Our Philosophical Method
We can call our technical doctrine "verisimilism", "literary calculus" or "empirical mathematics applied to texts". It is a technique rather than a theory. A theory is a set of rigorous demonstrations concerning the same subject and forming a kind of system, although open to the possibility of further discoveries. A technique is a body of sound knowledge of the same subject, obtained by trial and error. Technology is the application of a theory to the production of physical objects. Certain techniques, such as the making of stone tools, produce physical objects. Others, such as fine art, lead to the production of objects that conjure up aspects of beauty and ugliness, which are not very material. Others, such as writing, give us objects that our minds use, in particular to preserve knowledge over distances and ages. Verisimilism is thus like writing since it is a technique which does not directly produce physical objects but which is useful for knowledge. The difference between it and writing is merely that instead of having been obtained only by trial and error, verisimilism comes from the diversion of a theory towards a tentative process. The theory is that of probability, the foundations of which were laid by Stevin, Galileo, de Fermat, Pascal, the Bernouilli brothers and Bayes. It does not prove possible to apply this theory to text interpretation and so an empirical imitation of it is devised. This is no longer a theory but a philosophically based technique with the aim of enriching linguistic or poetic knowledge, literary analysis or commentary methods for mainly imaginative written or oral works.
Michel Magnen