The title for this first panel is “thinking worlds across media” which, of course, is intended to provide an umbrella under which to think about similarities and connections among the talks, about talking points and bridges that would compliment the respective presentations; but also to provoke discussions around fault lines and incompatibilities of the participants respective conceptual schemes.
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Why worlds?
It’s the question I am left with as we wrap up the first set of talks at the Practices of World Building Conference. As Marta Boni pointed out in her introduction, and Marie-Laure Ryan echoed in her presentation, the idea of worlds, though hardly new, is increasingly shaping how authors conceptualize their works and how audiences consume these works. But does it naturally follow that scholars interested in these works should take up the idea of worlds as an object of study in and of itself?
Understanding the practices of world building can help us better understand the contemporary mediascape, and question the notions of unity and multiplicity, thresholds of textuality, authorship, and interactivity, among others.
I would like to make a few final comments on the blog for this section of what I hope will remain an ongoing concern.
Haidee Wasson’s blog entry states what I believe we, at ARTHEMIS, all think: history and theory need not be antagonistic. And when Mark Betz looked at “reading against the grain” — a notion that has informed much theory since the late 60s — historically, he showed that there is a lot to be gained by looking at theory historically.
In 1977 Paul Ricoeur published an essay in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association entitled "The Question of Proof in Freud's Psychoanalytic Writings" where he describes what constitutes a fact in Freudian psychoanalysis.
Martin Lefebvre's recent reply suggests that he might agree with Stephen Jay Gould when he calls religion and science "non-overlapping magisteria." Citing Ricoeur, Lefebvre argues that psychoanalysis and cognitive science are non-overlapping; the former makes claims or refers to facts about phenomena that the latter does not. Neither Gould nor Ricoeur has persuaded me on this matter. Which is to say, I am open to persuasion, but need a more developed argument that adequately considers objections.
Ockham's maxim is spelled: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. The meaning of which being that it is bad scientific method to introduce, at once, independent hypotheses to explain the same facts of observation. In this regard, I did respond to Noel Carroll's question about parsimony (Ockham's razor) in calling forth Ricoeur's point that the facts that psychoanalysis seeks to explain are different from those that cognitive science or neuroscience seek to explain. They are simply not the same facts.
Thank you to Matthew for his generous feedback in another post. I'd like to reply to the claim that cinephilia is "missing" from my argument.
This is partly a continuation of my last entry on Burnett's presentation, but I wanted to separate the two because my concern is for a concept within (some) cinema studies that is greatly susceptible to misuse: