Getting There and Falling Short: an Interdisciplinary Symposium on Complex Content

The interdisciplinary symposium Getting There and Falling Short looks at some of the difficulties surrounding the idea of complex content. The novelty here is that we consider the issue from the perspective of various disciplines: cognitive, philosophical, mathematical and literary. What are the “coping strategies” of each field? How do their own modes of criticism take up the idea of complex content?

The event takes two different entry points into the issue of content: first, the idea within the enactive/extended paradigm of cognitive science that our access to the world is unmediated by internal representations. A second side is instantiated by ineffability and complexity, linguistic slippage and the fallacy of conceptual finality; horizons of intelligibility imposed by the failure of mathematical languages to pick out canonical structures in a unique way; and finally the incommensurability between the systemic nature of complex systems and the narrative forms through which we try to represent them. All of these issues speak of what our various representational and conceptual systems cannot achieve. How do the different disciplines deal with the dynamic of getting there and falling short? What are the processes by which each field of study conceptualises what it cannot reach?