The geometry of other people

Yes, the most famous thinker who is associated with this idea of architecture being also a social architecture is Foucault (which he discusses heavily in his book Discipline & Punish), but it really goes back to Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, where he describes the total system of Reason[0] that is required to make any judgement whatsoever as architectonic, and described these structures architecture.

[0]I say Reason, and not cognition, because for Kant cognition is empirical, and the purpose of the Critique of Pure Reason is to find the conditions of possibility for empirical reality to appear to us, so the total system that, in its reflection, can make those conditions appear to us (that is, the Critique itself), cannot, although it appears to the senses, actually itself be from within them--it must be purely intelligible. If you're curious how Kant solves this dilemma, well, so was everyone else, and the whole of the German, and then later anglo-american and French philosophical traditions have been remarkably pre-occupied with this question.

This is spatial / geometric intuition is useful not only to talk about social structures, but helps to organize almost any abstract idea.

In science, we talk of bridging fields, or filling in gaps, as if science is a landscape to be explored. Math is organised into topics that are linked together by “deep connections”.

Nice to see some cognitive semiotics surfacing on HN.

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