John said to Arlo:
... You can call a book an "intellectual pattern", and you'd be right in that
it had an intellectual creator. But the fact of a book or a teaching is a
social phenomena, involving publisher acceptance and reader popularity. Even
teachers can't be teachers by themselves. The social game is fundamental. No
writing can be significant until it's been read.
dmb says:
Hmmm. It seems to me that your point is predicated on the assumption that
"intellectual patterns" are isolated or by themselves. I don't think it works
that way at all. The intellectual and social levels are both co-operative,
collective, group efforts. Platt has this tendency to think of the intellectual
level as the level of individuality but you don't want to go there. It just
confuses things. Actually, the scientific method is the quintessential model of
co-operation. That's true within the lab, within the journals, within the
universities, within history and across cultures. I mean, values don't have to
be "social" just because they're part of a collective effort, a group effort.
This discussion group is supposed to be intellectual, for example. But how do
you do philosophy all by yourself? What would be the point?
John said:
If intellectual patterns came from social patterns, then the "infinity of
possible hypothesis" postulate wouldn't hold.
dmb says:
I think you're talking about two different things at the same time. In terms of
evolutionary development, intellectual patterns come from social patterns as a
child comes from its mother. In terms of intellectual creativity, the formation
of a new hypothesis is an intellectual response to Dynamic Quality. The former
is a description of an historical process of development and the latter is a
description of the creative process. The first one takes centuries the second
one happens in a moment. Taken as separate claims about different thing, which
they are, they're not in conflict with each other. But mushing them together
doesn't work at all.
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