I 'm a little confused re the statements you provide. Are both from Harris? Is one your own, or Damasio's?
The first paragraph is ok with me since all agree that neurology is still on the threshold figuring out the brain and its myriad neural pathways. As for the second paragraph, I fail to see why the mechanism of a clock is Not analogous to a set of directions. Those directions are translated into gears and springs (in analog clocks anyway) and thus the working of the clock is explicit. Very explicit. No magic involved. No tacit knowledge either. If Harris said that then I'm curious about his reasoning. And if the last sentence is not clear at all. What phenomenon is being referred to? I don't think I'm touting Harris as much as you think I am. I bring him up only because he addresses the very issues that preoccupy us on the list. I'm always a bit suspicious when people outside art -- and especially outside the completely nutty arena of art theory --claim to have a clear fix on things artwise. But I'm very impressed by Harry Collins (scientist) and his book on tacit and explicit knowledge and find his reasoning airtight, sentence by sentence, and deeply informative. Plus, I'm very impressed by Thierry de Duve's (art theorist/historian) new book, (in English) Greenberg Between the Lines. So much good material being published lately on art and aesthetics, suggesting a big shift in the making. I do like to think about Harris' idea that art is being subsumed by other disciplines, broken up into varied modes of practice within those disciplines. This is opposite the normative view that art is blurring the boundaries or is taking from other disciplines. My funny way of seeing this is an analogy with the medieval Vikings. The accepted picture is that they stormed ashore, stole all the pretty girls and loot, and went back to their ships to raid another place down the shore. In fact the Vikings came to stay and over time became assimilated by the peoples they invaded. Maybe it's the same in art. Art raids the disciplines and is absorbed instead. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, June 2, 2010 12:13:29 PM Subject: Re: book William -- Since I know your respect for Damasio, I think the following excerpt from Harris's brief intro to integrational linguistics may be of interest to you: It is sometimes said that a full understanding of our blinguistic knowledgeb (or, alternatively, a bscientificb understanding of language) will be impossible until advances in the study of the brain reveal exactly how the language faculty and other faculties are related. This is held out as one of the hopes for future bcognitive scienceb. 7c. Thinking of language in this way, however, rests on a misunderstanding. The mistake is analogous to supposing that the explanation of why a clock keeps good time must be that inside it there is a set of instructions for time-keeping. Research into brain mechanisms is interesting in its own right. But the fact that linguistic communication has already come to play such a central role in civilization without relying so far on any such research suggests that whatever human beings already know about language from their own experience is quite adequate for an bunderstandingb of the relevant phenomena.
