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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 2d

I don't know what to make of that, but worth thinking about more!

Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 2d

But a diagram resembles its object without looking like it, in terms of a shared relational structure. If I understand Weatherby right, his claim is that embeddings are diagrammatic, but LLMs move into the poetic, i.e. metaphor, since they are generative.

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 2d

good points! Though the notion of iconic, at least in a Peirician sense, is a bit wider than "look like," no? Peirce had three types of icons: image, diagram, metaphor. The image is based on "looking like."

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 2d

Cultural cartography in sociology, literary studies, and LLMs. Plus a bit of sociology of the sociology of culture. On coding , counting, and reading, and the possibility of something else.

open.substack.com/pub/thesilve...

Between Interpretation and the Machines

Cultural cartography across literary studies, sociology, and LLMs

open.substack.com

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 2d

Sociology has not escaped similar uncertainties. This post reflects on how the sociology of culture has grappled with these problems, via a brief history of its methodological debates from humanism to coding to computation.

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 2d

I have enjoyed this in a number of areas, but since I like reading and talking about books, it is especially the case with literary criticism and literary studies. Computational approaches raise the question of what exactly literary scholars do, or should be doing, with particular force.

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 2d

One fun thing about spending a little time on Substack is that you glimpse how other disciplines wrestle with foundational issues.
thesilverlining3.substack.com/p/between-in...

Between Interpretation and the Machines

Cultural cartography across literary studies, sociology, and LLMs

thesilverlining3.substack.com

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 9d

There is something to that, where the implied “we” seems very time bound, to 1990s mainstream sociology. I had a bit on that, which I didn’t include. Still, I think big ideas are important, often and especially in guiding assumptions behind our backs . Stay tuned a few weeks for a long post on that!

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 9d

While I have some serious criticisms of this and other claims, the book deserves major praise for raising such foundational claims in a forceful way that hopefully will inspire more discussion about them within and outside the field.

Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 9d

Martin’s central argument is that sociology built its foundations on only two of the three pillars of Kantian philosophy (the first and second critique) and was ever since plagued by the fact that it could not incorporate the third.

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 9d

In sociology, we don’t get monumental works of social theory by leading social theorists very often these days. So when we do, it is worth paying attention. In this post, I offer a critical analysis of John Levi Martin’s The True, the Good, and the Beautiful.

open.substack.com/pub/thesilve...

Comments on The True, The Good, and The Beautiful

Notes on John Levi Martin's Genealogy of Social Thought

open.substack.com

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 14d

www.aldaily.com

Check out the first entry

Arts & Letters Daily

Philosophy, literature, ideas, criticism, history, art, music from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

www.aldaily.com

Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 14d

open.substack.com/pub/thesilve...

Theory Visualization in the Social Sciences

Check out our special issue on the topic!

open.substack.com

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 16d

Hot takes on even hotter topics!

Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 16d

— A critical reflection on Robert Pippin’s reliance on the metaphor of “amphibians” to characterize the relationship between nature and culture.

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 16d

— A meditation on Thomas Mann’s phrase “objectivity is freedom” from Mann to comedy to CS Peirce’s theory of diagrams to Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man.
— A critique of overextending the notion of the Sociological Imagination.

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 16d

— A defence of Hegelian against Kantian aesthetics as a basis for general social theory, and an analysis of the problems from (implicitly and to some extent explicitly) relying on the latter, especially via the influence of Pierre Bourdieu

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 16d

— A response and extension to Joe Heath on Talcott Parsons’ concept of the Sick Role
— A defence of the 'f-word’ in sociology (functionalism)
— A critique of (some) functionalist theories of boredom

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 16d

Stay tuned in the coming weeks for:
— A review of John Levi Martin’s magisterial The True, the Beautiful, and the Good
— An essay on the problem of interpretation in sociology and literary studies, highlighting some inside baseball from the former that could be of interest to the latter

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 16d

-- satirical pieces on topics such as post-post-industrial tourism and the University of Chicago seminar
— Random observations on things like poker commentary speech patterns and small town tourist magazines, not to mention cognitive metaphors

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 16d

— Bits and pieces of my book-in-progress, Clout: social capitalism and the political sociality of influence
-- Summaries of my academic articles as they appear
— Reflections on the prospects of Artificial Social Intelligence and how to productively incorporate AI into university pedagogy

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 16d

Benefits of your free subscription include past features, such as:

— long essays on even longer texts, mostly novels, TV series, and #sociology, sometimes featuring extended discussions of obscure footnotes in mostly forgotten works of social theory.

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 16d

And then head over to Substack to subscribe to my newsletter
thesilverlining3.substack.com
or at the bottom of that link

Silver Linings | Dan Silver | Substack

Memos from the ivory basement. Click to read Silver Linings, by Dan Silver, a Substack publication. Launched 2 years ago.

thesilverlining3.substack.com

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 16d

Psyched and grateful that @thepointmag.bsky.social published my essay on reading Houellebecq through the lens of theatricality and absorption from Michael Fried.
Check it out there thepointmag.com/criticism/a-...

A Different Annihilation | The Point Magazine

The first novel I read by Michel Houellebecq was Elementary Particles, probably in 1999. I read it in German translation, toward the end of a year […]

thepointmag.com

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Dan Silver @dsilver432.bsky.social · 16d

starts from what I learned from Bob Dylan’s autobiography about how to stay out of mental ruts and ending with sociological aesthetics and diagrammatic social thought.

Intro is here:

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

(PDF) Introduction to Special Issue: Theory Visualization in the Social Sciences

PDF | On Sep 20, 2025, Stefan Bargheer and others published Introduction to Special Issue: Theory Visualization in the Social Sciences | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

www.researchgate.net

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