At 03:49 PM 3/18/03 -0500, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>So, W, you admit you're delusional. You just keep it on perspective.
>I knew John Nash, btw, when he was the Ghost of Fine Hall.
>jks
>
>
>That makes all the difference in the world. We are all partly
>delusional, in a Kantian sense - by inserting, so to speak, our apriori
>forms into our perceptions and "seeing" those forms as a part of outside
>reality. Philosophers and the assorted gang are no different in that
>respect than the common folk. The difference is that philsophers often
>know that they are doing it, whereas the common folk do not - they tend
>to think that they see things as they are.
>
>This was the crux of my argument against Kelley's insinuations that I
>see my cognitive processes differently than those of the other folks.
>The point was that I do react to propagandistic messages pretty much in
>the same way as the common folk, but I can frame them differently than
>many of these folks, and also bracket them out and reflect on their
>epistemological status, whereas most common folks do not bother. That
>is to say, I react to, say, images of cruelty, suffering, and tyranny
>pretty much the same way as most common folks do. Where different folks
>part ways is how these images are being congnitively framed: some of
>them reduce their impact by framing them in a racist framework i.e.
>brown-skinned people's suffering is lesser than that of the white
>skinned foks (as superbly illustrated by George Orwell in _Marrakech_) ,
>other frame it in a manichaean/Hollowoodian narrative of the struggle
>between light and darkness, good and evil, and call for acrusade against
>evil, and still other question its epistemological validity by
>"deconstructing" i.e. framing it as a constructed narrative intended to
>produce the effect that most folks are experiencing in the first place.
>
>Wojtek