Robert wrote:
2. What IS a "powerful idea", and how does it become powerful?
I'm particularly interested in asking whether ideas get their power from abstraction (finding similarity in structure), or generalization (finding similarity in features) - or from both.
Extrapolating just a little bit from contemporary science studies (people like Bruno Latour, John Law, etc.), I think it's possible to define "powerful" as "well-connected," in the sense that those ideas which are capable of doing the most work, of carrying you farthest, are the ones that are strongly connected to others -- the process part of experimental science is all about establishing connections. Conversely, powerful ideas are the ones which allow you to *make* connections, to explain thing x in terms of thing y, or draw analogies, or generalize; good theories do that.
I think the "connectedness" notion is a little less unwieldy than "abstraction," which can be hard to pin down precisely. Things can be very well connected while remaining very concrete.
- John Maxwell jmax@sfu.ca NEW PHONE #: 778-782-5287
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