Re: [] Re: Language and Logic

Jon,

Thanks for that quotation (copy below).  One of the most important
applications these days is to religious texts.  The most dangerous
people in any society are the "fundamentalists":  those who take
their religious texts as absolute truths and then draw the most
absurd conclusions by picking and choosing excerpts.

In America, the most dangerous threat comes from the fundamentalist
Christians; in Israel, the fundamentalist Jews; in the Arab countries,
the fundamentalist Muslims; in the world, all of them mixed together.

And you can generalize the word 'religious' to all kinds of doctrines
that are accepted as absolute:  Communism, Capitalism, Scientism,
Anti-Scientism, Logicism, Anti-logicism, Semantic-Webism, etc.

John
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When all is said and done, of course, Socrates' worries were not so much
about literacy as about what might happen to knowledge if the young had
unguided, uncritical access to information.  For Socrates, the search
for real knowledge did not revolve around information.  Rather, it was
about finding the essence and purpose of life.  Such a search required
a lifelong commitment to developing the deepest critical and analytical
skills, and to internalizing personal knowledge through the prodigious
use of memory, and long effort.  Only these conditions assured Socrates
that a student was capable of moving from exploring knowledge in
dialogue with a teacher to a path of principles that lead to action,
virtue, and ultimately to a "friendship with his god."  Socrates saw
knowledge as a force for the higher good; anything — such as literacy
— that might endanger it was anathema.  (Wolf, p. 220).

Wolf, Maryanne (2007), ''Proust and the Squid:
The Story and Science of the Reading Brain'',
Harper Collins, New York.  Paperback edition,
Harper Perennial, New York, 2008.


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