Formalism

I have been making two arguments simultaneously, and I am increasingly aware that they pull in different directions. The first argument, developed across the formal apparatus posts and the statechart...

Working through the formal apparatus, the institutional critique, and the politics of formalism, it becomes apparent that the concept of "state" in "state space" has been operating across the series...

The previous posts in this series built a formal apparatus - conceptual spaces, state spaces, graphs, promises, statecharts, grammars - and then applied it to a critique of public sector...

This post was originally written in October 2023. It has since been revised to add the "Decomposition Is Not Grammar" section, examining what the six originally proposed structural components achieve...

The previous posts have built up a layered picture: state spaces as the foundation for reasoning about systems; conceptual spaces as geometric vector spaces for representing meaning; graphs as the...