William asks: I 'm a little confused re the statements you provide. Are both from Harris? Is one your own, or Damasio's? Everything following my colon there is by Harris. I can't say I'm a champion of Damasio, but I felt Harris's dismissing remark was a bad reflection on Harris, not Damasio.
I haven't read Harry Collins's "Rethinking Expertise", but I've read an interview with him that I suspect might spur many scholars to protest his narrow usage of 'knowledge': idea of "tacit knowledge"things you can do but can't describe how. Riding a bike is the best-known example, but both everyday life and contributions to technical domains depend on tacit knowledge. Then I myself protest Harris's and (forgive me, William) your assumption that, for example, the word 'art' and related terms have mind-independent "referents". I realize my protest is too unclear in so short an assertion. In a subsequent posting I'll try to make it more comprehensible. 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. ----- 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.
