Dear all,
I've been skimming through the last few days of posts over morning coffee and saw a pattern.
Masculine – feminine
Thinking with the right side of the brain – thinking with the left side of the brain
Body – mind
Holistic – fragmented
All these dichotomies. What are they good for? We could regard them as some sort of scaffolding for thought. They impose a dimension for making distinctions. As such, they can be useful, but they are only one way of cutting the cake.
The line we project for cutting the cake doesn’t make the dimension real. It does, however, allow us to reason along that line. The drawback is that it only allows us to reason along the line until someone suggests imposing another dimension, or line of reasoning.
I was about to say that Lyotard was right, but then I realized that he also got caught in a dichotomy: the one between pluralism and consensus. But as we designers know, it can be both, as in the divergent and convergent processes.
Please excuse my ramblings, but I guess I’m thinking while writing. Anyhow, my conclusion might tentatively be here that the dichotomies are imposed upon the phenomenon under study, and that they both guide the line of reasoning as well as constrict it. I appreciate Jinan's attempt to impose a new dimension by re-labeling and re-framing the masculine and the feminine.
Best regards,
// Mattias
--
Mattias Arvola, Ph.D., Docent
Associate Professor of Cognitive Science
Director of the Cognitive Science Bachelor’s Programme
Department of Computer and Information Science
Linköping University
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