[Xmca-l] Re: Fate, Luck and Chance

[mike cole]

Hello Samuel--

I am not familiar with the term, "philosophical copout." Could you explain
what it means and how it applies to the notion that language is not
material? Or that part of language, meaning, is not? (Which I take to be
your view).

Sperber is a person relatively well versed in matters philosphical but also
anthropological perhaps even psychological. Does the copout influence how I
should think about his idea of the epidemiology of representations (today
we might here them referred to as "memes")?

So far as I can tell from the sampling of opinions on MCA it is safe to say
that we have some serious confusions about matters concerning ontology and
epistemology. Is there a currently prominent thinker we can turn to who can
provide better guidance through that maze?

Superceding the material/ideal dualism is one of the topics of conversation
here for the past 30 years. If someone has the agreed-upon, agreeable-upon
way to solve the problem, lets for goodness sake hear it! The older I get,
the more complicated the whole matter seems to me.

As you have seen, from time to time we pick some common text or texts and
some group of us all read them, and they discuss along with people who have
not read them. Perhaps you could offer a text we could use in that way.
Then we could bounce our different interpretations off of that common
object.

mike




On Sun, Nov 23, 2014 at 4:13 PM, Samuel Paul Louis Veissière, Dr <
samuel.veissiere@mcgill.ca> wrote:

> Dan Sperber dismisses the question by saying that "public representations"
> are sound waves and light patterns, and are as such material phenomena.
> That's a philosophical copout. Meaning (what we embed sound waves with) is
> not material, unless one goes full-on neuro-reductionist. If all human
> cultures are dualistic, or have found ways to talk about or try to solve
> the problem of dualism, it may be because, as far as humans are concerned,
> we have a pretty serious ontological problem. No?
>
> On Nov 23, 2014 7:06 PM, Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, Analisa --
>
> It they're not material, what are they?
>
> Helena Worthen
> helenaworthen@gmail.com
>
> On Nov 23, 2014, at 3:25 PM, Annalisa Aguilar wrote:
>
> > Andy,
> >
> > Please explain how words are material. Do you mean this literally or
> metaphorically?
> >
> > I am prone to accept that mind is material, but of a different order
> than Grandma's apple pie, mountains or a vinyl record. I can't quite see
> how words are material. Sounds traveling through space are movements of
> material (air), so that to me would be like saying dancing is material, if
> dancing is material, then what is the body who dances? And how is the body
> different from the dance?
> >
> > Kind regards,
> >
> > Annalisa
>
>
>


-- 
It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science with an
object that creates history. Ernst Boesch.