Jim Piat
Fri, 29 Sep 2006 16:25:05 -0700
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Dear Bill,
As always I enjoyed your straightforward,
informative and wise comments. You have a way of keeping my feet on the
ground without destroying the fun of having my head in the clouds (to pick
one of the nicer places I've been accused of having my
head). I hope I did not create the impression that I devalued
any of the methods of fixing belief that Peirce described. I don't think
he intended to devalue them either. Nor did I mean to put science on a
pedestal. Not that it needs any commendation from me. I think
science is a formalization of the method of common sense which (to
borrow Joe's apt description) includes the distinctive elements
of each method. I believe that common sense is the way all
humans in all cultures have at all times represented and participated in
the world. We are all symbolic creatures and we all feel, will,
and interpret the world with symbols whether we call one another
primitive or advanced. I
attribute the sometimes horrors we do not to common sense but to a degenerate
form of representation that tries to treat the relational
symbolic world as comprised of discrete unrelated things. A form with
no feeling is a phantom, an other with no resistence does not exist and thought
that does not mediate is empty verbiage. The danger arises out of
our ability to misrepresent. We are all fundmentally alike and cut
from the same cloth. LOL--I'm
of a mind to go off on a swoon about the commonality of humanity but I fear
getting called on giving facile lip service to something I don't
practice.
Oh, the feral children. Hell, I don't
even believe the accounts. Well I should say I don't believe the
labels. Most of them sound to me like accounts of severely retarded
children who have been hidden away by families. Countless severely retarded
children have grown up in relatively caring institutions with the same
outcome. But I agree with your point, IF a child could survive past
a week alone in the woods or a closet, the child still
would not develop language etc -- It's the preposterous
IF that makes me dismiss these as crack pot accounts that have
somehow emerged from the tabloids for 15 mins of manistream press. And
occassionally the attention of some devoted researcher who ends up wanting
to adopt the child. But I don't mean to be cruel. Fact is, I
don't know the detailed facts of any of these
cases. And I digress
--- unaccustomed as I am to public digressions
Best wishes,
Jim Piat
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