Ana, your writings about how concepts develop, grow, and snowball reminds
me of Foucault's "archeology of knowledge" (1972 in English
translation). My "Emergence in psychology" article is an
attempt to trace the history/archeology of the notion of
"emergence." Here is a quotation from Foucault that I
used in a recent article about Foucault's concept of
"discourse" (to appear in CULTURAL STUDIES):
"One tries in this way to discover how the recurrent elements of
statements can reappear, dissociate, recompose, gain in extension or
determination, be taken up into new logical structures, acquire, on the
other hand, new semantic contents, and constitute partial organizations
among themselves. These schemata make it possible to describe…[a
concept’s] anonymous dispersion through texts, books, and
oeuvres" (1969/72, p. 60).
At 11:37 PM 4/13/02 -0400, you wrote:
>I think that ideas and concepts start like small snowballs. And for a
long
>time they don't make a difference.
>But they grow - not like snowballs, more like fungus - linking
underground
>and spawning to seemingly great distances. No one knows who are their
>carriers and how exactly they travel from one person (group,
>institution...) to another.
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