=2E..this is a message I have been intending to get written for a couple of
days now, since waking up on Sunday morning to the batch of Saturday
messages from the US. My reaction to Pedro Portes' message was to write a
short followup to Vera's response:
At 12.36 -0700 97-11-15, vera p john-steiner wrote:
>Dear Pedro,
>I really enjoyed your life-span approach to the qual-quant discussion
>Vera
=2E..saying that I appreciated also the bringing in of institutional
traditions and developments in the qualquant discussion -- that when quant
methods come in a package with nominalist basic assumptions and getting a
quant training in the social sciences entails going through an
apprenticeship in nominalism (which is, I suppose, generally the case) THEN
I understand Gary Shank's approach to the discussion (it was just that to
MY mind we were instead sketching for the future... and please, an
alternative future to the one Ken Goodman desperatly outlines for US
education!)
But then, when I got to Martin's response... well, I never sent my message,
because I got entangled instead in the pattern of why people like me, who
have chosen to hone themselves into qualitative tools, feel this need of
justifying themselves versus quant methods. Either like Martin did, by
revealing his past in physics. Or like I did in private to David Dirlam
when Mike introduced us back in September: I had this urge to explain that
I could probably have been pretty good at maths etc. IF there hadn't been
this huge hole in my secondary education... -- dropped out and went to art
school :-/ -- It wasn't bacause of any distrust from my correspondent (on
the contrary), but nevertheless I had to sort of explain: see, I'm not
stupid, just always have this feeling of cheating when I understand some
model by graphs and other visuals... and I cannot really do the step by
step mechanics of a differential equation or somesuch.
And as for the paragraph in Pedro's message that challenged Martin into
"showing his ID", I had not even noticed... anything remark-able, anything
"out of the ordinary". That was what struck me dumb for a moment! I
couldn't sort myself out as to what to write.
This cultural pattern of the Power of Numbers is, I think, a point where
much larger scales of time and space fold into the moments of
communication. Where we as writing individuals unwittingly reproduce
infertile separations, even as we are consciously struggling to overcome
the valuations written into them... Do you see what I mean?
Eva