How does my autobiography, that is the story of my life, relate to the story of the World Wars? When I find myself with the inspiration to write about history, it’s usually either about myself, which is a zoomed-in perspective, or about the World Wars, which is a zoomed-out perspective. I have the confidence, perhaps specifically the individualistic confidence, to do foundational work and system building; a lot of people who came of age either during the First World War or earlier had that kind of confidence, and most people nowadays no longer have that kind of confidence. I do foundational work and system building (e.g., phenomenalist logic and linguistics), and when I go from my lone intellectual mode to a social-intellectual mode, with the goal being to get other people on board, I find that most people nowadays lack the foundational-work-system-building ambition; they’re too short-term practical.
The story of my life relates to the story of the World Wars in that the World Wars were part of the most recent boom in confidence. In the aftermath of the World Wars, which was in part the corresponding bust, foundational work and system building went out of fashion. If I want to understand why my work is old-fashioned, then I must look to the World Wars; I must make sense of that boom and bust.
My goals:
- Integrate Austrian economics with British empiricism. That is, put Mises and Hayek on a Humean foundation
- Use British-empiricist Austrian economics as a model science for linguistics
- Integrate logic and linguistics
- Ultimately:
- My foundational work would be phenomenalist…
- My system building would go from phenomenalist economics to phenomenalist logic and linguistics (with mathematics as a model for how to make notation for logic)…
- Before going onto the more experimental fields of health etc
- Tell the story of my life insofar as it’s relevant to why I have those goals, which again are out of fashion, zooming out throughout that micro story to the macro story of the World Wars insofar as they’ve relevant to why most people don’t have goals like that anymore. I can’t only do the work; I must (a) motivate myself to do the work, (b) motivate others to get on board, and (c) explain the mechanisms of demotivation so as to counteract those mechanisms. I must put the work in autobiographical and historical context.
I’m also interested not only in doing the kind of foundational work and system building that I agree with, disproving along the way the most popular and influential rival schools of thought, but also in explaining why those rival schools of thought got popular and influential. For example, physicalism unmoored from phenomenalism, which is what the late logical positivists argued for, is a rival school of thought. There’s constructing my phenomenalist system (with physicalism moored to it) and proving it, and there’s deconstructing their physicalist system (unmoored from phenomenalism) and disproving it. After that construction and then deconstruction, that is after those positive and then negative projects, there’s the transition from disembodied to embodied ideas; there are the ideas themselves, mine that I agree with and theirs that I disagree with, and then there’s why I came up with what I came up with and why they did something different.
In refuting physicalism unmoored from phenomenalism, I’m interested not only in explaining why the disembodied idea is wrong but also in embodying the idea in the people. Why did that idea come about, sociologically speaking?
To consolidate, my goals are to:
- Do a certain kind of project (with phenomenalist logic and linguistics being an example)
- Explain why a lot of people used to be on board with that kind of project but no longer are (whether they were right or wrong in their contributions)
- Refute the most popular and influential rival schools of thought (which are mostly old schools of thought because most people are no longer working on anything relevant)
- Explain why those rival schools of thought came about
That is:
- Zoom into the ideas, positive-constructively
- Zoom out to the people (autobiographically and historically as relates to motivation)
- Zoom into the ideas, negative-deconstructively
- Zoom out to the people again (historically as relates to error)