William writes: > The projection I speak of is intuitive. It is not a decision. It is not > voluntary. As an intuitive projection it is a sensation, not language or > mathematics but a an emotive act resulting from sensory experience. > I don't dispute this. The white woman in the South a hundred years ago fearfully "saw" the big black guy walking toward her as a beast who wanted to rape her. Agreed: She hasn't "decided", "volunteered", to see him that way. Lovers "project on" their lovers a romantic idealization concocted in their minds. Voters susceptible to hero-worship "project on" their leader the "great man" image their minds have conjured, dawing on association from the white-washed historical idols of history plus maybe their memory of their excellent Dad.
What I project on someone may condition my reception of everything he does, but in truth it doesn't change the actual man one whit. That whole projection business is in my mind. How many times have we heard and essentially agreed with a line like, "For God sakes, when are you going to see him for what he is?" And when we utter a line like that, we're not claiming the other person's "vision" is voluntary. Exactly what we're trying to do is put more associations in his mind in the hope we'll finally change his receiving apparatus. > "In this way I do disagree with Cheerskep's extreme subjectivity." > It's not obvious to me that there's any intrinsic disagreement between us here. As for honestly believing that an extra-mental object "has" "meaning", "is" "meaningful", I don't for a minute deny that many people so believe. They look at something, and notion arises in their minds. It must have "come from" the object! No -- all that came from the object was raw sense data. It's the mind that associates, construes. > And Brady has brought up the problem, too. If we can't know what is > going on in another's brain when we say such and such, then why is it that most > people are able to communicate rather successfully, even when they represent > differing cultures, class,m education, motives, etc? The answer is intuitive > projection, a way of involuntarily pretending that the objective world has > meaning. > I should initially say I won't comment on that last sentence because it illuminates nothing for me. Again and again I've said that our various modes of communication are "serviceable". One of caring housekeepers, an Indonesian, just came into my room, pointed toward the bedroom, put two palms together, and tilted her head against them. I "got" that she wanted me to know my wife was now asleep. What I'd urge is that we also consider why the opposite occurs. If we showed an Andean sheep-herder this exchange, it would convey effectively nothing. It's no good on one hand to cite "cultural experience" as building associations into us that enable us to derive "meaningful" notion from oft-experienced stuff -- beginning with vocabulary in our language -- and on the other hand to imply that no, it's not a matter of our being subjected to repeated juxapositions in experience that enlarges our inventory of memory that we then associate with new raw experience -- it's that the object -- word, phrase, painting, swastika -- HAS "meaning" independent of any associating the mind does. ************** It's only a deal if it's where you want to go. Find your travel deal here. (http://information.travel.aol.com/deals?ncid=aoltrv00050000000047)
