I felt like drawing ants today, because I woke up to some unnerving ant trails in my kitchen. This reminded me that Emergence is a super good book.
Tag: Pictures of Theories
Pictures of Theories: The Iceberg Theory
The Iceberg Theory, Literary Studies:
“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”
— Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
Pictures of Theories: Parallel Universe Theory
The Parallel Universe Theory (AKA the Many Worlds Theory/the Multiverse), Quantum Mechanics: Wow, there is so much fun and difficult stuff to read on this one, sadly I did not have time to read much of it this week. I will return to this post and spruce it up at some point. But here is […]
Pictures of Theories: The Specious Present
The Specious Present: Psychology/Neuroscience, specifically time perception.
You could file this one under philosophy too, but I mean everything is philosophy, really.
The term “specious time” originated with E. Robert Kelley (aka E. R. Clay) …
Pictures of Theories: The Entscheidungsproblem
The Entscheidungsproblem, Computer Science: This one was a doozy. But the main reason I started this website was to champion intelligence in a fun way, in the angry face of the stupidity that seems to be swallowing America. Well, trying to understand the Entscheidungsproblem sure as heck was fun. I emerged a little smarter even if […]
Pictures of Theories: Performativity
Performativity (specifically Judith Butler’s iteration), Gender Studies: Philosopher and feminist theorist Judith Butler offered a new, more Continental (specifically, Foucauldian) reading of the notion of performativity, which has its roots in linguistics and philosophy of language. She describes performativity as “that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.” She […]
Pictures of Theories: Language Acquisition Device
Language Acquisition Device (LAD), Linguistics: First proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, the LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is a component of the nativist theory of language. This theory asserts that humans are born with the instinct or “innate facility” for acquiring […]
Pictures of Theories: The Death of the Author
Well, that was an easy one.
Pictures of Theories: The Boltzmann Brain Paradox
The Boltzmann brain paradox, physics: A Boltzmann brain is a hypothesized self-aware entity that arises due to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos. The idea is named for the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), who advanced an idea that the Universe is observed to be in a highly improbable non-equilibrium state because only when […]
Pictures of Theories: Representation
Representation, Cognitive Science: (Also referred to as mental representation or cognitive representation.) A representation is a formal system for making explicit certain entities or types of information, together with a specification of how the system does this. And I shall call the result of using a representation to describe a given entity […]
Pictures of Theories: Deconstruction
Deconstruction, literary studies: Deconstruction is a method of literary analysis with roots in the work of philosopher Jacques Derrida. According to Wikipedia, “This article has multiple issues.” Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. – J. Hillis Miller, “Stevens’ Rock […]
Pictures of Theories: Differentiation
Differentiation, education studies: “Differentiated instruction and assessment (also known as differentiated learning or, in education, simply, differentiation) is a framework or philosophy for effective teaching that involves providing different students with different avenues to learning (often in the same classroom) in terms of: acquiring content; processing, constructing, or making sense of ideas; and developing teaching […]
Send me your theories
Are you currently or have you ever pursued an advanced degree in any field? Please send me theoretical terms from your field so that I can draw pictures of them. I will post the pictures here for you to see.