Krimel said:
... the Mythos is just discarded Logos. Any explanation expressed in symbolic
fashion is an intellectual pattern. Claiming that God created the universe in
seven days for example is an intellectual pattern. At one time it was Logos.
The fact that it gets replace by "better" ideas that assume the mantle of Logos
does not mean that the pattern is any less an intellectual pattern.
dmb says:
That's what the Victorian scholars thought. That's what Freud thought but
mythological symbols will be very badly misunderstood if they're taken as bad
ideas. As Joseph Campbell says, religion is a misreading of mythology. And
that's exactly the error, reading them as expressing ideas. By analogy, your
claim is like saying that dreaming is just being awake badly. I think this
analogy is most apt, because myths and dreams "speak" the same kind of
language. Myths and dreams are both very far away from the skilled manipulation
of abstractions.
Krimel said:
Both Mythos and Logos are part of the collection of intellectual patterns. You
are confusing the function of intellectual patterns on the one hand and the
quality of the patterns on the other. If levels are sets of patterns, then the
level has to include all of the patterns.
dmb says:
Well, no. The distinction is partly based on the fact that they function
differently. When you read myths as myths rather than bad ideas, they are just
as true as any true idea. To say myths are just bad ideas is like saying
organisms are just bad myths. If you try to understand one in terms of the
other, you'll fail to understand it for what it is. That's the problem with
reductionism, see? It is a kind of category error.
Imagine if I described the music of a string quartet in terms of vibrations per
second. Imagine that I report the frequencies with absolutely perfect precision
and emphatically insist that there could be no music without those vibrations.
All of that would be undeniably true. But if you objected because all this is
irrelevant to music AS music, you'd be right. If you objected because I'd
reduced music to a quantification of the physical facts, you'd be right. And
that's what I'm saying about biological explanations of culture and language. I
don't deny the biological facts any more than you'd deny the fact that strings
vibrate.
My dictionary doesn't have a picture of you along with this entry, but it
could....
reductionism |riˈdək sh əˌnizəm|noun often derogatorythe practice of analyzing
and describing a complex phenomenon, esp. a mental, social, or biological
phenomenon, in terms of phenomena that are held to represent a simpler or more
fundamental level, esp. when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation.
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