Dear Terry,
Thanks for your reply, and thanks for your effort to clarify what you meant. Nevertheless, you never did explain why the statement that “knowledge is a property of consciousness” supposedly “has problems epistemologically as a derivative of a false noun-verb development.”
I’m going to offer three brief comments, before withdrawing from the effort to converse with you on this subject. First, Antonio Damasio is an important thinker. What I requested was not an even longer list of Damasio’s excellent books — I have them all. What I requested was your specific restatement of the relevant points that you assert bear on this discussion. The Standard Edition of Sigmund Freud’s collected works runs 24 volumes in the English translation. If I were to make the claim that Freud said “x” about topic “n” — a precis, or summary — I’d provide a careful reference that allows readers to see for themselves what Freud himself wrote. That’s the only way for people to know whether my precise is accurate.
Second, I disagree with your claim that "the concept of knowledge has implicitly taken knowledge to be an object for a very long time” and that I deal with knowledge in this way. You’re getting hung up on the grammatical form of a single word. A noun may describe a process. To say that “knowledge is embodied” is simply to say that “knowledge a property of consciousness” — that is, another way of saying that those conscious and living creatures who “know” sharing the attribute of knowledge or knowing. It is also a reasonable to say “knowing is a property of consciousness” — that is, the ability to know something is an attribute or property of conscious creatures.
Since you want to insist that I am bound to a view of knowledge or knowing as an object rather than a process, this leaves us little to discuss. It remains the case for me that knowledge is a process. My take on this goes back to work done a century ago by George Herbert Mead and John Dewey, both working in the pragmatist tradition. While Mead did not himself use the term “symbolic interactionism,” his work gave rise to the symbolic interactionist tradition, leading to Herbert Blumer’s work, as well as to significant aspects of Peter Berger’s work and Thomas Luckmann’s. It takes a great deal of work to sort through these epistemological issues — if you want to stop me at the first sentence by insisting that I am writing about “knowledge as object,” there is no point trying to go further. This is especially the case when you make this claim without demonstrating how it is that I am bound to this position.
The only thing that I can see to explain your claim that the statement “knowledge is a property of consciousness” supposedly “has problems epistemologically as a derivative of a false noun-verb development” seems to be the fact that the word “knowledge” is a noun. Words such as “consciousness,” “being,” “performance,” and “action” are also nouns — nouns that describe processes.
Perhaps we will have better luck another time if we can discuss a topic where we can agree on what words mean. Or we might have better luck in a conversation where you are willing to permit me to examine and use words as carefully as I try to do to develop a responsible argument before you insist that because I am using a noun, I am therefore describing an object rather than a process.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
