — perhaps they're secret embezzlers who plan to see each other the next afternoon to plan their latest chicanery, and the whole conversation is a charade to mislead potential undercover agents — they've nonetheless implied that though they want to see each other they have more immediate priorities.
I'd also say that this interchange reveals a hunk about Sam and Chris and their world. It may not reveal what they really want or need, but it tells me what they want to convey and the social forms they use to convey it. Of course, I myself know something about their world (we'll say it's contemporary America, and Sam and Chris are socially more or less like me). E.g., "lunch" isn't the same commitment as "dinner," the latter implying (again, not necessarily correctly) a stronger friendship.
Okay, we can ask questions of this interchange. For instance, "What sort of friendship will Sam and Chis end up having?" "What sort of friendship would Sam and Chris like to have?" "What sort of friendship should Sam and Chis have?" Is this the sort of thing you have in mind when you [i.e. Dave] use the phrase "implicitly posed question"? If so, "implicitly" is the wrong word, since neither Sam nor Chris implied the question. In some ways, their current and subsequent behavior may "answer" such questions, but that doesn't mean that Sam and Chris are either asking them or implying them. I'm the one who's asking them. I'd say the questions are there to be asked, simply because the world has a future and we can try to predict it, and, barring a sudden calamity or unexpected events, Sam and Chris are likely to at least have the opportunity to interact in said future. (I take it that neither is expected to be sentenced to prison in the next day or so.)
In any event, by changing a few words, we can ask ourselves similar questions about people in the anime and video-game worlds: how will they interact? how would they like to interact? how should they interact? And we can throw in all sorts of variables: race, class, gender, whether people are positioning themselves as fans or critics or intellectuals or geeks, whether they are there just for fun or they're serious participants, and so on. [I'll add that] if anime/VG is implicitly asking and implicitly "addressing" such questions [as Dave says], then the rockwrite world is implicitly asking and implicitly "addressing" such questions too, no matter how bad a botch the latter world's explicit questions and answers are.
To put all this more abstractly, there's a bunch of stuff that I generally put into the category "hairstyle"/"acting out" — I'm using these words as positives in this particular paragraph — that I consider to be at least a rudimentary form of thought, or at least as having the potential for containing thought. The way I put it is that, by choosing my cut of hair, or what shirt to put on, or what tone of voice to use on a comment thread, I'm to some extent answering some questions (what will my relationship be to others given their hairstyles and shirts and tones of voice?) even if I'm not asking such questions explicitly or implicitly, and even if I think the questions are a waste of time (which I don't, but that's a different issue). As I said, I don't see how rockwrite, no matter what it does, can make such answers and their attendant questions go away.
