Hi Marsha, Marsha said: My alternative view is that the differentiation between professional and amateur philosopher is just so much cultural clap-trap.
Matt: When one combines this formulation of your alternative with Ron's observation that "every topic is cultural claptrap" (because, I take it, everything to discuss is built out of our culture, i.e. static patterns) and then Dan's iteration of the value of discussion despite that broad, too-true fact, I think we can get the sense in which this formulation isn't as preferable as your second formulation: "the differences are not really a topic that interests me." For the second strikes me as perfectly reasonable: there are lots of topics that don't interest me (one might say: that I'm incurious about). However, the first formulation was, we might say, dismissive of that topic. And I don't take it that we need to dismiss everything that doesn't interest us, and further that dismissing is exactly not what one amateur does to another: dismissing is what a professional does when they find that something isn't relevant to the discipline. But amateurs have no discipline, and so seemingly should always take at most a non-dismissive non-interest in each others work. Also, I agree that many attempts to differentiate between pro and amateur are "so much cultural claptrap." However, that's why I take an interest in trying to find a better way to state those differences should they exist in a meaningful way. I'm not sure I've found any yet, and I don't take it that thinking about it is necessary for one to compose themselves as an amateur (i.e., I don't think it's necessary for an amateur to be interested in this particular topic). Matt Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
