Subject: PKF: Whorf on Feyerabends later problems Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2000 17:32:53 +0100 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. I read John Preston=B4s Science as SuperMarket... on http://www.rdg.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/jmpscienceassupermarket.htm "To say that the world has a multi-faceted nature is one thing; but it is not to endorse Feyerabend's supposition that a completely unknowable entity, 'Being', has the (quite remarkable but logically inexplicable) capacity to respond in different ways to different inquirers, depending on their psychological and social situations. Neither is it to accept Feyerabend's supposition that any ontology which sustains a thriving culture eo ipso exists. A world (hyper-world?) crowded with all the things everyone has ever believed in is a world none of its inhabitants can begin to explain. A world (hyper-world?) crowded with all the things everyone has ever believed in is a world none of its inhabitants can begin to explain. ... "Or are the commonalty of human nature and the potential commonalty of human culture reasons to think that Feyerabend would accept a commensurating 'meta-narrative'?" Drawing a long measure to another thinker I found Benjamin Lee Whorf=B4s essay Languages and Logic a way of looking at the apparent incompatability of both accepting a meta-narrative and accepting that ontological outlooks respond to reality in relativistic closed domains, where in the following passage from Whorf from hs essay, it appears one is allowed a narrative and eo ipso cultures: "Western culture has made, through language, a provisional analysis of reality and, without correctives, holds resolutely to that analysis as final. The only corrective lies in all those other tongues which by aeons of independent evolution have arrived at different, but equally logical, provisional analyses." This is not Feyerabends democratic council of laymen, it something else. Alexander Patterson : SAP R/3 Logistics SCM all industries . R/3 Telecoms / Utilities Network Logistics SAP OLAP Business Intelligence: Advanced Planning Systems (SAP APO), Data warehousing (SAP BW) voice/fax: +42 0425 22627 mob/gsm: +42 0602 610 663 email: nou-AT-clnet.cz webmail: bms-apatt-AT-universalmail.com
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