I have, too many times, tried to post on here only to work into something that was beyond the requirements and that should have been posted in the essay forum. Therefore, on this one, I will work in an outline form loosely based on Wittgenstein:
Briccolege, as defined by Claude Levi-Strauss, is that natural human tendency to work with what is at hand. It is about randomly putting things together until we find something that works for us -that resonates and seduces. We basically do it here since we are always working with the knowledge we have at hand, repeating ourselves, and rearranging as we work towards that which anchors our thought (a Point of Capture) or, to put it in Frost’s words, offers us that momentary stay against confusion.
1.There is something about the mind that likes juxtapositioning one thing on the other.
1.1Take dreams, for instance: what does the mind do in the process but randomly pick out one qualia and juxtaposition it with another randomly picked qualia? And doesn’t it do this until it finds a pattern that resonates with it and then retains that pattern?
1.12 This tendency finds support in the theory that dreaming is a product of mental activity while sleeping and that it participates in the process of brain plasticity.
1.2We see a similar process at work in the creative act. What does the artist do but randomly fuse the little things that give them pleasure and that they have collected until they find juxtapositions that work together?
2.We tend to think in a linear stream of consciousness while working with cognitive maps that are, in a mental sense, 3D. The analogy would be achieving a collage effect via montage.
2.1 The only explanation for this is that while we experience thinking in a linear stream of consciousness manner, we still have the individual elements of that cognitive map in the physiological infrastructure of the brain.
2.2 The analogy would be an old CRT TV that produces an image by scanning the screen of the outer glass of the tube. In other words, it produces a 3D effect through a linear process.
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Still, this 3D effect comes about to us through the linear effect of the stream of consciousness: a process of seeing different things in different places: yet connected in a way that can be approached from multiple angles.
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Logic, reason, and the scientific method are little more than methods of adding to individual briccolege. They are the means by which we accumulate individual units of thought to later fuse into our mental constructs, as well as a means of checking and testing the process of construction. They are diagnostic in nature. Regardless of how methodical, the approach is always a form of briccolege.
Conclusion: It may be briccolege that facilitates this effect that, in a sense, makes more concrete what thought, or the stream of consciousness, cannot approach directly.
However, this is a not a prescriptive argument. To argue that this is a epistemology we should follow would be to fall into a naturalistic fallacy. It is merely to point out the natural process that may underlie all creative and intellectual endeavors -a description as I see it.