thesis basement design
So, it looks like I am finally heading toward the stretch in my life when I will have an opportunity to make progress on my thesis.
As a good architect (*chuckle*), I am thinking of a protocol stack of sorts, and here are some of the layers that I have identified and wish to sort out.
- The layer of argumentation, which breaks down into two pieces:
- The formal layer of logic, where we deal with issues of validity. These are arguments that have established rules of inference.
- The informal layer of rhetoric, where we deal with issues of presentation of situations where there is not enough information to build formal models yet. (I like to think of this as the duct-tape layer of the exposition.)
- The layer of model building, which has several components to it.
- There is the work of the Minnesota School of Philosophy of Science (e.g. Giere) on how model building works in the so-called "hard" sciences.
- There is the Cognitive Science work on how model building (in the sense of mental and conceptual models) actually proceeds and functions, and crucially how model derivation through analogous reasoning and through case based model completion plays out. For those keeping tabs on origins, I am thinking of the NWU CogSci/AI folks (Gentner, Forbus, Riesbeck) and Brits like Johnson-Laird.
- The coupling between these two layers is accomplished, if I am not mistaken, by the theory of scientific discovery as outlined by Peirce, esp with his use of the deductive foundation and the twin approaches to knowledge acquisition--induction for new rules, abduction for new instances--for populating the edge of what is known.
The basic assumption is that the models that are being built will be extracted from argumentations and presented in the form of argumentations. So the models are the content, and the argumentation is the packaging layer.
I think with that epistemological toolbox in hand, it will be possible to work over the key works of Mediterranean historiography, starting with Braudel's magnum opus of the WW2 years, and identify structural patterns of model building. These structural patterns will then provide guidelines for required conceptual models to attack the problem of the early history of Mormonism and its internal change as the movement grew and was pushed westward.
Something like that.