[Jos] By "co-incide (ent)" I mean that they co-incide, the whole point of the sentence is that I'm choosing not to offer a cause or effect. Your sentence sets "coincidence" as a cause in it'self which is just plain wierd.
[Krimel] I was striving for brevity, sorry. Are you saying that the invention of the printing press and the rise of literacy are merely correlated. That is they coincide in time but there is some other causal factors involved. [Jos] As to literacy rates, your example is tautologous and silly, clearly you cant read something that isn't there, I suspect this was clear to you at the time of writing. [Krimel] I don't see a tautology here at all. After all the presses could churn out millions of documents that go unread. Nothing about the production of written material demands that they be read. Especially if there is no relationship between rate of literacy and availability of reading material. [Jos] Literacy, I would say is a function of communication/comprehension. Presumably one could have measured storytelling/singing abilities in some fashion and plotted eduactional trends in pre-literate cultures but did the quality of the message improve when we started writing it down? Evidence??? [Krimel] But this is precisely my point. Whatever the Quality of storytelling might have been it is largely unknown. It has been erased from the common store of knowledge by the passage of time. By increasing the common store and facilitating access to it we enhance the potential for individuals to acquire information that allow the expansion of consciousness. Like stack of unread books there is not guarantee that this will happen but I submit that it increases the probability of it happening and this can be seen. The study Platt cited stated "Between 1947 and 1995 the number of high school graduates entering college (including community college) rose from 2,338,2261 to 14,261,800-a rate of growth three times faster than that of the population." Does this at least hint at the fact that a greater percentage of the population is realizing this potential? 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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
