[lit-ideas] Re: Normal and Revolutionary Learning
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "wokshevs@xxxxxx" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 11:58:03 +0900
On 8/16/07, wokshevs@xxxxxx <wokshevs@xxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Would anybody here be able to recall in one's own biography a case of
> revolutionary learning?
>
First, Walter, thanks for the compliment. I treasure it highly.
Turning, however, to your question, yes. There was no single "Eureka!"
or Saul on the road to Damascus moment. Instead, when I look back, I
see a series of moments, associated with particular texts that
transformed me from the boy who went off to college looking for the
Truth with a capital T, the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth, to
the grandfather who has learned that all human thought is partial, and
the universe is a very big place of which we know, at best, only a
small corner. Over the years, I have mentioned several of them here
before, but the following seem worth mentioning again.
Nietszche, the story comparing the Scientist and the Metaphysician to
two men watching Salome perform the dance of the seven veils: one
savoring being tantalized, the other wanting it all off, now.
Warren McCulloch, the rebuttal to those who take the latest failure of
machines to do everything that humans can do as evidence that no
machine will ever equal or surpass a human being: "We build a better
machine."
Noam Chomsky, the concept of scientific method as an evaluation
procedure instead of a discovery procedure.
Michael Burt, on why a strict positivist should have rejected
Copernicus's theory and accepted Ptolemy's instead.
Stanley Cavell, the search for the good as multiple wagon trains
headed across a plain to multiple destinations instead of a climb up
Plato's mountain to the single Good at the top.
Richard Rorty, pragmatic rejection of classical antinomies, the
philosophy of social hope.
George Lakoff, why thinking in terms of Aristotelian categories isn't
natural at all.
Howard Becker, Tricks of the Trade, how sociologist Everett Hughes got
his students to stop trying to define ethnic groups and look at what
people said about them instead.
Pierre Bourdieu, the view that all distinctions are sites of struggle
and how the battle goes may depend more on habitus than rational
choice.
Gary Klein, Sources of Power, on recognition-primed decision making
and why experience counts.
To which I would have to add my own academic efforts, a handful of
published papers, one book, all projects that reminded me how little I
actually know.
All have nudged me along a path that has led, to borrow Hesse's
metaphor, from the glass-bead games that intoxicated my youth, to the
Benedictine's historicism that now feels right to me.
John
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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