Correction & Dogmatism (was re: oppression)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Charles Brown wrote:
>
>>At any rate, we should look at the phallocentrism of agnostics too,
>>their implicit authoritarian enforcement of their uncertainty on
>>everybody else: Their slogan seems to be : If I am uncertain, you
>>must be too.
>
>Charles, I'm not chronically uncertain. I've got a set of principles
>that underlie almost everything I write or say. But as a matter of
>habit I like to look at these principles, look at the conclusions
>I've drawn from them, and see if they hold up. I like to read and
>listen to people who disagree with me. And it makes me very nervous
>when I hear ideas or strategies or artworks described as correct or
>incorrect; it seems like the first steps on a road that ends in
>censors and firing squads.
>
>Doug

I don't subscribe to this slippery slope argument.  For instance, I correct
my students' mistakes, but I don't shoot them.

Without some criteria of correctness and incorrectness, corrections are
impossible.  And without corrections, we end up with dogmatism -- the very
thing you are trying to avoid.  That is why we need comrades -- in
scholarship & politics -- whom we can trust to correct us (without
destroying us) when we don't notice our errors.  We must speak under
correction, or else we live in a pre-critical dream.

Yoshie