Peter,
nice to see you on the list again.
when I read the Ingold papers that were put on the MCA homepage I thought
about your discussion of Thelen and Smith specifically and probably should
have mentioned it at the time; I had the feeling that the positions Ingold
advances were good examples or variant examples of the entire embodiment
position that we discussed when reading your paper.
I especially like the point you made about the role of "the plan" and how it
must inform the woodsman (or anyone) not only when to start the activity but
also when to stop it, when the objective has been attained. I think this is
extremely important and perhaps it isn't coincidental that the major
breakthrough that enabled the entire development of cybernetica, computer
languages, was Alan Turing's development of a technique (algorithm) by which
a machine could be made to determine whether a sequence of numbers being
generated by some recursive algorithm would eventually terminate - This is
just an observation but seems tantalizingly related to the point you made.
Your point about chomsky's universal grammar being more like legs than
walking is also well taken. Just out of curiosity, what's your position on
the chomskyan idea?
I must admit I was looking forward to reading Ingold's work on tools and
will keep it on the "to read" list in light of your comments.
take care,
Paul H. Dillon
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