[lit-ideas] Re: 4 Grandkids
- From: "Walter C. Okshevsky" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, "atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:56:33 -0230
Allow me to beg the question by making what I take to be an important
pedagogical point, if not a metaphysical one.
I attribute the success of the students I have taught and mentored through
graduate and/or doctoral studies less to any erotic abilities I may possess for
developing the requisite skills and dispoisitions for such success, and more to
their own capacities for learning and hard work which they had mostly attained
on their own prior to any influence I may have subsequently had on them. (Try
saying that in German :).
Walter O
MUN
Quoting "atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> I will reply to this scurrilous and damnable post as soon as I have time. I
> don't want the heathen Donal to think he has won. There's another deeper
> level to Hell than Virgil ever dared show Dante, the one awaiting Donal's
> soul. I will send him there very soon. Mark my word.
>
> Mike Geary
> Memphis
>
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Donal McEvoy
> To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Sent: 4/26/2010 6:57:59 AM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: 4 Grandkids
>
>
>
>
> --- On Sun, 25/4/10, Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> >Ursula's observation that you can only find what is already in you, smacks
> of >Gnosticism to me -- Gnosticism as I interpret it and agree with.
>
> This"observation" can be viewed as trite or false, depending how it is
> interpreted.
>
> False if construed to assert that a person can only ever find (at some point
> in the future) what "is already" present within them: this is false in
> respect of some of the many things that evolve or develop e.g. sexual desire,
> awareness of others' sensibilities and feelings, and a wide range of
> character-traits [which must develop from what is _not_ "already" present,
> unless we deny there any such thing as character building or development].
>
> It is true, but quite trite, if interpreted to assert merely that we cannot
> find within us anything that does not exist "already" within us as a
> disposition or propensity. All behaviour, whether of persons or objects, can
> be said to be possible only because of prior, or "already" existing,
> dispositions or propensities. For example, the cd I just cracked placing it
> in the player, could only crack because it had "already" a disposition or
> propensity to so crack - one activated by my action.
> Put another way:- nothing can happen without there being some prior
> disposition or propensity for it to happen.
>
> While this point is trite it may still be the basis for a powerful and
> explanatory 'metaphysical' and even 'scientific' research programmme, a per
> the view Popper outlines in the last volume of the Postscript to LdF, where
> he defends a metaphysic of reality as "changing propensities for change". The
> powerful explanations arise from predictive and probabilistic (in a
> propensity, non-inductive sense of probability) explanations which posit
> _specific_ dispositions and propensities.
>
> To take a simple example from evolution (where these kinds of explanation are
> often used; see "The Selfish Gene" for an excellent account of some): in a
> drought a mammal may well be provoked to 'activate' its disposition or
> propensity to move in search of water by walking; a tree cannot uproot itself
> and walk but may well be provoked to 'activate' its disposition or propensity
> to move in search of water by extending its roots downwards - it may hit an
> underground water-table that ensures its survival.
>
> But "changing propensities for change" also points up the sense in which
> "propensities" are not simply there "already" - except in the vacuous sense
> that to come into play propensities must be logically possible, and therefore
> exist "already" as logical possibilities. But to say that anything that
> exists, or potentially exists as a matter of disposition or propensity, must
> be something that can exist as a matter of logical possibility, is not to
> offer much in the way of concrete explanation. Logical possibility does not
> really explain what exists; rather logical impossibility rules out the
> existence of, say, contradictory states of affairs.
>
> > How ideas or values or appreciations get inside us to begin with, I don't
> know.
>
> There are many ways, at least as many as there are forms of cultural
> transmission. And if we abandon a Lockean definition of "ideas" in terms of
> consciously held contents of the mind, we are born with many "ideas" - for
> example, to respond to a smile, to suckle, to cry if in discomfort.
>
> >There's not much of that kind of knowledge in me to work with.
>
> _Pace_ Mike, in one his last essays Popper asserts (without offering any
> clear empirical or testable basis) that in his view 99% of "knowledge" is
> inbuilt in us and other organisms by way of dispositions and propensities. By
> "knowledge" he does not mean merely consciously held thoughts, but also the
> "knowledge" of the tree to push its roots deeper in a drought, or the
> "knowledge" of a dog to salivate in anticipation of eating [in P's view the
> conditioned reflex of Pavlov's dog _does not exist_ and is merely a mistaken,
> and metaphysical, interpretation of the observable experiments; the dog
> salivates not because of Lockean associationist psychology holding true but
> because it has evolutionarily-prepared traits, here to salivate in
> anticipation of eating, as per Darwin (a point obscured by Tooby _et al_ who
> have tried to Lockeanise Darwinism).
>
> Donal
> Yr Friendly Neighbourhood Popperian
> England
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