Alphabetical Thinking
I have been organising
my thoughts alphabetically for many years. Emptying out a cupboard, I found a
sheet of foolscap, dated 1991, with a draft list of chapter headings for a book
to be written titled Things to Think
With: One Hundred Powerful Ideas. I liked Claude Lévi-Strauss’s phrase choses bonnes à penser (things good to
think with) the moment I first encountered it and I have made repeated use of the
idea. On this 1991 occasion my alphabetical list of chapter headings reads as
follows, now properly alphabetised and numbered by a click on Word. The
material in square brackets has been added to clarify what I was thinking
about:
1. Alienation
[Marx]
2. Analytic/Synthetic
[philosophy of language]
3.
Aufhebung
[Hegel]
4. Background
/ Foreground
5. Bad
Faith
6. Believing
that “p” is true
7.
Bricolage
[Lévi-Strauss]
8. Catastrophe Theory
9. Collective
/ Distributive Agreement [theories of convention and mutual belief]
10. Collective
Goods [Mancur Olson etc]
11. Cyclical
Majority (Condorcet) [also Kenneth
Arrow]
12. Deconstruction
[Derrida]
13. Double
Bind [Gregory Bateson]
14. Emic
/ Etic [as in phonemic / phonetic]
15. Equality
of Opportunity
16. Fact
/ Value Distinction
17. Falsifiability
[Popper]
18. Family
Resemblance [Wittengstein]
19. Functionalism
[ as in sociology]
20. Games,
Theory of
21. Geisteswissenschaften [
the human sciences in the German tradition ]
22. Genre
23. Gestalt
[ as in Psychology]
24. Gödel’s
Theorem
25. Good
Enough Mother [Winnicott]
26. Grammar
27. Ideology
28. Indifference
Curve Analysis [as in marginalist economics]
29. Intentional
Object [philosophy of mind and language]
30. Intertextuality
[various literary theorists]
31. Intuition
/ Introspection [ as in linguistics]
32. Irreversibility
33. Language
34. Making
Strange [as in Wordsworth, Shklovsky and Brecht]
35. Marginal
Utility [in economics]
36. Modularity
[ as in modular theories of mind – Chomsky, Fodor etc]
37. Natural
Selection [Darwin]
38. Necessary
and Sufficient [conditions as in philosophy]
39. Optimality
[ as in public goods theories – Olson, Elster etc]
40. Original
Position [John Rawls]
41. Overdetermination [Freud, Althusser]
42. Paradigm
/ Episteme [ Kuhn, Foucault]
43. Personal
is Political
44. Possible
Worlds [analytical philosophy]
45. Pragmatics
46. Prisoner’s
Dilemma [theory of games]
47. Producer
Capture [ libertarian political theory]
48. Public
Sphere [Habermas]
49. Relevance
[Grice, Sperber and Wilson]
50. Repressive
Tolerance [Marcuse]
51. Rigid
Designator [Saul Kripke]
52. Semiotic
/ Semantic [Julia Kristeva]
53. Structure
54. Surplus
of Meaning [literary theory]
55. Synchrony
[Saussure]
56. “The
Real” [probably Hegel]
57. Theodicy
[the problem of evil]
58. Transference
[ Freud]
59. Transformation
[Chomsky]
60. Transitional
Object [Winnicott]
61. Turing
Machine [Alan Turing]
62. Twin
Earth [analytical philosophy; Putnam]
63. Uncertainty
Principle [Heisenberg]
64. Unconscious
[Freud]
65. Underdetermination
[Kuhn, Quine, Feyerabend]
66. Uniformitarianism
[Lyell’s Geology]
67. Unintended
Consequences [social and economic theory]
68. Universal
Grammar [ Chomsky]
69. Zero-Sum
[Theory of Games]
The idea was to get to 100 ideas but as you see I
only got to 69. The book never got written, but many of the ideas are to be
found through my writing, past and present. When I look at the list now, I
think it can serve as a very short and fairly honest intellectual biography.
