About

Unjustified Margins.

A collection of musings generally connected by the idea of boundaries which are not entirely obvious or universal.  This title began as  a set of lectures to examine taxonomies — the ways we classify the world around us and how those classifications inform our understandings and explanations of the world in which we live.  Before long it became clear the understanding of the world could change the way we classify it.  The taxonomy and the understanding combining and transforming one another through the combined agencies of reason and observation.

Another main tendency in this collection is looking at events which are evaluated in different ways for reasons of ideology or prejudice rather than logic. Sometimes an analogy which is used in one context is scrupulously avoided in another and the other apparent motive for this is the ideological inconvenience which would be encountered.  Sometimes we call this “hypocrisy” and sometimes “double standards” and sometimes we don’t notice it at all because we are so accustomed to applying one set of standards to events in one context and another set of standards to events in another context we do not notice the switch at all.

This ability to “switch interpretative codes” effortlessly and usually unconsciously is sometimes seen as “intuition”.

Sometimes our intuitive grasp of how the world works combines with our curiosity and this then leads us to reject the  intuition which began our explorations in the first place.

These ideas should be read by those who are not overly thin-skinned or rigidly wedded to their own way of seeing the world.

Intuition, curiosity, and reason. Of these the greatest is curiosity.  Curiosity asks intuition “how do you know you are right?” and it enlists reason to answer that question.

Only when curiosity is satisfied are the margins justified.

And human curiosity, constrained as it is by human reason, will never be satisfied.

Most of what appears here will be esoteric and arcane. Every now and then a comment on something going on in the “real world” may appear.