And that is why you think the idea is radical Ken, because it is 
problematic to you. And looking for definitive 'answers' is your way 
of dealing with the problem. So you select from what has gone before 
and rhetorically construct your story. From my standpoint, I am 
looking for possibilities, so the idea does not seem radical to me.

cheers, teena



>Dear Klaus,
>
>Thanks for your reply. I'd argue that this is exactly where we start 
>to slide down that slippery metaphorical slope. There are three ways 
>to answer this.
>
>In the post to which I replied, you wrote:
>
>--snip--
>
>If fiction is what is created by an act of invention -- as my 
>dictionary suggest,  i'd argue more generally
>
>THE WORLD WE KNOW IS FICTION
>
>--snip--
>
>The first answer is a version of Medieval logic-chopping. The world 
>we know is effectively the world there "is" so you can see how I 
>translated that into the claim that "everything is fiction." If 
>_all_ you can ever claim to know is fictive, then the idea that 
>everything is fiction isn't that far a leap. If "every known thing 
>is fiction" how could we _know_ whether any one thing is fiction or 
>not? This is logic-chopping, so I'll stop here. Except for an 
>irresistible touch of Aristotelian cosmology: perhaps the world we 
>know is fiction while the heavens are not.
>
>The first answer makes no sense.
>
>The second answer is pragmatic. I'll agree that we create the world 
>through our understanding and our use of language and other symbols. 
>This is classic symbolic interactionism going back to the 
>Mead-Blumer tradition. But we do not create the world alone. We 
>co-create it, and we share it with others. We are not homunculi 
>trapped within the fallible frame of a nervous system watching the 
>world by remote control through the eyes of a giant whom we steer, a 
>giant body whose sensory apparatus is separate from ourselves, 
>transmitting signals that we sense. I'll agree that it is difficult 
>to know the world, and that we are often mistaken in our 
>interpretations and understandings. This situation is exacerbated 
>precisely because we share the world with other human beings, 
>building our symbolic universe with them. We understand and 
>experience the world through the nomos of common cultures. But this 
>very fact also means that however imperfectly, we create a world of 
>common understandings based on some kind of reality outside the 
>private world of self and personal speech. Much as we speak of 
>intersubjectivity in scientific analysis, there are forms of 
>intersubjectivity that function in understanding common, shared 
>worlds.
>
>No one is ever fully connected to a reality outside the interpretive 
>mechanism of our nervous system, but neither are we some sort of 
>radical creatures that a sixteenth-century philosopher might 
>describe. Saying reasonably that our experience of the world creates 
>the world for us, and saying reasonably enough that we have no true 
>access to the world except through our nervous system does not lead 
>to the radical claim that no world exists outside our nervous or the 
>equally radical claim that any world we can know is effectively 
>fiction simply because there is no form of absolute, knowable truth 
>or objectivity. To say we can never really know the world outside 
>except through the workings of our nervous system verges on the 
>"brain in a vat" argument. In fact, if the claims you make are so, 
>one might well argue that you have no real way to know whether what 
>you believe is so or not. You could be entirely mistaken without 
>knowing that you are mistaken. The epistemological problem here is 
>that your argument seems to rest on a double standard: you seem to 
>claim that the rest of us suffer from an epistemological problem 
>because we speak of things as if we believe that they are so -- and 
>then you argue as though what you believe is so.
>
>I'll argue that even though there is a real world that we cannot 
>genuinely know in any comprehensive sense, we do know the real world 
>reasonably well. This is not a fictive world. Even though we 
>co-create our interpretation, experience, and understand of the 
>world through mechanisms that fit constructivist perspectives or 
>symbolic interactionist perspectives or pragmatist perspectives, 
>these descriptions explain how we interpret the world without any 
>need to claim that the world is a fiction.
>
>The second answer seems reasonable enough to me. But there is a third answer.
>
>The third answer is that we have evolved from earlier creatures 
>selected by the process of evolution. This process means that our 
>ancestors got here and stayed here because our nervous systems were 
>suited to understanding and interpreting the world in which they 
>found survivable niches. Those who were incapable of gaining 
>effective access to reality went extinct. The descendents of those 
>ancestors -- us -- can access the world through reasonably effective 
>nervous systems. We often interpret that real world badly, but the 
>world as many of us know it is not fiction simply because some of us 
>do badly.
>
>If evolution is merely a fairy tale or one plausible scientific 
>account among others, this may not be so. If George Bush and his 
>creation science friends say that men started out as dust and women 
>started out as a rib. If that's true, I suppose we may not have 
>access to reality outside our nervous systems after all. This would 
>certainly explain a great deal about what has happened in the world 
>during the past eight years. Whatever the Lord has been blowing into 
>the president's nostrils, I'd argue that evolution accounts for the 
>rest of us.
>
>If this is the case, it accounts for the properties of most designed 
>artifacts and the nature of the creatures we design them for. That, 
>in turn, rests on the real properties of the world and the fact that 
>we can access them reasonably through a nervous system that allows 
>us to do so. The properties of human being in human cultures shape 
>our interpretations of the world. In this sense, we create the world 
>through culture and through language. Our nervous systems give 
>access to a real world. I'd hesitate to say that our nervous systems 
>"create" the world in the same way that language "creates" the 
>world. The process of evolution suggests quite the contrary: the 
>world created the nervous systems, and these systems link us 
>effectively to the world except for people suffering from the kinds 
>of neurological or psychological problems of the kind we meet in 
>Oliver Sacks's books.
>
>There is an exception. Evolution apparently fails to explain some 
>politicians and those fundamentalists who stand four-square on the 
>literal Bible. Other than the elect and the elected, however, 
>evolution explains how most of us got here, and it explains some 
>aspects of how designers work.
>
>Critical realism in several flavors, symbolic interactionism, 
>pragmatism, and constructivism in several flavors suggests that 
>there is a real world that we can access reasonably well without 
>arguing that "every known thing is fiction." Biology, evolutionary 
>biology, and evolutionary psychology would reach the same conclusion.
>
>It seems to me that there is no epistemological problem here. In 
>contrast, I see serious epistemological problems in the radical 
>claim that "the world we know is fiction."
>
>Yours,
>
>Ken
>
>
>>dear ken,
>>
>>your statement "(if) everyTHING is fiction ..." is not the same as "every
>>known thing is fiction." if you confuse the two you get into epistemological
>>troubles.
>>
>>how could you assume that the acknowledgement that the known world is
>>fiction prevents you from deciding which one is better, more reasonable, or
>>responsible?  sure, some fictions are better than others.  the point is that
>>you can't talk about a world without talking about it.  you don't have
>>access to a reality outside of your nervous system that creates it.
>>
>>klaus
>
>
>--
>
>Ken Friedman
>Professor
>
>Dean, Swinburne Design
>Swinburne University of Technology
>Melbourne, Australia