Using naive, positivistic literalism, exploiting its apparent contrasts from the convoluted developments characterising philosophical specialisations and their discourses, is invariably an anchoring appeal to common intuitions. But there can be different reasons behind such an appeal.
In scientific demonstration, discursive convolution has a close relation to the teleology of ‘results’; these ‘results’ being a kind of cartography of future immediacies and reliable regularities; such teleological methodologies, no matter how wild their interim, empirical excursions might be, are always conditioned by ‘knowing’ obligations to arrive at the mappable effects of ‘demonstration’, in the construction, or constructive extension, of future commonalities and their eventual, given ‘intuitions’.
The social power of scientific discourse is ultimately contingent on the association with its applications and technological effects on common intuition; usually in ritualised forms of mass distribution, as prodigiously numerous, altared ‘engines of demonstration’, or engineered commodities. Under the signs of various scientific laws, priests administer these engines of habitual ritual, for pricely offerings.
But this perpetual festival of scientific demonstrations, though it exercises considerable challenges, rarely questions the utilitarian assumptions and habits it services. Even less, does it question the common intuitions, from which those utilitarian assumptions and habits arise. Within the confines of the technosensorium, naive, positivistic literalism, can continue on in the sphere of an l.c.d. (lowest common denominator), ‘user friendliness’, relatively unhindered by surrounding sophistications, which anyway have been largely constituted in its service.