Robert C. wrote: What's curious is that he believes we get a better feel for reality and human nature by reading novels ( = made up stuff). I definitely wouldn't want to draw conclusions too strongly about life, the intellect or the mind that is based on the fictional behavior of fictional characters.
Oh, Lordy, Lordy, do I ever agree!!!!! However, as rights of privacy and control by research "participants" over their own data have become more and more stringent in NSF and NIMH guidelines, it has been increasingly difficult for psychologists to do naturalistic research that anybody would respect on human beings. The plain fact is that people behave differently when they know you are watching them, and give different results when they know what your research hypothesis is. They try to make you happy. The American Psychological Association has become so infused with political correctness that it would not surprise me to learn that the Gombe Stream Chimpanzees had been asked to sign wavers of their "participant" rights. In this context, I have proposed (for argument purposes, perhaps; with me, I can never tell the difference) that my psychology department consider novels as possible phd dissertations. The reasoning is that if we are forbidden from telling the truth about real live human beings, we could at least tell the truth about fictional ones. The problem is, of course, what it means to tell the truth about a fictional character. Now, I don't want to hear from the non realists on this one. If the idea of truth doesn't have any grip on your imagination, then you aren't part of my target audience here. I don't want to hear that truth belongs to the guy with the biggest gun. It may be true, but I don't want to hear it. You Deconstructionists just .... Just ..... bugger off. The closest I have ever come to shading the truth in my writing is in a series of essays under a pseudonym in which I included examples of events that - blush - never quite actually happened. I rearranged "extraneous" details to make a sharper, shorter, clearer examples. As a writer, I felt fine about it; as a scientist, it gnaws at me to this day. Who am I to say what is "extraneous"? As Robert says, so persuasively, "I definitely wouldn't want to draw conclusions too strongly about life, the intellect or the mind that is based on the fictional behavior of fictional characters." Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/nthompson http://www.cusf.org From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Robert J. Cordingley Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2010 8:22 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] The Case for a Literary Education (re 10 Best...) Joseph Epstein makes the case for a Literary Education in this 2008 lecture (approx 40 min): http://www.isi.org/lectures/lectures.aspx?SBy=search&SSub=title&SFor=A%20Lit erary%20Education He believes a Literary Education teaches a number of things including 'how astonishing reality' is and also 'the limits of the intellect'. Given the number of literary refererences in his argument you may get the best out of this if you already have a Literary Education which makes it a little self-serving IMHO. I guess it works for novelists. Bio from the website: Joseph Epstein was born in 1937 in Chicago, and attended the public schools there and, later, the University of Chicago. He is the author of, among other books, Fabulous Small Jews, Snobbery, Friendship, Narcissus Leaves the Pool, and In a Cardboard Belt! His most recent book, Fred Astaire, will be published in September by Yale University Press as part of its American Icons series. Mr. Epstein taught in the Department of English at Northwestern University for thirty years. He was the editor of The American Scholar, the intellectual quarterly of Phi Beta Kappa, between 1974 and 1997. His essays and short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Commentary, The Atlantic, The Weekly Standard, The Hudson Review, and other magazines. His work has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Chinese, and Japanese. He is currently working on a book Houghton Mifflin on the subject of Gossip. It doesn't seem that a Ph.D was required, btw, and none of his works were recommended for our 10 Best... However, that the intellect may be limited is a good reason to want to make a selection in life, be it one's Bucket List or one's reading list. What's curious is that he believes we get a better feel for reality and human nature by reading novels ( = made up stuff). I definitely wouldn't want to draw conclusions too strongly about life, the intellect or the mind that is based on the fictional behavior of fictional characters. Thanks Robert C
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