Re: All the way with Piaget (fwd)
Naoki Ueno (nueno who-is-at nier.go.jp)
Sat, 9 May 1998 12:51:22 +0900
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