Re: Kate's book/ Compact OED- a sight for sore eyes

From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon 28 Mar 2005 - 23:15:41 GMT

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    --- Kenneth Van Oost <kennethvanoost@belgacom.net> wrote:

    >
    > ----- Original Message -----
    > From: Kate Distin <memes@distin.co.uk>
    > You wrote,
    > > Scott - I really wasn't careful enough with my
    > phraseology here: like
    > > Lawrence, I even own the compact OED (and can't
    > even claim not to have
    > > done so at the time this was written)! Of course
    > what I had in my head
    > > was a picture of the normal-sized text version of
    > the OED - which is not
    > > much use to readers with no direct access to the
    > inside of my head . . .
    >
    > Kate,
    >
    > Isn 't that what we usually do !?
    > What I have in my head are just ' fragments ', (
    > representations !?) of what
    > is the ' normal ' size of the info availble.
    >
    > Like Scott mentions, are these pieces not then
    > recombined in order to get
    > the full picture !?
    >
    I'm not sure about the full picture, but we assemble fragments together into a collage.
    >
    > This would at least refer to my take on how our
    > brain works.
    > I consider that our brain, at least its basic
    > elements, works with what Jung
    > called archetypes.
    >
    I preferred when Jung was talking about memory fragments before he went on the archetype bandwagon.
    >
    > Each time we are confronted with
    > and within any possible
    > situation an archetype is ' opened ', with our
    > experience considering the
    > specific situation we fill in the blanks to find a
    > reasonable solution.
    >
    Jung's archetypes were based upon a priori structural settings much like Lorenz argues in his Russian Manuscipt. Lorenz gives me serious jitters, but his views on evolutionization of the Kantian categories are food for thought. He talks about how this innate structuralization puts us in a perceptual straightjacket (he uses an analogy with a lobster's carapace) so to speak and how we can approximate reality, but not be sure we've arrived, much like Popper does with his views on evolutionary epistemology. Lorenz is an inductionist in his Russian Manuscript in which make his views quite different from Popper the hypothetico-deductionist, but Lorenz seems to lean towards a sort of falsificationism in that he says that discordance with previous assumptions is a starting point in further gains in knowledge. Lorenz seems to believe we start out with innate working hypotheses and experience builds upon this initial foundation. Kant keeps the transcendant and immanent separate, where Lorenz thinks we can break gradually through this barrier. Maybe we won't know all there is to know about reality, but we can approach it asymptotically.

    Jung never approached epistemology with the intellectual rigor of Popper or Lorenz, but he did fish in similar waters using a Kantian flyrod. The problem is that flyrods are inappropriate for deep sea fishing ;-)
     

                    
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