All good questions, Luke, especially the first one. Your post immediately brings to mind the famous Oliver Wendell Holmes quote about the simplicity on the other side of complexity. My synthetic mind is always trying to find the simple cognitive pathways through complexity, and while I do worry at times about reductionism, I also perceive the value of stripping away the noise to create a simplified mental model that opens the door to engaging with a complex landscape ... as you say a useful initial step. Would be good though to create something of a taxonomy of simplification processes and outputs to put some language and structure about what our minds do by instinct.
I do however note the dispiriting reality that much of what passes for social theory is not simple, and certainly not fit for purpose as an instrument for imagination and emancipation. We probably also need some criteria to help distinguish the good from the bad ...
All good questions, Luke, especially the first one. Your post immediately brings to mind the famous Oliver Wendell Holmes quote about the simplicity on the other side of complexity. My synthetic mind is always trying to find the simple cognitive pathways through complexity, and while I do worry at times about reductionism, I also perceive the value of stripping away the noise to create a simplified mental model that opens the door to engaging with a complex landscape ... as you say a useful initial step. Would be good though to create something of a taxonomy of simplification processes and outputs to put some language and structure about what our minds do by instinct.
I do however note the dispiriting reality that much of what passes for social theory is not simple, and certainly not fit for purpose as an instrument for imagination and emancipation. We probably also need some criteria to help distinguish the good from the bad ...