From: "John Mingers" <orsjm-AT-razor.wbs.warwick.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 9 Jun 1998 14:52:09 GMT Subject: Re: BHA: society, santa, truth, etc. I'd like to follow up Ruth's tale with my own. When I was a similar age I was determined to discover if santa was real (my parents wouldn't say) so I set traps by tieing string across the room (I was an experimentalist from an early age). Unfortunately no one was ever caught and I never really understood why until I was a parent and realised that you could put on the light without waking the children. I see this as the starting point of my academic career, and my distrust of experiments! As to the debate I don't see the problem The referent to the term "santa" does not exist an an embodied being, but does as a concept and set of cultural practices. John > > I can't help but toss in that when I was little (4 or 5-ish?) I asked my mom > if Santa Claus (the guy) was real. She reports that she didn't know what to > do at first, but decided that she didn't want to lie about it. So she said > no. And that was that. No lingering effects, except perhaps for a > continuing preoccupation with truth. (I don't mean to belittle the real > struggle that many parents do have with this, especially when they're poor, > just to say that the situation with respect to Santa is not always as dire > as it was starting to sound.) > John Mingers, Reader in Operational Research and Systems, Warwick Business School, Internet: J.Mingers-AT-warwick.ac.uk University of Warwick, fax: +1203 524539 Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. phone: +1203 522475 WWW: http://www.wbs.warwick.ac.uk/ --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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