Hi Phillip--
Hi Phillip-- The phenomena you note certainly resonate with me and I
assume other attendees.
An international organization like ISCAR faces horrendous problems of
multiple, partially overlapping understandings of the basic terms they
are using. We know this a severe problem within any given language
community (English/Finnish/Spanish to take three relevant examples) vis
a vis original texts in another language, like Russian. That many of the
Russian terms are themselves translations from yet another language (e.g.
German) compounds the problems.
In such circumstances, I constantly find myself wondering whether
seeming disagreements are really disagreements (e.g., they have a common
conceptual grounding, but conflicting conclusions) or simply misunderstandings.
Its so often hard to tell!
In such circumstances my own strategy is (when I am not over-tired or
careless) to try to listen with a "third ear" to see if I can distinguish
whether or not there are real disagreements and to celebrate such moments
if/when I think one obtains. Then, at least, we could know that a contradiction
was a contradiction, not a bad place to start.
The polysemy of "boundary object" appears pretty near daily here at UCSD,
home of the boundary object lady herself, and of course, just plan "object"
gets worked on over and over and over again.
I'lll be interested in your question, but I have one in return. Did you
hear a paper or symposium that you found especially interesting that you might
summarize for those xmca-ers who couldn't make it?
mike
(only a day behind you!)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Aug 01 2002 - 01:00:10 PDT