Rationality and rupture

Trafford, James (2013) Rationality and rupture. Design Ecologies, 3 (2). pp. 234-256. ISSN 2043-068X

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Rationality and rupture - Accepted Version

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Creators:

Trafford, James

Description/Abstract:

Any thought which is true to the contemporary must, seemingly, recognise the complex ecologies of human and non-human assemblages, algorithms, data structures, planetary climate change, and so on. In this setting, it is unsurprising that there has been a recent shift towards consideration of basic questions of ontology and epistemology in order to attempt some traction on this terrain. In much of this, however, we find a constructed caricature of both reason and intuition, in which reason is reduced to the algorithmic by means of a recursively axiomatised formal system for the enumeration of all truths in a structure. Here, I suggest that this is a poor shadow of rationality that is rooted in a static, classical "image of thought"; and that many attempts to construct a category in excess of reason end up with an ossification and metastatisation of intuition at the loss of any criticality and epistemic mediation. This paper provides an attempt to undermine these views from within the caricature itself. In so doing, we consider a form of rationality capable of gaining traction on the shifting-sands of the quasi-transcendental structure of experience, through the rehabilitation of abstraction as a process of navigational dialogue and transformation.

Item Type:

Article

Official URL:

http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Jour...

Date:

1 December 2013

Identification Number:

10.1386/des.3.2.234_1