Two Phrases We Should Use More

Given how much we love to build abstractions from reality, and how much we later tend to confuse those abstractions with reality, it seems like we should use these two concepts from N. Katherine Hayles a lot more often:

Platonic Backhand

Hayles's term for the tendency to judge reality according to abstractions that were derived from it--i.e., the tendency to imagine that abstract forms of the real somehow preceded the real. From this perspective, reality appears like a collection of ideal forms that has gone noisy or static-y from the unfortunate, but essentially meaningless, clutter of individual circumstance.

Taken to an extreme, this habit leads to a worldview that prevents people from seeking new explanations for phenomena or data that don't fit pre-existing theoretical models of the world, because by definition anything that does not adhere to the model is just noise.

Platonic Forehand

This is a newer and less common problem, but an interesting one nonetheless. The Platonic Forehand is Hayles's term for the mistaken belief that any simplified model that can generate "noisy" results can be considered an accurate or realistic model: since reality is full of a bunch of noise, dirt, and static we don't understand, an abstract model that can also generate similar things we can't understand must be doing the same kind of work as the world, generating an equivalent world of its own.

Both moves are essentially idealistic--that is, they privilege abstractions over the irreducible complexity of the world itself. The former denigrates any complexity that doesn't fit the abstraction as not worth acknowledging; the latter sees that complexity, but deals with it by assuming that the only difference between its ideal world and the real world is some incomprehensible messiness, so that adding that messiness to its ideal thereby approximates "the real."

(That second one seems analogous to at least some of what goes on in certain kinds of gritty realism--the addition of "grit" to an abstract model of the world's workings essentially creates an acceptably "realistic" portrayal of the world.)

Now go forth, and accuse others of these nicely named errors!