Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Hamlet, as described in De la sérendipité dans la science, la technique, l'art et le droit : Leçons de l'inattendu:

«un expérimentateur qui met en une situation en abyme (une pièce dans la pièce) dans laquelle il pourra observer les réactions de son oncle pour trouver la preuve de son innocence ou de sa culpabilité. Comme le signale Merton, cette reconstruction n’est pas loin de la méthod de l’exérimentateur dans le domaine scientifique.»

This reminds me again of scattering theory, and the other flavors of the i → S → o model that we've been talking about.  An experimental situation is mise en abyme and typically also in medias res, that is to say: it's a small-scale situation that is bounded by events that are already in progress. When we talk about "phatics" it seems that we are not only talking about the scatterer S or even an experiment i → S → o that takes place in the abstract, but rather, a relationship between S and S′, where S′ is the "frame story".

Alas, poor Maurits...

With this image of "sphere projections" and possibly more abstract "sphere transformations" in mind, here are some words from Douglas Hofstadter:

«Much like the mathematical concepts just cited, our ordinary concepts are also structured in a sphere-like manner, with the most primary examples forming the core and with less typical examples forming the outer layers. Such sphericity imbues any concept with an implicit sense of what its stronger and weaker instances are. But in addition to slowly building up richly layered spheres around concepts (a process that stretches out over years), we also quickly build spheres around events or situations that we experience or hear about (this can happen in a second or two, even a fraction of a second). [...] [S]urrounding every event on an unconscious level is what I have referred to elsewhere as a commonsense halo or an implicit counterfactual sphere, so called because it consist of many related, usually counterfactual, variants of the event.» Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, p. 71

The implicit counterfactual sphere reminds me of what Rasmus was talking about with the topic of "implicit questions".  To me this suggests the nested, or, as Rasmus was getting at, onion-like, nature of contexts and frame stories.  Perhaps the implicit questions are -- sort of like Walton's "critical questions" -- the steps by which we move between S and S′.

Finally, thinking about counterfactuals, this caught my attention:

«Whoever wants to resist the disruption of the hitherto known economy of illusions, has to be something other than what had been known as human to date -- a surviver vaccinated against the madness of the truth.  [...] Does not everything point to the idea that according to Nietzsche the bad news possesses an edge oven the good news that cannot be compensated for, whereas all attempts to give primacy to the latter are based only on momentary vigor and temporary self-hypnosis.  Yes, isn't Nietzsche thereby exactly the paradigmatic thinker of modernity insofar as it is defined by the impossibility of catching up with the real through counter-factual corrections? Is modernity not defined by a consciousness that runs ahead of the monstrousness of facts, for which discourses about art and human rights only ever consist in compensation and first aid.»  Peter Sloterdijk, Nietzsche Apostle, pp. 41, 43

The first part of this book documents a quite striking critique of language as basically being a matter of bragging.  The µ-function of usual language is somehow supposed to en-voice a posture of confidence and of dominance, but, perversely, also a place of vengeance and compensation.

If Nietzsche is a paradigmatic thinker of modernity, maybe Hamlet is the prototype.  There's something about the sense that no matter what we throw into S, we are going to get "less" back -- the idea that every experiment is wrapped up with an entropic evening-out and mixing.  However, the idea that we could beat this system -- over time and collectively -- isn't a counter-factual dream, but a reasonably sober observation on the way things have evolved up to now.

The temporal features matter.  In the first place, we are not just talking about a "relation" between S and S′, that is, some static thing that could be pointed to.  To put it another way, S and S′ are embedded, together, in another larger context T.  Because T has a temporal structure, it is possible to run an experiment i/S/o with the property that one agent knows i and the result o is only available much later on to another agent.  In a typical scattering scenario one should know at least two of the elements of {i, S, o} in order to deduce something about the third component.  If these sorts of long-range experiments are going to be interpretable, it seems like some sort of error-correcting code or shibboleth needs to be used.

Here, of course, the word "Nietzsche" works quite well.

Individualism [...] is to be understood not as an accidental or avoidable current in the history of mentalities, but rather, as an anthropological break which first made possible the emergence of a type of human being surrounded by enough media and means of discharge to be able to individualize counter to its "societal preconditions." [...]  Individualism is capable of alliances with all sides, and Nietzsche is its designer, its prophet. [...] [F]or him, at stake is not only to throw products on today's market, but instead to create the market wave itself, by which the work is belatedly carried to success. ibid. pp. 66-67

If we believe all of that then this is this sort of thing that could makes Nietzsche part of the vanguard of a "phatic turn".