Comments on: Fatalism, and the Visualization of Philosophy

By: Malcolm Jones

Malcolm Jones — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 14:53:58 +0000

Quite interesting. I found these comments by googling ‘Visualization of Philosophy’. I’m a ’seasoned’ designer/illustrator preparing to do a Ph.D. and was thinking about setting myself the challenge of designing a model of C.S.Peirce’s philosophy of semiotics - a kind of Everest of visual modeling. I’m encouraged!

What I’ve noticed while hanging around academics, particularly those who have been doing it for a long time, is that they model ideas brilliantly in their minds, but are hopeless at communicating them to others, except in the long-winded and unfortunately linear form of text. Many do use notation and construct visual sketching systems to help them work through their ideas, but largely these are personalized systems and meaningless to most other people. Seems like bringing some of these models of thought out into the tangible world (as is the case in most scientific work) would be a benefit.

By: Rob Adams

Rob Adams — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 19:41:22 +0000

I disagree that philosophy is all about “meaningless vortices of knowledge that are ultimately inapplicable to most contexts outside the classroom” - studying philosophy in college helped me build the intellectual frameworks that have guided the most important decisions of my life, and I continue to use the tools I acquired to refine those systems. But I agree that academic philosophy does a poor job of helping students to recognize the value of philosophy and apply it to their real lives, which I think was your point.

Teaching philosophers to communicate visually may not solve the problem but it would undoubtedly help. The conundrum is that trying to give them these skills later in life may be less effective than you’re envisioning - as Steve points out they are “word addicts” already. Our (US) education system emphasizes verbal communication skills to the almost complete exclusion of visual communication skills from grade school through graduate school, and this is a problem across all disciplines, not just philosophy.

By: John Dowdell

John Dowdell — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 20:50:51 +0000

Agreed… it’s particularly perverse with discussions on “accessibility”….

Here’s a collection of quotes on the “would’ve written a shorter letter” theme:
http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=84

By: steve bingham

steve bingham — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:56:21 +0000

I like the idea of getting philosophers to think visually but they are word addicts and, as you suggest, their word-swarms form dark, impenetrable clouds.

I think we’re going to have to wait for even easier-to-use graphic tools that will enable at least some philosophers to get ‘hands-on’ and show us their thinking visually. That would also serve to get us much deeper into Bill Gibson’s famous ‘consensual hallucination’ (recently redefined in Spook Country as ‘non-consensual’) than all the goofy Second Life stuff.

So hurry up and get us those tools, will ya?