[Xmca-l] Re: Fate, Luck and Chance

[Greg Thompson]

Martin,
$20K question:
Is consciousness (or whatever term you would prefer - btw, what term would
you prefer?) "internally constituted" or "externally constituted"?

Also, would you be willing to share the paper of which you speak? Or at
least the citation?
-greg

On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 6:55 PM, Martin John Packer <mpacker@uniandes.edu.co
> wrote:

> On Nov 19, 2014, at 4:56 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > "objective"
> > just means that something is seen as not subject to change by a
> > discourse community, even where that discourse community consists of
> > just me and my lonely self.
>
> Perhaps, David. But with time and effort and study we can come to view
> that something differently, no?
>
> There's a small but growing literature on "constitution" - the way that a
> water molecule is constituted of, not caused by, hydrogen and oxygen. And
> the article I was reading today was making an interesting distinction
> between 'internal constitution,' as in the case of water, and 'external
> constitution,' as in the case of money. What makes a coin a token of
> monetary value is *external* to it: the social institutions of banking and
> the practices of buying and selling. These don't cause it, they constitute
> it. The coin, taken at face value, is objective. But once we study it as it
> circulates through these practice and institutions, we come to see that its
> objectivity does not mean it cannot change. On the contrary.
>
> Although LSV like to talk about the constituents of a meaningful word as
> 'internal' to that word, it seems more accurate to see them as external in
> the same sense as the constituents of a coin or a bill are necessarily
> external to it.
>
> Martin
>



-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson