[Xmca-l] Re: in the eye of the beholder

[Larry Purss]

I meant to address to John Cummins, [not Charles]
John, your question focuses our attention  on ways of *orienting*
[direction] and *values* and their relations.

Their distinctions also overlap. Orientations express values and values
guide orientation.  The theme of thought and *cognitions* as *expressive
cognitions* suggests that *thoughts* and *values* are expressions
expressing orientations.

On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 5:33 AM, Lplarry <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:

> Charles the exploring orientaiting  as distinct to values is interesting.
> Merleau ponty discussed Sens as both (sense And orientation). Meaningful
> directio and directed meaning
> Values (as expressive cognitions) perform these directed sense  SENS
> ------------------------------
> From: Charles Bazerman <bazerman@education.ucsb.edu>
> Sent: ‎2014-‎09-‎22 7:38 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: in the eye of the beholder
>
> Let me explain my comments better.  I think the WEIRD article is
> wonderful.  I think it is very important to recognize that knowledge is
> produced by humans in social configurations through rhetorical means.  I
> think it is very important to understand the limited perspectives that have
> gone into the construction of our knowledge and how to expand those
> perspectives to get richer, fuller views that produce results that are more
> reliable and more widely applicable and are less stigmatizing of human
> variation, ideologies, cultures. It is important to the advance of
> knowledge to understand these things.  It is also important for us to
> understand how it is we can keep creating progressively better maps of the
> world we live in and are part of.
>
> Concepts such as accountability (as I used it), and warrantable
> assertability (as Michael and Dewey used it), is to bring knowledge
> production into human processes, which are fallible, contingent, and
> limited, but which advance by bringing more persuasive evidence to bear in
> order to reframe perspectives and make more phenomena persuasively
> visible.  This is exactly what the WEIRD article does and what Medin and
> Bang do.  This is exactly what persuasive gender, ethnicity, and cultural
> studies do.
>
> Having lived through the "science wars" of the eighties, having produced a
> rhetorical history of scientific papers, and having been attacked both by
> one side as being an enemy of science and by the other as being a naive
> realist, I see the project of finding a way to understand the production
> and use of evidence within different rhetorical discursive fields as a
> significant and incomplete task.  The value is both
> methodological/epistemological and political.
>
> The politics of this are that showing we have ways for the empirical
> project to go forward but in more enlightened ways will in the long run
> gain more allies than only opposing and rejecting the science we find
> narrow in its perspective.  Otherwise we are too easily perceived as
> "enemies of science."  The culture of science aims at moving forward and
> will find ways of incorporating persuasive views that do not put it in a
> dead end. We do not do ourselves a service by making it appear our
> opposition is so categorical as to appear to impose a dead end.  The
> successes of science are sufficient that they will just roll over any
> roadblock we attempt to put in place.  Not long ago, for example, the
> general belief was that it was a single thing and that the writing aspect
> was trivial. By now, almost all recognize that scientific writing has a
> history and evolves and varies.   That does not discredit scientific
> writing, but is just the way things work out in the human practice of co
> ming to knowledge.  Many scientists are incorporating contingent,
> historical, rhetorical, and cultural perspectives in their understandings
> of what they are doing.  But the project of expanding our view is long, and
> perhaps never ending.  Yet we seek, like the blind person with the stick,
> to understand our surroundings and our selves, so that we can move more
> freely and successfully through the world.
>
> Concerning Climate-Change deniers, creationists, and others, our account
> of science needs to be able to warrant why we do not find their claims or
> their evidence, such as it is, persuasive.  And we need to be able to
> distinguish on principled grounds, the difference between such regressive
> ideologies which ignore persuasive evidence and substantive cultural
> critiques which are grounded in persuasive evidence and open our eyes
> wider, to understand that it is important to ask, who is asking and who is
> WEIRD.
>
> Chuck
>
>