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beelikejAs you may know I'm reading Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern at the moment and I'm loving it more each day. I want to share the awesome, so I will be posting a couple of exerpts from this book in the next couple of days (weeks? I wish I could read faster, but there is much going back and forth and relishing thoughts in between:).
Comments are encouraged!
When I was younger, I used to believe that once something had been discovered, verified, and published, it was then part of Knowledge: definitive, accepted, and irrevocable. Only in unusual cases, so I thought, would opposing claims then continue to be published. To my surprise, however I found that the truth has to fight constantly for its life! That an idea has been discovered and printed in a "reputable journal" does not ensure that it wil become well known and accepted. In fact, usually it will have to be rephrased en reprinted many different times, often by many different people, before it has any chance of taking hold. This is upsetting to an idealist like me, someone more disposed to believe in the notion of a monolithic and absolute truth than in the notion of a pluralistic and relative truth (a notion championed by a certain school of anthropologists and socioligists, who un-self-consciously insist "all systems of belief are equally valid", seemingly without realizing that this dogma of relativism not only is just as narrow-minded as any other dogma, but moreover is unbelievably wishy-washy!). The idea that the truth has to fight for its life is a sad discovery. The idea that the truth will not out, unless it is given a lot of help, is pretty upsetting.
Taken from Section II, Chapter 5: Sense & Society: World Views in Collision
I have just finished the chapter on Number Numbness and am currently enjoying Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness. I will probably quote both tomorrow;) You have been warned!
Comments are encouraged!
When I was younger, I used to believe that once something had been discovered, verified, and published, it was then part of Knowledge: definitive, accepted, and irrevocable. Only in unusual cases, so I thought, would opposing claims then continue to be published. To my surprise, however I found that the truth has to fight constantly for its life! That an idea has been discovered and printed in a "reputable journal" does not ensure that it wil become well known and accepted. In fact, usually it will have to be rephrased en reprinted many different times, often by many different people, before it has any chance of taking hold. This is upsetting to an idealist like me, someone more disposed to believe in the notion of a monolithic and absolute truth than in the notion of a pluralistic and relative truth (a notion championed by a certain school of anthropologists and socioligists, who un-self-consciously insist "all systems of belief are equally valid", seemingly without realizing that this dogma of relativism not only is just as narrow-minded as any other dogma, but moreover is unbelievably wishy-washy!). The idea that the truth has to fight for its life is a sad discovery. The idea that the truth will not out, unless it is given a lot of help, is pretty upsetting.
Taken from Section II, Chapter 5: Sense & Society: World Views in Collision
I have just finished the chapter on Number Numbness and am currently enjoying Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness. I will probably quote both tomorrow;) You have been warned!
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Date: 2008-05-14 10:27 am (UTC)I'm pretty fond of relative truth. I loved my first trips to the university library when I first started my studies, and finding out that for every theory, there's someone else who discredits it. It doesn't bother me that 'truth has to fight for its life' because to me, there no such thing as a definite truth anyway.
Caveat: Um, though I suppose exceptions need to be made for creationism, negationism and other unfounded crap. But as a historian, generally speaking, I love the thought that nothing is fixed in time, can always be rediscovered by using a different outlook.
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