Re: remarkable coincidences

From: Keith Sawyer (ksawyer@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Wed Apr 17 2002 - 15:29:53 PDT


Ana, your writings about how concepts develop, grow, and snowball reminds me of Foucault's "archeology of knowledge" (1972 in English translation).  My "Emergence in psychology" article is an attempt to trace the history/archeology of the notion of "emergence."  Here is a quotation from Foucault that I used in a recent article about Foucault's concept of "discourse" (to appear in CULTURAL STUDIES):

"One tries in this way to discover how the recurrent elements of statements can reappear, dissociate, recompose, gain in extension or determination, be taken up into new logical structures, acquire, on the other hand, new semantic contents, and constitute partial organizations among themselves.  These schemata make it possible to describe…[a concept’s] anonymous dispersion through texts, books, and oeuvres" (1969/72, p. 60).

At 11:37 PM 4/13/02 -0400, you wrote:
>I think that ideas and concepts start like small snowballs. And for a long
>time they don't make a difference.
>But they grow - not like snowballs, more like fungus - linking underground
>and spawning to seemingly great distances. No one knows who are their
>carriers and how exactly they travel from one person (group,
>institution...) to another.

R. Keith Sawyer

http://www.keithsawyer.com/
Assistant Professor
Department of Education
Washington University
Campus Box 1183
St. Louis, MO  63130
314-935-8724



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed May 01 2002 - 01:00:07 PDT