Abstract

GAEKJU, a studio in the RISCON family, publishes synthetic scenes of talk at work, which it describes as written for comparison and not testimony from the trades they show. This short study reads eleven of these scenes, all synthetic, chosen by one rule: every synthetic scene of the kind of talk GAEKJU calls idle talk whose evidence and readings carry no count. The study asks what a scene written for comparison can show about idle talk at work, and how it marks what it has made up. It reads the scenes through the debate on imagined cases: the thought experiment in science and in ethics, and the vignette in survey, experimental and interview research. It finds three things. Each scene says what it changed in the new setting and what it does not answer, and what it shows is a limit of counting talk by words, not a fact about any trade. The longer scenes then judge an ending that their own written talk supplies, while the shorter ones decline to. And every test the scenes propose lies in a record that no written scene can hold. The contribution is a reading of a third kind of imagined case, one with no respondents, written to find where a measure stops.