Friends,
Klaus's long, careful reply has me thinking. I am still writing a
response. In the meantime, Victor wrote am elegant note that raises
some of the issues I am struggling to express. Different perspective,
and similar thoughts.
Thank you, Victor.
Ken
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Victor Margolin wrote:
Dear Colleagues:
At the risk of annoying some people and being taken to task for not
responding to each of the arguments in the discussion I would like to
offer the following statements
1) Language is a form of representation; it is a system of signs
through which we seek to communicate experiences both actual and
imaginative
2) We can't say that anything is absolutely true but we can make
assumptions based on our own experience. I would use the term
'fiction' to refer to acts of the imagination that do not purport to
be actual experiences. I would say otherwise that language may be
more or less persuasive in convincing us that something actually
happened
3) Events that individuals experience are real, presuming that we
accept that sensory experience more often than not corresponds to the
real; linguistic representations of so called real events are more or
less persuasive; they can be verified by multiple accounts or refuted
by similar means; to the degree that we live through representations
we need to make judgements about what to accept as actual and what to
discount as fiction (something that is not actual)
4) linguistic representation is a form of mediation between
individuals; it can be critiqued in terms of its capacity (in a
particular instance) to accurately or fairly represent something that
happened. I will stop here. This is simply my attempt to be
reasonable. It is crazy to deny experience. Holocaust deniers, for
example, are not credible. There is too much evidence to contradict
their claims. We develop our own capacities to judge the accuracy of
linguistic representation, i.e. to judge whether something said is
likely to be an accurate representation. It also helps to use the
term 'fiction' for works that are self-consciously imaginative. To
call history writing, for example, fiction, is to suggest that there
is no claim to any degree of veracity. Of course some historians try
to cover up the truth and to the degree that they do, they depart
from actuality and present a work that is purely imaginative. To the
degree that they try to create a narrative based on events, they may
be taken seriously as historians. Of course, any work in the
humanities is subject to interpretation and that is what, in my
opinion differentiates the humanities from the sciences. They expose
themselves as representations and allow for interpretation and debate
as legitimate forms of response.
Enough.
Victor Margolin
--
--
Ken Friedman
Professor
Dean, Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
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