What, Why & How do we Know ?
Dave Winer interviews George Lakoff. Thanks to Matt at WordPress. It’s a worthwhile listen. Informal and rambling, but some good stuff about the (deliberate) psychology of associating ideas with words when describing candidate and party positions in the current US Presidential campaigning. (Framing and Parent / Child & Strict-father / Nurturing theories.)
Lakoff’s Metaphor and War has been much linked and quoted in the blogoshpere. This Joho link picked-up from Solipsism Gradient (Rainer Brockenhof). Blogged a link to Lakoff’s piece earlier without comment, but found it disappointingly shallow given the subject matter – Joho calls it “close to self-parody”. I still have “Metaphors We Live By” and … Continue reading “Lakoff’s Metaphor and War”
I naively branded causation (even just time as the basis of correlation) as “weird” when I first started this philosophical quest over 20 years ago. Paging Bishop Berkeley anyone? And of course the more we unpick layers of determinism and emergence, upward and downward causation, the weirder it gets. Some things never change. Time and … Continue reading “Causation and Existence”
I’ve had actual language lessons in maybe four non-English foreign languages at various times, studied a couple more as a precursor to needing to learn them and looked-up some basic vocabulary in a couple more for travel reasons. More generally, I’ve taken longer term interest in etymology, particularly from Proto-Indo-European roots and sometimes Sanskrit sources as well … Continue reading “MML – Me & My Languages”
As a practitioner of positive psychology (and an atheist) Jonathan Haidt’s “The Happiness Hypothesis” reads at times like a spiritual self-help book, and in a sense it is, but it is supported by a mass of academic and scientific references. The Psybertron agenda has been on evolutionary psychology as a description of both epistemology (what … Continue reading “Haidt’s Happiness”
Both Shawn and Mark at Anecdote have blogged about James Harlow Brown’s “Dangerous Undertaking: The Search for Transformation“. The book is on my reading list, but I have several others ahead of it in the pipeline at the moment, however this metaphor reinforces why it looks interesting to me. Yes, overlapping patterns of involvement in … Continue reading “The Pond Metaphor”
As I was in the Opposite Aphorisms post below … here is a link to Steve Johnson’s latest book “Why Everything Bad Is Good For You“, linked from Euan Semple’s blog. I assume this is the same Steve Johnson as in Lakoff and Johnson ? Looks worth a look. Looks like pure Dynamic Quality. Almost … Continue reading “Talking of Perversity”
I’m well through Godel, Escher, Bach. (Started Hofstadter’s “GEB” here.) Hofstadter is almost apologetic in his introduction about his apparent espousing of Zen philosophy, almost distancing himself from it to maintain credibility with serious scientific peers. It’s actually pretty clear in the book that he is not ultimately sympathetic to it anyway, but he does … Continue reading “Hofstadter and Zen”