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Old 12-14-2009, 06:06 AM   #8 (permalink)
roachboy
 
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the question of what is "true" follows from a decision that is made before the demonstration starts about what information will and will not be included in the demonstration. for a believer, axioms would include the existence of some god. for a non-believer, it wouldn't.
and (again) you can't demonstrate axioms from inside demonstrations that presuppose them.

what this means, really, is that any statement called "true" can be run back to presuppositions which are arbitrary.

dynamical systems theories of embodied cognition show that this is the case through what they do to older assumptions about, say, the mind/body split or notions that cognition is top-down and works via representations and so is a matter of symbolic ordering. both of those approaches operated within framing assumptions that were introduced as a function of ambient cultural factors and which were dragged through all demonstrations. these assumptions were shown to be "true" across the demonstrations that they informed. dynamical systems theory is also a framework that operates with its own assumptions--so it can produce different types of "true" statements about embodiment, about the limitations of a skull-bound notions of being-in-the-world (because we're electrical systems basically)...so it can show all kinds of problems with older frames. but that doesn't mean that dynamical systems theory is not also a frame.

it's a problem. people seem to want "true" statements to obtain in a way that abstracts them from the procedures that produces them. i suppose in that there's a residuum of a religious committment. or maybe it's an american thing, a reflection of a kind of constructed passivity of some kind, an idea that certain statements are simply as they are, and by extension that the world can be captured across certain kinds of statements which are not problematic because they are, somehow, transcendent. you like, like a believer may think god is.


o yeah: if you look at cognitive linguistics, which operates in a register kinda parallel to other modes of exploring the implications of notions of embodied cognition, it's pretty obvious that being able to model (and so talk about) the neural-net underpinnings of ordinary experience does not mean that folk have any direct access to this mode of interaction with the world in the context of their usual experience---they see the world across the results, which are mediated categorically. so you could say that these processes are as we imagine them to be.

there's more, but i gots to feign interest in work stuff for a while.
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