Re: All the way with Piaget (fwd)

Dewey Dykstra, Jr. (dykstrad who-is-at bsumail.idbsu.edu)
Mon, 11 May 1998 09:23:47 -0600

>At 4:29 PM 5/8/98 -0600, Dewey Dykstra, Jr. wrote:
>>It's a bit like the analogy that both a grain of sand and an ounce of water
>>will fit into an empty wine bottle, but a baseball will not. Taking the
>>development of our ideas about the physical world over history as an
>>example, we can see many examples in which we found the grain of sand (idea
>>1), say, fits into the bottle 9fits our experience) but some alternative,
>>say a baseball (idea 2), did not, while at the same time the ounce of water
>>(idea 30 had not yet occurred to us. Later when the 'ounce of water' idea
>>did finally occur to someone, we try it and see that it fits also. We can
>>only know the degree of fit if we can, *at the same time-independently*,
>>know the idea (the grain of sand, the ounce of water, etc.) AND the thing
>>we are trying to fit the world "out there" (the empty wine bottle).
>
>In order to use a wine bottle, we have to produce a wine bottle.
>In order to know conservation of volume, Piaget needed the pretty
>accurate same size bottles that were produced by the modern industry,
>consisted of various divisions of labour, based on socially organized unit
>system for coordinating various divisions of labour as Latour pointed out.
>
>In that sense, the world "out there" such as an empty wine bottle is
>not "out there".
>
>Naoki Ueno
>NIER, Tokyo

Naoki, this is an analogy. The analogy gets to the meaning of 'fit" as in,
a statement such as "Our constructed knowledge 'fits' our experience and
enables us to make predictions." The wine bottle is part of the analogy
and in that analogy, the person trying the grain of sand and the ounce of
water does not know, has no way of knowing, it is a wine bottle. The wine
bottle is not intended to be taken literally but as some sort of container
whose opening will allow the passage of the grain of sand or the water but
not the baseball. The wine bottle merely _represents_ "out there".

The analogy has nothing to do with conservation of volume or
standardization of the bottles established by social conventions. In the
analogy, the wine bottle could have been *any* container.

Dewey

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Dewey I. Dykstra, Jr. Phone: (208)385-3105
Professor of Physics Dept: (208)385-3775
Department of Physics/MCF421/418 Fax: (208)385-4330
Boise State University dykstrad who-is-at bsumail.idbsu.edu
1910 University Drive Boise Highlanders
Boise, ID 83725-1570 novice piper

"Physical concepts are the free creations of the human mind and
are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external
world."--A. Einstein in The Evolution of Physics with L. Infeld,
1938.
"Every [person's] world picture is and always remains a construct
of [their] mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence."
--E. Schrodinger in Mind and Matter, 1958.
"Don't mistake your watermelon for the universe." --K. Amdahl in
There Are No Electrons, 1991.
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