[MD] From each... to each

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

Craig, Steve,

[Steve]
Consider this 3) If we experience a wolf attacking us, experience tells us
wolves have sharp teeth, even if we don't know the words "wolf," 'sharp," or
"teeth," and even if there are no biologists around to tell us.

[Arlo]
Experience does not tell you "wolves have sharp teeth". Experience tells you
"low quality situation". Language is a cultural attempt to codify this
experience into symbolic representations. We have words like "wolf", "sharp"
and "teeth" because these have cultural value for us.

Tell me, do you both feel man is a objective observer, simply observing reality
and describing it in a unbiased and unobstructed way? Your views on language
(or a term I prefer, linguaculture) seem to indicate this.

What do you think of Pirsig's assessment (describing the mediating effects of
language)...

"There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic
physicist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in language." Our intellectual
description of nature is always culturally derived.

The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of freeing itself
from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to invent a myth of
independence from the social level for its own benefit. Science and reason,
this myth goes, come only from the objective world, never from the social
world. The world of objects imposes itself upon the mind with no social
mediation whatsoever.

It is easy to see the historic reasons for this myth of independence. Science
might never have survived without it. But a close examination shows it isn't
so."

Pirsig had also written, "Similarly, Choctaw, Tunica, the Keresian Pueblo
Indians and many other people make no terminological distinction between blue
and green." Was this because no one, biologically, among these tribes had the
necessary receptors in their eyes to make this distinction? According to
Pirsig, it is because their culture did not value such a distinction, and so
the language did not reflect it, and so those assimiliating the culture do not
value it.

Arlo