Klaus,
I think you misunderstand me or perhaps didn't read the rest of my email.
The new approaches I pointed to are very different from positivism.
Viewing human behaviour as if and only as if humans are primarily animals,
and at the same time viewing what we as humans take central (our sense that
we each exist as an individual) is an illusory incidental artefact of our
animal existence and response to our developmental environmental contexts,
is very different from the attempt at objectivism of positivism. Instead,
these perspectives regard human sense of self as real and exisiting (at
least in the illusions of individuals), shaping behaviours but not central
to understanding why behaviours occur. Instead, they assume that the
explanations to our behaviours, perceptions and thoughts are more reliably
found in studying our beings as primarily animal organisms.
As I said, this perspective is not new. Patanjali discusses it in detail in
2nd Century BCE in his sutras on yoga. More recently, it underpins many
texts used in the study of design. Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death'
and the work of Larry Law and other situationists spring to mind as does
some of the work by Richard Coyne whilst at Sydney. More recently still, the
position appears regularly in articles in New Scientist, partucularly in
relation to evolutionary biological explanations of behaviour.
Time to move on from the positivism vs. subjectivist debate and draw on new
findings about human existence that go beyond placing subjective experience
central to the picture.
Best regards,
Terry
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Klaus
Krippendorff
Sent: Monday, 27 August 2007 11:25 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: long post: still defining design
terry,
you said:
<It's culturally and personally a tough challenge to regard ones' sense of
self as illusory and irrelevant - about as difficult perhaps as realising
the universe doesn't rotate round the earth
>
ignoring the self as the observer has been the standard operating procedure
since the enlightenment and obviously far from problematic for modernist
scientists. this is evident when it is written that "X IS Y" or according
to recent conversations: "design IS xyz". there is no observer in this
statement, plain ontology, plain metaphysics -- meta, just as wolfgang
described
klaus
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