I think one of the biggest gaps in our understanding of human affairs is that we have no theory of what it really means for ideas, or views, or attitudes, or feelings, about distinct objects to be in tension or in harmony with one another. We need some kind of a theory of this in order to make sense of ‘elective affinities’ talk in historical explanation, and in order to make sense of the idea of some view being logically consistent but ‘dialectically’ inconsistent, and in order to make sense of the kind of ‘structural dependence of social norm x on social norm y’ talk one finds in Theory, which though often questionable is often pretty interesting. (It might even be necessary for making sense of *some aspects* of the ‘reflective equilibrium’ talk that’s fundamental in a lot of analytic philosophy.)

One reason why I think that really making sense of this requires overcoming a big gap is that IMO it will require some synthesis of a ‘memetic’ perspective and a ‘logical’ perspective on ideas (or whatever). In all these cases we really are talking about a kind of soft consistency or soft inconsistency, not just about any kind of causal pathway whereby one idea (or whatever) helps or hinders the propagation of another — it’s not like the relationship between an interest in hats and insanity via mercury poisoning — but on the other hand I don’t think what we’re talking about can be separated from the actual population dynamics of ideas in a brain or in a society or in historical processes. After all it’s not a logical relationships between bodies of propositions, it’s a… something relationship between… forces (?!) related to bodies of propositions.

When I think about it intuitively, I imagine something like ideas (or whatever) having ‘natural’ trajectories towards generalization, towards making everything in their image so to speak, and ‘soft consistency’/’soft inconsistency’ having something to do with the difference between a set of ideas (or whatever) that are held in check from generalizing to the point of clashing with each other only by the grace of executive function fiat (or some social-process analogue of that), and a set of ideas (or whatever) that each… internally represent their relation to one another within a totality? And I imagine that this difference is closely tied to the memetic stability/instability of the set.

Obviously there are resources on this, and sometimes profound ones, to be found in Hegel, Derrida, Deleuze, but working any of this stuff into the scientific image, or even just the plain-English image, seems astonishingly hard.