In a message dated 1/3/00 4:10:04 PM Central Standard Time,
lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net(none) writes:
> ...And they would be right. Definitions aren't knowledge,
> and arguments about definitions are intellectual masturbation.
> Feynmann makes a point of this eloquently when he talks about
> people who can walk down a wooded trail and tell you the name
> of every bird and every plant but don't actually know anything
> about those birds or plants. Now if you knew, for example,
> that this certain bird likes to eat this certain plant, but
> you don't know the name of either one, you know more than the
> person who can name both because you actually know a
> substantive fact about nature, while ey knows nothing but
> arbitrary names.
Great point! My wife has a steel trap memory for the names of plants and
animals (and knows the common and latin names of hundreds and hundreds of
species), while I seem to be missing the compenents necessary to amass that
knowledge to any significant degree at all. Our knowledge of the actualy
dynamics of various ecologies is much less disparate, though (Anthea's only a
little better at that than me ...)
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:01:57 MDT