Re: a follow-up on the discussion of radical constructivism

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Wed, 22 Jul 1998 20:02:49 -0400

I want to thank Dewey for passing on Ernst von G's lucid contributions to
the thread on ?ontology ... I certainly find myself mainly in agreement
with him, though perhaps there are, as he no doubt realizes (one cannot say
everything in every message), further mysteries in any attempt to apportion
out what constraints or limitations lie with the Manifold, with our
interaction with it, or with any reality it presents to us. My own view has
generally been that we are ourselves a part of the Manifold, of the
"heterogeneity" that seems inevitably to appear in any attempt to make
sense or meaning of our being-with-the-world, and that the analytical
effort to factor this whole into an Us and an It, or worse, an "I" and
anything more, may have its local conveniences, but is not to be taken too
seriously. Indeed this is exactly the message of the mystical philosophers,
mainly from Asian cultures ... and it ought to open up for us the
importance of taking seriously some very different cultural views about
what constitute useful fundamental categories for making meaning in our
experiencing... even those from other periods of European history.

Maybe my impatience with perennial debates on epistemology and ontology is
really an embarassment at their cultural and historical parochialism; not
much different really from those we're taught to scorn within many narrowly
ethnocentric religious traditions. People who aspire to the language of
universals ought at least to engage with the full range of human cultural
imaginations ... and the implications of their by and large equal
viability. There may be a good argument that some ways of making sense have
better fits to local and present conditions (e.g. those produced by the
local technologies), as we make our sciences true by manufacturing the
artifacts which confirm them. I agree with Ernst, and probably even with
Kant, that it is still worthwhile to elaborate webs of local truth to catch
our daily fish, but every web today depends in critical ways on non-local
actors and their different local truths, from which we ought to be able to
learn something still not universal, but less parochial than heretofore. JAY.

PS. My discomfort here is not, of course, with Ernst or Dewey or Bill or
..., but with the paradigms and discourses of Philosophy and Psychology as
such, as locally and lately conceived.

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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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