“As we study other peoples, past or present, we dissolve the totality of their existence into items we are able to handle and fail to note the other parts of their lives which remain unassimilable to ours as a whole.”Tagged: Knowledge Without First-Hand Proximity, Issues of Abstraction, Epistemology, The Problem of Knowledge Abstraction
“One of the abiding problems of explanation is that it splits issues analytically in order to clarify them, and in the process often impoverishes or denatures the issues, depriving them of some of their full and essential depth.”Tagged: The Limits of Knowledge, Epistemology, Analytical Reductionism, Hurtles In Objective Interpretation
“The more we explain, the more we generate need for further explanation.”Tagged: Knowledge, The Never Ending Story, Forever Grasping, No End to Epistemology, Truth as Movement
“What is involved here is not relativism in the subjective sense but rather relationism: one can indeed determine truth or falsity, but truth is ultimately verifiable in complex ways, not in any simple way.”Tagged: Relativism vs. Relationism, Relationism, Infinite Webs of Truth, Millions of Shades of Truth
“The ancient Greek term mythos, which yields our English 'myth,' at its root means anything delivered by word of mouth and thus from the start was radically acoustic.”Tagged: Etymology, Orality, Myth, Meaning in Vocalization, Word Origins
“There is no end to interpretation.”Tagged: Hermeneutics, endless possibilities, A Text Is Always New
“It is perfectly true that neither you nor I can hope to set up a program for activity which is at all likely to be feasible ten or twenty thousand years from now. But it is also true that unless we habitually feel our activity and decisions to be somehow involved in the long-range future, just as we…”Tagged: Human Planning, Planning
“America is a nation whose genius seems to be adaptability and change.”Tagged: Change, The United States, Adaptability, America as a Place of Change
“For models come and go. Not that the old ones turn out necessarily to be untrue. They may remain entirely true while they become quite unfruitful. Models provide analogies which are of their very nature limited, and, as this dialogue which makes human society what it is moves on, the models once…”Tagged: Truth as Movement, Never Ending Story, The Evolution of Knowledge
“In an oral culture, knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost: fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential for wisdom and effective administration.”Tagged: Oral Cultures, The Speed of Oral Communication, Winged Words
“Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit… Though words are grounded in oral speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever. A literate person, asked to think of the word 'nevertheless', will normally (and I strongly suspect always) have some…”Tagged: Thought Catalog History
“A name is often referred to in slang as a ‘handle,’ a hold on something or someone.”Tagged: Names, Naming, Language as a Hold Over Something, The Oppressiveness of Names
“A liberal education today must include reflection on the significance of writing and print, situating these media and all their works in their historically patterned sequences. When we speak of a sequence of media, we do not mean that new media of communications annihilate their antecedents. When…”Tagged: Communications, Liberal Education, Pattern Recognition As An Academic Discipline