A New App - MojoPad

[entropydave (David)]

In your analogy is Tinderbox the kitchen, the oven, or the bread dough?

By chance, I have two ovens in my kitchen: one uses convective heat, the other radiant heat. Each bakes bread differently, even if the dough is the same. Knowing this, I choose which to use according to what I think might work best.

I’ve never had any interest in Obsidian or Todoist, and Scrivener did not agree with me. Lots of apps look like lots of other apps. Tinderbox reminds me of HyperCard, but is not Hypercard. Sometimes small differences in an app, make an outsize difference to the work done with it.

Seven years is not so long to write a work of philosophy, or indeed of literature. If you think you see the path to where you want to go, motivation can be easy. Other times, it is a wonder or confusion that abides with you, like a stone in your shoe, until eventually you take off your shoe.

In any case, knowing the details, I don’t think it is right to say Wittgenstein spent seven years writing the Tractatus. Rather fewer years, even if he wrote down what he called his grundegedanke very early. He wasn’t working on the Tractatus until he conceived the project of deriving the general form of a proposition.

There is an interesting question here, that relates tangentially to Tinderbox. Keeping a notebook is work, but it is not, in my view, a work. A work involves a try (un coup d’essai) guided by a purpose (≈fin). This comes up when trying to understand someone’s thinking: When considering what weight to give to the precipitate of the the process (e.g. the notes made) and what weight to give to the products (e.g. the work produced on top of the process). Wittgenstein made a lot of notes, but for the Tractatus he selected and assembled them to a purpose. The same is true for the Blue Book. Both have a unity that collections of notes do not—and when those notes are collected by an editor, the work becomes a hybrid or co-authored one.

I like the analogy of “information gardening” but I’ve always felt it quite limited, because in real gardens the garden also grows of itself. A gardener is in a responsive relationship to the garden, even though he or she may intervene with a felling or a planting. For me at least, Tinderbox is the kitchen.

[dominiquerenauld]

@entropydave

In your analogy is Tinderbox the kitchen, the oven, or the bread dough?

In my experience, a Tinderbox file is something like – it’s just an analogy – a kitchen. I mean: an interior place with a good temperature or a sweet envelope and both a dough I could infinitely knead while, as you probably know, a dough does not need to be indefinitely treated in this way, but the fact is that it is very enjoyable to do it. The oven is certainly Scrivener, but up to a certain point, I tend to use Tinderbox too with some projects I can handle in this way and particularly when they need a certain amount of tags or attributes.

@entropydave

I don’t think it is right to say Wittgenstein spent seven years writing the Tractatus.

On this point, I follow the indications of Frank Plumpton Ramsey, which mentioned “7 years” (Wittgenstein Correspondance philosophique, Gallimard, 2015, page 314), but I’m not a specialist of Wittgenstein. A confused admirer, at best.

@entropydave

There is an interesting question here, that relates tangentially to Tinderbox. Keeping a notebook is work, but it is not, in my view, a work.

I agree with you, but as you know, when you transform or extend some of your notes into complementary notes – and using the Outline view is particularly useful –, you get something that, step by step, takes the allure of a draft. In the way I keep my journal with Tinderbox, for instance, the attribute $Journal de recherche allows me to gather a lot notes and in the whole, those notes outline something like an ordered development.

Anyway, it is delightful to find one’s way of making bread, whatever the tools you use.

[entropydave (David)]

Wittgenstein could be a bit peculiar when speaking about his own writing. A story illustrates the point with some connection to Tinderbox. Wittgenstein told a prospective publisher for the Tractatus that his book consisted of “two parts”: the written part and the unwritten part. And, he said, it was the unwritten part that was the most important. (He could say this because he claimed that in every meaningful sentence there is something said, and something “shown”.)

I think perhaps the same can be said about a collection of notes in Tinderbox. There are the notes and then what the notes might reveal. The process of incremental formalisation—rightly, so often stressed as a valuable way to use Tinderbox—might be thought of as both creating and revealing what lies unwritten in the notes. Or perhaps better, making what is unwritten written.

(I can’t resist mentioning here too the supposed and so-called “unwritten doctrines” (agrapha dogmata) by Plato—unwritten because they resisted formalisation.)