This idea is fascinating to me. Working in higher Ed, what you know about what other people have said is arguably more important than anything you can say yourself. It is certainly a prerequisite to saying anything yourself. But I take pause and wonder if anything is actually being said at all? Isn’t dealing in the abstract part of our deeper intellectual abilities as humans? Don’t we further our understanding by hearing previous experiences and then using what we hear, building upon it, and shaping new experiences based on it? I guess I don’t yet have an answer to the question, can we truly know without experience?
I love these questions. You ask whether dealing in the abstract is part of our intellectual abilities as humans and it seems that it is - although the ability is apparently also highly culturally dependent. At any rate, we have learned to deal with and in abstractions to an extraordinary degree, in ways that are completely taken for granted in our mode of life, e.g. numbers, letters. So there's no doubt to me that this ability to latch onto an abstraction is fundamental to our lives and influences our behavior. Does it lead to genuinely increased understanding? I don't know. How are we measuring understanding? If it can support and increase understanding, can it also cramp and mislead it? What is the process, what does it look like when it is genuinely increasing understanding? Large and tantalizing questions.
This idea is fascinating to me. Working in higher Ed, what you know about what other people have said is arguably more important than anything you can say yourself. It is certainly a prerequisite to saying anything yourself. But I take pause and wonder if anything is actually being said at all? Isn’t dealing in the abstract part of our deeper intellectual abilities as humans? Don’t we further our understanding by hearing previous experiences and then using what we hear, building upon it, and shaping new experiences based on it? I guess I don’t yet have an answer to the question, can we truly know without experience?
I love these questions. You ask whether dealing in the abstract is part of our intellectual abilities as humans and it seems that it is - although the ability is apparently also highly culturally dependent. At any rate, we have learned to deal with and in abstractions to an extraordinary degree, in ways that are completely taken for granted in our mode of life, e.g. numbers, letters. So there's no doubt to me that this ability to latch onto an abstraction is fundamental to our lives and influences our behavior. Does it lead to genuinely increased understanding? I don't know. How are we measuring understanding? If it can support and increase understanding, can it also cramp and mislead it? What is the process, what does it look like when it is genuinely increasing understanding? Large and tantalizing questions.