Living in Detail

Alfred North Whitehead is meant to have said: “We think in generalities, but we live in details.”

And a cheap jibe would be: "'Detail' is a general term." What kind of thing, after all, is a 'detail'?

I can say to you 'I unlocked my front door', and you believe that you know what I mean. You don't need to know the colour of my door, or the particular awkwardness of my lock, or even the street that I live in, in order to understand this statement. But I have all these things in my mind when I make it. I don't strip them away to the bare sense that you make of it.

You might even imagine your own front door, which I have never seen ...

If I said to you "Please unlock my front door", you would, of course, need more information - information that might look a bit like (but not be identical to) the colour of the door, the name of the street etc. that I have in my mind when I think about doing it.

If I'm giving you more 'details' I am bringing things into the 'generality' realm that weren't there before (so far as our conversation is concerned).

This possibility of exploration - bringing the 'details' into the 'generalities' - may look like it can be completed, but it obviously cannot. At the very least, it would take a very long time, and be very boring and pointless, to try to make a disciplined task of this. And even where novelists or poets pretend to this kind of project, they will still select and present - generally in a way that has, itself, semantic content.

Also, our direct experience is that something is always left behind, and something new is represented, in each telling. It feels like an 'open' process, not one that can be completed ...

The activity of conversation has, of course, a 'detail' aspect - it appears to be (but cannot be reduced to) a game of noises, postures, gestures, marks ... or the absence of these when they are 'expected'. Small particular neurological 'surprises' that capture our attention and prompt a prediction, a response.

This also could be mapped in increasing detail without producing a 'final' representation. Our semantic networks are also, necessarily, 'open'. This isn't to say that we 'don't know what we're saying' - it's just that we may discover implications after the fact, or even discover that we need to acknowledge an unexpected implication in order to remain intelligible to our interlocutors.

No machine will ever do this the way that a human being does. Human beings make machines - directly or conceptually - partly by artificially constraining or ignoring exactly the representational and semantic 'openness' that is unavoidable in real conversation; by pretending that it's only the things we can presently be sure about that really count; by imagining that the Kripke/Goodman paradox does not predict the generation of monsters by 'rule-following' machines.