Ricardo, I have thought that kind of thing too. (That is why Tannen's
work on the argument culture so appealed to me.) I haven't been reading
LSV's _Crisis_, being preoccupied with other crises at other levels in
other places, but it doesn't surprise me that even in such revered places
we can find walk that doesn't fit the talk. I don't know how many times I
have been excited by the vision in the openings of
books/articles/speeches, only to be disappointed that what follows seems
to betray its promise.
I think that we can imagine, in our better moments, a world of multiple
and open-ended truths/goods/beauties that can be taken up by people as
they learn to think of and value them -- a world of stories that can keep
us from believing too whole-heartedly in a single one (which can only be
reductionistic). But then our old academic ways of thinking -- our
positivitistic faith (which is embodied in our language/talk) pokes
through (and pokes holes in) our vision, so that our visionary talk and
our work talk are at odds. Getting a little Whorfian -- our language
habits constrain us, but not because they make it impossible for us to
imagine anything else, rather because we know that others expect this
languaging -- even when we declare that we are doing something different!
[I started this as a backstage response to Ricardo, changed my mind. Can
you tell where? :) ]
--Alena
On Tue, 16 Oct 2001,
Ricardo Ottoni Vaz Japiassu wrote:
> We would say, here, that LSV's chrisis is "a very difficult bond to gnaw" (um osso difícil de roer) - something like yours "hard nut to crack" or "very strict"... Besides the fact his text in Portuguese is very long and into a "brick" (in a very thick book).
>
> To read all/any chrisis is, no doubt, a task that demands some time.
>
> I had the impression, after reading it this time ( I'd already put my eyes on it some years ago) that it was conceived as a conference - I'm not sure about it. Specially the last part of it (number 14) seems to me like a speach in order to take off a round of applause from an audience that in those times believed in the dream of a "new man" and a "new society".
>
> Although he is right - in my oppinion - to say Psychology needs to become a science or a hole (General Psychology) that can unify all psychological work of the past in a new and unique ensemble under new basis, a "culture of peace" or the cultural-historical approach to psyche, LSV seems to me, somethimes, advocating a "culture of war" between psychological streams that have different readings of reality, different ways of understanding psychological phenomena and therefore that believe in different truths.
>
> It is like he is saying there is only one truth - the cientifical truth. And this contradicts - in my view - what he himself says about the complex relation between science, knowledge and the words (number 9).
>
>
>
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>
>
> Ricardo Japiassu
> Professor da Universidade do Estado da Bahia-Uneb X
> rjapias@uol.com.br
>
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