From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Dec 10 2002 - 17:40:34 MST
On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 02:47:51PM -0800, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> Ah-ha, the south-man living in summer-land (its a *really*
> nasty day in Seattle today) *is* still alive and phoneth home!
My thought exactly. I can report that Stockholm is grey and frosty too.
But we think we saw the sun today at 12.34, although a few of the
witnesses thought it was more likely a UFO.
> > Ah, but relevant to *what*? Half the trouble in understanding difficult
> > discourse is knowing what interpretative frame to read it through.
> [snip]
> > His error is not in saying any of this, which is a commonplace of physics,
> > but in supposing that this insight can be imported directly and usefully into any
> > relativism salient to human culture.
>
> Now I'm *really* confused. I'm absolutely certain that both Damien and
> Anders are using a variant of English that I don't speak (with or without
> my Bostonian accent).
Exactly. I think Damien has a good point about interpretative frames.
Think of them as the ribosomes to transcribe the RNA of text into the a
mental protein. Now imagine that there are not just variants of the
genetic code but variant ribosomes that do different things - some might
include extra amino acids according to some rule, others might even bind
the emerging protein to other proteins. The poststructuralist ribosome
is a very baroque and flashy entity, that probably isn't even very
faithful to the RNA but is very good at producing interesting proteins
with complex effects.
(OK, it is late and I have ribosomes on my brain)
Part of poststructuralist jargon is just a certain style of writing.
Part of it is the usual "let's separate the ingroup who gets it from the
outgroup who wont" social exclusion trick. Part of it is real speciality
terms. Part of is poetic allusions and associations making the words
more alive and fun. When you speak cellbiologese or I speak neuronese we
do the same, although the proportions between the uses may be slightly
different.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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