Construction, de-construction, re-construction

I am returning to Speranza's postings on these topics, having been distracted for a while.

One would think (being irreverent) that deconstruction is the kind of thing one might have to do between a construction and a re-construction, so that's my title.
Its not so of course.

I have had to refer to that wikpedia entry, since Speranza points out that the post I commented on was really motivated by consideration of deconstructionism.

And I like the idea.
That is, the idea I picked up from a fleeting glance at the wiki.

It sounds like deconstructionism is a kind of analysis (and "rational reconstruction" is also an analytic method).
It seems however to be an analysis motivated by the prejudice (not wholly without foundation) that any philosophical text (or is it any kind of text at all?) will, when we look closely enough, turn out to be ill-founded.
Not just wrong, but muddled and incoherent?

This points to another kind of paradox of analysis.
If a rational re-construction, (perhaps a formal model) is offered as a disambiguation of some historical text, and if we suppose from the advances in analysis which have taken place in the interim that we are now capable of constructing such things without serious risk of incoherence, then how can such a method provide an understanding of a theory which was in fact muddled and actually was incoherent or inconsistent?

The Aristotelian modelling which I undertook about a year ago under provocation from Speranza, Code and Grice (in reverse temporal order of unwitting complicity), provides a "classic" example, for I was there constructing multiple formal (and therefore, with the logical tools at hand, with a very high confidence of coherence) models approximating to a theory which on the face of it was probably wrong, if not actually inconsistent.
The most conspicuous sign of difficulty in the syllogism is in the existential fallacy, and this feature forced me to offer two kinds of model, both of which probably  misrepresented Aristotle by chosing different ways of fixing the original.  One by giving the syllogism a semantics which makes the existential fallacies non-fallacious, and the other kind by chosing a more credible account of the semantics and dropping the syllogisms which are not sound in that context.

It seems to me that the prejudice of deconstructionism often enough turns out to be true that a constructive analytic method should recognise the probability that the matters under analysis will not hang together and should offer a systematic approach to obtaining an informative analysis nonetheless.
For this a mere de-construction will not suffice, if by this we mean taking apart the original just far enough to show that it is ill-founded or inconsistent.

Typically a theory which does not fit together will have been based on some sound insights, each of which can be coherently articulated, but which prove difficult to combine sucessfully.  A proper analysis will find these coherent parts and will involve rational constructions of maximal consistent subtheories together with some account of why these cannot be combined together.

In my Aristotelian enterprise there is just an incling of such a method, but no systematic articulation.  For me, the methodological exposition is to hang around X-Logic, and this will involve an account of the role of rational re-construction which engages with the probability that the original material will prove to be, more or less, a mess.

Here I might say a little more about the distinction between construction and re-construction, which in my last comment on this depended on whether the construction is intended to explicate some prior material (re-construction), or whether it is an approach to some topic ab-initio (construction).
This is a wafer thin distinction, possibly not sustainable, and does not really impact on how the construction is undertaken, but only on how we judge the success of the construction.
Once again I refer to Carnap/Quine on analyticity, in which Quine insists against Carnap that a defined concept of analyticity must comply with precedent and that its compliance cannot be established, whereas Carnap specifically uses "explication" for the case that a definition is absolved from obligation to conform to precedent and is permitted to escape the paradox of analysis by providing a more precise and hence not quite the same meaning as any of the precedents.

RBJ