Morning On Sun, 7 Oct 2001, Louis_Schmier wrote:
> Jim, an early good morning. Can't sleep. What answer is so written in > stone, so infallible, that it is not subject to questioning, to > examination, to reconsideration by ourselves of ourselves and by others? Things like: the earth is round, the earth is more than 7,000 years old, the occipital lobes of the human brain process visual information, students who actively process information are more likely to remember the information than students who passively read it, performance on intelligence tests is correlated with school success, people who are similar to one another are more likely to be attracted to one another than people who are dissimilar, and so on endlessly. There are many, many things about the world and human beings that we now know with much confidence. > The dynamic of our disciplines is that of constant questioning, constant > curiosity, constant investigation, constant experimentation, constant > discovery. The stagnancy of "It has always been done this way," is > anathma to that process of learning and growing we all hold so dear. The point of questioning, curiosity, etc. is because we want to know answers to the questions, we want to find out what we don't know. There may be some people who are simply satisfied with constant questioning, and don't care about the answers, but that somewhat defeats the whole point of questioning. If anyone said anything about "it has always been this way" it certainly wasn't me. My whole point was that our relatively new way of examining questions (reason and science) does allow us to arrive at answers, even if some of them might be tentative until further evidence is acquired. Indeed, many of the conflicts in academic disciplines (evolution vs. creationism, parapsychology, child-rearing practices, ...) occur because the new answers to timeless questions are inconsistent with traditional knowledge and are deemed unacceptable by certain segments of society. Perhaps the most fundamental of these conflicts is how we can come to understand the world better ... science and reason OR the traditional ways (intuition, religion, cultural practices, ...). Best wishes Jim ============================================================================ James M. Clark (204) 786-9757 Department of Psychology (204) 774-4134 Fax University of Winnipeg 4L05D Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 [EMAIL PROTECTED] CANADA http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark ============================================================================ --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
