SUO: RE: Re: The Story So Far
Dear Jon,
> I promised myself
> then and there that I would never go humbly again --
> that is to say, to so docily surrender my whole way
> of being and living and thinking to whatever form
> of authoritarian dogma that somebody judged was
> the right grade of pablum to be parceling out
> to me at a given age and estimated station.
And I will stand shoulder to shoulder with you.
However, I don't detect this problem here. I detect here a respect for
different viewpoints, and a desire to understand how they relate to each
other.
Regards
Matthew
============================================================
Matthew West
Operations & Asset Management - Shell Services International
Shell Visiting Professor, The Keyworth Institute
H3229, Shell Centre, London, SE1 7NA, UK.
Tel: +44 207 934 4490 Fax: 7929 Mobile: +44 7796 336538
http://www.shellservices.com/
http://www.keyworth.leeds.ac.uk/
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/
============================================================
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawbrey@oakland.edu]
> Sent: 06 March 2001 21:00
> To: West, Matthew MR SSI-GREA-UK
> Cc: Stand Up Ontology
> Subject: SUO: Re: The Story So Far
>
>
> Matthew West wrote:
> >
> > Dear Jon,
> >
> > > We ought to be very careful about identifying mutually exclusive
> > > options, especially, very wary of POV's that present themselves as
> > > Either-Or's whenever it is conceivable they merely gloss different
> > > facets of the same object, subject, topic, or whatever,
> as this has
> > > been one of the places, historically and hysterically
> speaking, where
> > > we have wasted the most time, that is, assuming that at
> least some of
> > > it could have been avoided, which is a good question for
> such as us.
> >
> > MW: A good point worth clarifying. In my view a choice
> > is required just when failure to make a choice leads to
> > a logical contradiction, and that is the test I would be
> > looking for (at least as a starting position). Choices
> > of course only apply within a particular point of view.
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > Matthew
>
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>
> Matthew,
>
> Again, we have to be extremely careful, because all of these POV's
> have been well "worked over" in point of time and history, and those
> who seek a distinctive position are well-schooled in all of the ways
> to "sharpen up" a position to the point where, in its unnaturally
> idealized, idolized, idle-ized, idyllized form, it may appear to
> involve a contradiction with what are really its complementary
> and its supplementary positions. I guess that I will always
> return to the days when I had to work through the fuss over
> particles versus waves, since this was the mess that most
> impressed me when I first had to make my eigen-transition
> from the classical way of thinking, that had been burned
> into my impressionable brain by my high school teachers,
> to the "relativistic and quantum mechanical" (RAQM) way
> that I had to learn as a fresh-person at the university.
> What I discovered, after much distraction and grief and
> the long dark night of the soul, was that the RAQM way
> of thought had really been my natural way of thinking
> all along, that is, before my grammar school teachers
> had burned it out of my brain, and I promised myself
> then and there that I would never go humbly again --
> that is to say, to so docily surrender my whole way
> of being and living and thinking to whatever form
> of authoritarian dogma that somebody judged was
> the right grade of pablum to be parceling out
> to me at a given age and estimated station.
>
> So There!
>
> Jon Awbrey
>
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>