The key word is CONTRASTING. Whatever it is we discuss, we contrast it to that we do not discuss. Therein lies a great danger and opportunity. Contrasting that what is a part of our knowledge with that which we do not know we can get used to the idea of foreground and background. We utilise trhe foreground and get lost in details among the varied components of the foreground. This is not the fruitful way of thinking.
It is much more productive to consider how we delineate that what we know against that we do not know, what we suppose to be self-evident among the symbols that we perceive in the foreground, what is that what we disregard, pushing it into the background, how we can gain insight by switching between foreground and background. Then we discover how we fool ourselves and how we create the puzzles which we work hard afterwards to solve. There is no way around the fact that we were duped - at the tender age of 6 years - into thinking the differences to be irrelevant and to consider the similarities to be relevant. The differences are as relevant to a complete description of the whole as the similarities. (I have bored you now long ago with the repeated insistence that it is a detail which IS important which differentiates 3+3 from 2+4 or 5+1. ) Making up - wishing for - an intellectual background in which only the bright-coloured similarities attract our attention and we neglect the small, grey, insignificat details of differences as irrelevant GUARANTEES continued empty trashing of words. The relevance lies not among the details within the contents of the foreground but in the relation of the foreground to the background. The difference between us and animals is that we can exchange foreground and background and discuss how the world changes - in our perception, not really. We can step back from the artefacts of our perceptional apparatus and try to see white on black and not only black on white. Then we could discuss how the world presents itself if we use TWO ways of reading the mixture of black/white patterns. That what is the collection of what we know and can know is delineated by the rules by which we contrast the foreground to the background. K. 2009/10/7 Loet Leydesdorff <l...@leydesdorff.net> > > S: The difference between us and animals is basically language. > > > S: Why not 'check out' 'Biosemiotics'? > > > > STAN > > Dear Stan, > > I don't understand the "bio" in this. If we distinguish between two systems > of reference for knowledge -- discursive knowledge to be attributed to > interhuman communication, and personal knowledge to be attributed to human > psychologies -- the latter one is biologically embedded by the body, but > the > former is only embedded by human minds (which are of course embodied). > Knowledge can then also be globalized and become person-independent. In > other words: discursive knowledge is generated bottom-up, but control can > be > top-down. > > Shouldn't it therefore be "psycho-semiotics"? "Bio-semiotics" is only valid > for personalized knowledge. (For the good order, let me hasten to add that > the two systems of knowledge -- the interpersonal and the personal ones -- > are reflexive to each other.) > > Best wishes, > > > Loet > ________________________________ > > Loet Leydesdorff > Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR), > Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam. > Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-20- 525 3681 > l...@leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/ > > > _______________________________________________ > fis mailing list > fis@listas.unizar.es > https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis >
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