Strange Islands.



Untitled

My life as a scrapbook.






Theme by spaceperson Powered by Tumblr

klammer
Tagged
understanding


Tuesday, Jun 14th, 2011
The limits of knowledge: Things we’ll never understand

You might not expect the UK’s Astronomer Royal to make too many pronouncements about what chimpanzees think, but that is one of Martin Rees’s favourite topics. He reckons we can learn a lesson from what they understand about the world - or, rather, what they don’t. “A chimpanzee can’t understand quantum mechanics,” Rees points out.

That might sound like a statement of the obvious. After all, as Richard Feynman famously said, nobody understands quantum mechanics. The point, though, is that chimps don’t even know what they don’t understand. “It’s not that a chimpanzee is struggling to understand quantum mechanics,” Rees says. “It’s not even aware of it.” The question that intrigues Rees is whether there are facets of the universe to which we humans are similarly oblivious. “There is no reason to believe that our brains are matched to understanding every level of reality,” he says.

via Woshao/New Scientist

h/t @anibalmastobiza

∞11:30 am, by jamreilly5 notes Comments
[knowledge] [understanding] [martin rees]

Monday, Apr 04th, 2011
High Res


Alleviating social and cultural difficulties requires better communication. And the problem that faces us is, how do we improve our communication? It will not do to set out posthaste to “solve the problem” of inadequate communication. The most pressing task is rather to start inquiring immediately about how that problem presents itself to us. (Reddy, 1979) The conduit metaphor operates whenever people speak or write as if they “insert” their mental contents (feelings, meanings, thoughts, concepts, etc.) into “containers” (words, phrases, sentences, etc.) whose contents are then “extracted” by listeners and readers. Thus, language is viewed as a “conduit” conveying mental content between people. The conduit-metaphor paradigm states that communication failure needs explanation, because success should be automatic. Conversely, the toolmakers paradigm states that partial miscommunication is inherent and can only be fixed by continuous effort and extensive verbal interaction. (via wikiP)  the conduit metaphor is leading us down a technological and social blind alley. That blind alley is mass communications systems coupled with mass neglect of the internal, human systems responsible for nine-tenths of the work in communicating. We think we are “capturing ideas in words,” and funneling them out to the greatest public in the history of the world. But if there are no ideas “within” this endless flood of words, then all we are doing is replaying the myth of Babel—centering it, this time, around a broadcasting tower. via Michael J. Reddy -  The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language About Language (1979) Image: Tower of Babel by Marten van Valckenborch (c.1600) via wikiM

Alleviating social and cultural difficulties requires better communication. And the problem that faces us is, how do we improve our communication? It will not do to set out posthaste to “solve the problem” of inadequate communication. The most pressing task is rather to start inquiring immediately about how that problem presents itself to us. (Reddy, 1979)

The conduit metaphor operates whenever people speak or write as if they “insert” their mental contents (feelings, meanings, thoughts, concepts, etc.) into “containers” (words, phrases, sentences, etc.) whose contents are then “extracted” by listeners and readers. Thus, language is viewed as a “conduit” conveying mental content between people.

The conduit-metaphor paradigm states that communication failure needs explanation, because success should be automatic. Conversely, the toolmakers paradigm states that partial miscommunication is inherent and can only be fixed by continuous effort and extensive verbal interaction. (via wikiP)

 the conduit metaphor is leading us down a technological and social blind alley. That blind alley is mass communications systems coupled with mass neglect of the internal, human systems responsible for nine-tenths of the work in communicating. We think we are “capturing ideas in words,” and funneling them out to the greatest public in the history of the world. But if there are no ideas “within” this endless flood of words, then all we are doing is replaying the myth of Babel—centering it, this time, around a broadcasting tower.

via Michael J. Reddy -  The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language About Language (1979)

Image: Tower of Babel by Marten van Valckenborch (c.1600) via wikiM

∞08:26 pm, by jamreilly5 notes Comments
[conduit metaphor] [language] [meaning] [michael reddy] [understanding]

tumblr likes