Keith Hudson wrote:
[snip]
[snip]I don't understand the rest of what you've written below I'm afraid.
My apologies, but our vocabularies are so different, I can't get on your wavelength no matter how hard I try.
Keith Hudson
The question arises:
How could European civilization, for over 2,000 years
and continuing almost unabated today, have essentially
have lost track of the universal fact that all
ratiocination is human *activity* with motivations,
aspirations, intentions, etc.?
YOu do not understand the preceding paragraph I wrote???
[snip]all laws of physics which take the form:
If <whatever-1> then <whatever-2>
Really have the form:
If we do <whatever-1a> then we will
encounter <whatever-b>
Or the preceding paragraph?
Sorry, no.
Let's try this [yet] again in [yet another] a diferent way.
I will grant that it doesn't make much practical
difference whether we assert
The planets move in elliptical orbits
or
When we take an interest in the night sky,
we can best predict
where we see what we call the planets,
by treating them as very large objects
very far away which move in elliptical
orbits....
I think it makes a lot more practical
difference whether the faculty members of
a school assert
Students will cheat less if the punishment
for cheating is expulsion than if
they can get away with it with impunity
or
We the faculty have decided to
subject those persons over whom we have
power -- the students -- to a system
of examination how well they have
done the things we instruct them to do,
And we will get them to conform to
the regimen we want to impose better
if we expel the ones we catch cheating
and get them to fear they are always
being watched so that whenever one
of them tries to cheat he or she
will think they are likely to be
detected and caught, than if
we profer our examinations
but do not punish students who
do not behave as we want them to
behave in response, since in the
latter case, seeing that failing the
exams would still cause them injury,
the students will often choose to
cheat rather than avoidably suffer
us to punish them for failing the exam.
In the first case, the volitional relations
between faculty and students are obfuscated
through the projection of an impersonal
order of the world. In the second case
it is clear that some persons are using
their power over other persons in a
unilateral way. In the first case even
a student who is immensely wealthy may
think he or she is subject to The Universal
Law of Cheating. In teh latter case, the
student just might think, and even say
and act:
Just who do you think you are
to try to make my life miserable like
that? Go find somebody else
to do it to, or, better, how about
I just buy up your damned school
and then fire the lot of you?
Now, the reason such issues are intersting
is not so much for the cases of the
persons who have a choice but have been
tricked into thinking they don't, but
to try to begin to do things to
enable those who have less choice to
have more of a voice in the shape of
their life (yes,
you guess it, I think I am more one of
the latter than of the former, although
rich liberals sometimes try to help those
beneath them just because it makes them feel
better to help them...).
Michel Foucault (a lot of his writings make little
sense to me, but some of what he wrote makes
a lot of sense to me) aserted that
Forms of power create domasins of objects
Example: The power of pedagogues creates
students, and it also creates honors students
and dropouts. How about we say that
students are not a natural species even
if atoms are? That if persons did not
experience, there would be no students, even
if you want to say that even if persons
did not experience there would still
be atoms.
Ultimately, I favor a metaphysical agnosticism,
which is open to the possibility that
even the Pythagorean Theorem may
one day be disproved.
But I think such agnosticism about the
objects in experience does not
affect the issue of:
Who is a peer participant in the conversation,
and who is an object whose fate the
peers in the conversation
decide unilaterally?
Where the "metaphysical agnosticism" comes in
is that the peer participants in the
conversation keep themselves open to the
possible invalidation of any assertion
about any subject they talk about - with
the one exception that they collgially agree
not to reduce any among themselves from
a peer member of the conversation to
a mere object whose fate is discused by
the remaining members of the conversation,
and -- Gee, this is realy difficult!?$%^&*( -->
they also discuss this situation itself,
i.e., the fact that they are peers in
converation, etc.
Finally, why isn't this stuff talked about more?
My hypothesis is that the gods (bosses,
faculty, etc.) generally don't have to
talk about their situation because nobody
is threatening it, etc. Why think that you
are bossing people around if you don't have
to -- only a few persons realy enjoy
having the image of themselves as torturers.
But one example of the latter is the
person who founded RCA, David Sarnoff, who
said:
I don't get ulcers; I give them.
Do you really think there would be Black Studies
programs in our universities if only but all white people
were the slaves? Don't you think the people
now in the Black Studies depts would then
be in the School of Management Science instead?
Any response other than blanket incomprehension?
Dead right. Blank incomprehension I'm afraid. You must remember that I'm an old man with a decaying brain. Use simple words as you do when writing to Harry.
Keith Hudson
\brad mcormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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