Greetings Economists, On Aug 27, 2006, at 7:21 AM, ravi wrote:
Being much more of that much-maligned persuasion called "relativism" than anyone I know, I do see value in reading all alternatives as possible. Even "Creationism vindicated".
Doyle; The brain being a network structure supports a relativistic interpretation of knowledge. So in the long run some sort of relativism must prevail. In so far as Doug is concerned, I've seen this complaint about his short comments before. One can guess having seen it continue for so long that he won't change, and it's not likely that we we'll see more in depth writing like I think a great many would like to see. So ignoring a knowledge production flaw (in my view) I'll return to your comment about relativism. A state encompasses a great many points of view. That is relativistic, but power rests usually in some well defined hands though views will diverge in any case of mechanism of unity. Sartre admired the Soviets for their unity. I think Sartre considered that in the sense that social change emerges in revolutions out of the ashes of the old order, and social change of that sort is represented by a new sort of agreement shared amongst people about what society is or is not. The technology like Google search engines allow us to re-combine writing from any period. Whatever recombination might arise, Technology 'combination' suggests that all that raw knowledge needs unification of some sort. That could easily be seen as relativistic as well as Marx would have had Historical Materialism teach us. So that documents are not written by smart guys, but converge into a unified whole that represents a stable 'whole' compared to other versions such as the conflict between Feudal Monarchs and the Capitalists might show us. Or that the global environment is really the totality of living processes upon the material bed of the local universe. Certain other technologies suggest similar results. Big data capacity storage allows us to think all speech can be recorded. Mathematical solutions of the cocktail party problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_problem suggest that as well. The law as it is practiced suggests too that 'judgment' is a combination of opinions over time. Care taking like Mothers engage in suggests social combination not dictatorship of the Mother over children. Such that a happy child is the happy circumstance of loving environment around them. Or the platitudinous thought suggests that. Global positioning, knowing where one is at all times is not necessarily a language ability. When people have Alzheimer's they develop 'motion blindness' in which they can't remember paths to follow to a target like their home. So we want to consider not just a verbal 'whole', but a knowledge whole. In that case for example where many people participate in a list, is that a Bayes Net (directed knowledge) like knowledge ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes_net ) that in itself is valuable as a relativistic combinatorial milieu which is good enough to supplant 'flaws' in knowledge production ability. thanks, Doyle Saylor network communications in a scalable environment: http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/labs/ccrg/projects/wings.html
