CONDUCTION

What are the consequences of differance at the more elaborated levels of discourse and logic? That is one of the motivating questions of teletheory. For now I must confine the answer to the question of logic, in which a new term is needed to replace induction, deduction, and even adduction, in order to identify the electronic properties of differantial reasoning. The term is conduction.... How should we conduct ourselves in the age of television? Electronically. How might we keep current in education? Electronically. Conduction, that is, carries the simple form of the pun into a learned extrapolation in theory. When we pose the ancient question of the ground of reason in the context of teletheory we think first of all of the pun that gives us the electronic ground. Ground: a conducting connection between an electric circuit or equipment and the earth or some other conducting body. Reasoning by conduction involves, then, the flow of energy through a circuit. Later we will want to discuss this flow in terms of transduction. For now we should confine ourselves to the short-circuiting of this flow, which gives us a new definition of truth as "a relationship of conduction between disparate fields of information," as illustrated here in the conduction between the vocabulary of electricity and that of logic. [Ulmer 63]