>sides bread.
>
>Hah. Kelley. I beg
god! i love it when people do that! what are you wearing joanna. :)
>to differ. I've made excellent bread (having learned
>to knead and bake from my mother who learned it from her mother) without
>having the slightest idea wtf was going in the dough.
your gram (like mine) can tell you about why bread isn't rising well on a particular day: she might blab on about the humidity, the age of the flour, she might scold you for not using unbleached, for not getting liquid hot enough or getting it too hot, or for forgetting the salt, etc.
as such she's using knowledge passed on to her from others which she has probably altered along the way from her own experiments and from talking to others. carrol's point that we can't learn from others is b.s. on that point. should have fleshed it out. you're right to call me on it. still, what i'm saying is what carrol said we can't do here: we learn how to do things from other people. and that is every bit as much a part as praxis as kneading the bread to learn how to do it. theory and practice are *interrelated* existing in a complex relationship to one another. they aren't reducible to one another and that is what i hear carrol doing.
>So there.
>
> >similarly, your claim about how we go about working with
> >religious people is based on a theory of knowledge and social change. you
> >can't and don't escape by saying that you don't use theory. you do. all
> >the time.
>
>There may be theories about this or that but if we're ignorant of them and
>procede regardless, don't you think it's a bit of a stretch to say we're
>"using" theory?
i was going along with carrol's analogy to point out why it's not so that bread making is only something you can do by just doing it. you learn from the collective experiences of others. some recorded (someday i'm going to write the definitive guide to the cookbook genre. cookbooks are literature, damn it. including those dang "fund raiser" cookbooks. i've got the world's best! query joanna, are your fave pages sticky? heh. when i scout garage sales etc i look for the cookbooks that have lots of sticky pages. :) [1]
carrol was, himself, using theory rather loosely and, coz i'm a bitch stickler for a definition of theory (ask ken), i decided to leave it alone else we would have really gone off on a tangent. what we are doing in this list debate is not theory, though theories are being loosely deployed (at different levels: substantive v. meta theory, for ex).
>sticky-fingered
good :)
>Joanna
ps, apologies for lighting into you a while back. meant to write at the time. got busy and it zipped right out of the noggin. but, better late than never. ha ha. somehow my mother doesn't deal with that one when it comes to birthday cards.
kelley