RE: Occam's razor and Galileo

Andrew McGuire (amcguire@unlvm.unl.edu)
Wed, 29 Jul 1998 08:45:54 -0500

To Misha, Dale, Douglas, Lion, and now Bruce. I have resisted the urge to
respond to your conversation until now, but it has become too much. Is
this how you speak in everyday life? Maybe I am lacking in vocabulary but
I do not understand much of what you write. Do you really have to write
like this or is it just an opportunity to use new words? I know I could
just delete your messages but I hope some of what you are saying is worth
listening to. I think good communicators can say wise things to people
without causing them to reach for a dictionary. Does anyone else feel this
way? As an example, the paragraph below starting "As I recall...," what
is all that?

Respectfully,

Andy McGuire, Extension Educator
amcguire@unlvm.unl.edu
P.O. Box 736 office 402-254-2289
Hartington NE 68739 fax 402-254-6891
University of Nebraska Cooperative Extension

On Wednesday, July 29, 1998 2:04 AM, Bruce Bacon [SMTP:bbacon@mtn.org]
wrote:
> What a wonderful nostalgia for the mid 60's appropriation of "paradigm"
> shifts from astonomy to social science wafted through memory! HOW can
> information be reciprocal of entropy? Paradigm is another name for
culture
> construct. It was the time when cybernetics made sense of system,
feedback
> a criterion. Two heroes illumined the arcane epicycles of what defines a
> social system:
> * R.B. Fuller defined entropy as "...the first subdivision of the
> universe, into inside the system and outside the system."
> ** Norbert Weiner defined entropy as "...regions in phase-space."
>
> As I recall, the helpful lesson in this to be the necessity of
> 'point-of-view' as an irreducible construct for placing self and others
in
> a dramatic historical and everyday cultural nexus. Either experience or
> knowledge, freedom, even imagination and dreams, is a product of a lived
> life, pragmatic and existential.
> The folk aphorism about walking a trail in another's moccasin's
as
> a guide to understanding and antidote to projective judgment is an apt
> summary.
>
> So I suppose today's lesson is that 'sustainability' is about erudite
> discourse as well as nutrition and soil humus.
> I'm also fond of Luce Irigaray's cautionary definition of 'dementia' as a
> the condition when one is not able to say anything other than what has
been
> heard.
> One of my favored erudite discussions of this paradigm shift is a
> book from the 70's, titled System and Structure (out of print last time I
> checked) by an author from Simon Fraser Univ or Univ B C whose name
escapes
> me now. My highlighted and annotated copy burned up in a fire, or maybe I
> loaned it.
> So thanks for the impassioned discussion; my razor is 'point of
view'.
>
>
>
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