Thanks for the Dewey ref, Matt.
All I mean by adam and eve, Andy, was that being human, they acted for
reasons, illusory perhaps, but they were not BLIND watch makers (I was
playing with words, always a dangerous move on email!, sorry).
By my understanding, the fact or artifact mediation of human activity means
that purposes of prior generations (variously defined) become the
affordances of the artifacts in our environments through a process of
selection such that having at our disposal, for an example, a spoon, the
"purpose" of eating some ice cream
(or digging for grubs) is present in the environment as a possibility even
before we know it.
mike
On 12/24/06, Paul Dillon <phd_crit_think@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I for one have never rejected the notion of teleology and believe that one
> of the great disasters that empricism has wrought upon modern thought is the
> removal from sight of the multiple causes: formal, effective, teleological,
> etc. , leaving only effective cause.
>
> And of course that notion is central to the concept of development whether
> it be in psychology or sociological theories of modernization. I agree with
> Andy that it is unavoidable, except for behaviorists and structuralists, to
> specify teleologies for individual subjects. The question remains for
> collectivities. It would seem that the idea of conversations with a future
> also implies teleology insofar as the conversations are exploratory and the
> topic has an internal organization yet to be discovered. This is perhaps
> the idea of history operating behind the backs of humans. Sartre's analysis
> of the storming of the Bastille in his Critique of Dialectical
> Reason provides a wonderful example of how one can see that apparently
> unstructured actions of mobs, motivated by an absence, can crystallize into
> a direction. The first steps determining the ones that follow.
>
> Paul
>
> *Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>* wrote:
>
> It is so interesting, confusing, thought provoking to follow people's
> ideas
> about the process
> of development.
>
> It was peg griffin, not sylvia scribner, Paul, with whom we wrote about
> zo-peds as conversations
> with the future.
>
> I have been pouring through LSV writings as best I can for all the places
> where the term, development,
> is used. I was reminded of the year that the LCHC seminar was devoted to
> reading and trying to help
> Norris Minnick as he labored through the translation of LSV Volume 1
> Collected works. The term, development,
> is used in some many ways/contexts by LSV that it is a real task to try to
> arrive at some family group of
> meanings.
>
> Different metaphors highlight different sides of the multifacted
> (imagined?)
> jewel. One question that is on my
> mind is the issue of QUALITATIVE CHANGE being central to LSV's though and
> the extent to which different
> metaphors include this idea.
>
>
> Other ideas floating in the discussion that I am chewing on are
> interfunctional reorganization (both within the brain and
> between person and environment, and issue of directionality in
> development.
>
> I cannot agree that teleological thinkins is always wrong, as I interpret
> the local concensus to be. It is hard to avoid the conclusion
> that all culturally mediated action is teleological, which does not mean
> it
> is not misguided!!
> mike
>
> God may be a blind watchmaker, but neither and Adam or Eve, skilled as
> they
> were in watch making or making watchers, i am not sure which,
> was blind.
> mike
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