Sure
Eduardo
We can learn something from books. The “we” is important to the question (omitted when one ask whether books contain a thing). What we learn has much to do with how open we are to allow the printed characters to resonate with what we already know and are willing to re-examine, expand or take in. You wouldn’t learn any thing from a book written in characters you are unfamiliar with, in a language you don’t understand, or on a subject you know more than what someone else could learn from reading a book who doesn’t know what you do.
My question concerns what you are driving at with this question in this forum. Perhaps you should ask what can you learn from facing an artifact? Before you interface with it and how it changes after you interfaced with it - as you intended, not as you intended, being surprised, experience failure you can correct, experience breakdown, or in the extreme being killed experiencing nothing at all. Your reading of a book can shatter your preconceptions, they can drive you into despair but only if you met them.
Klaus
Sent from my iPhone
On Oct 19, 2017, at 11:14 PM, Eduardo A. Corte-Real <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Of course that books don’t contain knowledge in the same way they don’t contain unicorns. In fact nothing contain unicorns since they are fantastic beasts (and free spirits).
It is obvious that books, in fact, contain arrangements of 2D signs that are intended to communicate and (this is important in book history) retain something that, being de-codified, at least produce “Thought” in the reader.
This is obvious.
We all know that boats that work properly float. So when I’m saying “I went by boat to Brazil” I don’t have to say “I went to Brazil on a boat that floats” (unless you are a stand-up comedian). So when I’m saying that I learn that there were Pre Plinean eruptions from a book because it contained knowledge about volcanoes I’m of course omitting what books obviously are in a limited and correct definition. I’m jumping over all that to the instrumental purpose of knowing about volcanoes safely in my apartment, and choosing an Encyclopedia of Volcanoes to do so.
But I understand that all this might be problematic.
So I’m rephrasing my original question:
Can we learn from books?
Thanks,
Eduardo
Eduardo Corte-Real
PhD Arch.
Associate Professor
Professor Associado com Agregação
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Av. Dom Carlos I, nº4, 1200-649 Lisboa, Portugal
T: +351 213 939 600
<http://www.iade.pt/>
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