>Alan Dean wrote:
>>
>>The statement: "reduce the potential for rational decisions to be made by
>>making the environment unintelligible the behaviour of the population
>>appears to become less predictable" seems to be epistemologically suspect.
>>If you change an environment such that it becomes meaningless to the
>>elements that reside within it then not much can take place (B.E. makes a
>>related point).
>>
>
Alan Penn wrote:
>This may seem epistemologically suspect, but is empirically correct.
>Perhaps the epistemology is wrong. Presumably the environment of the
>container for a gas is 'meaningless' to the gas molecules, however
>statistical regularites of a high order 'take place' in the gas.
>
I don't really like analogies, but "meaningless" in the sense I meant it
would for gas molecules be a system at absolute zero. That is, an
environment that prohibited naturally occuring activity. Structures and
actors (agents) coevolve in the natural world, so changing the environment
outside evolved parameters is epistemologically (and ontologically)
suspect, I suspect.
ATB
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Alan Dean Ph.D.
Sociology and Anthropology
School of Comparative and Applied Social Sciences
University of Hull
Hull
HU6 7RX
UK
Phone: + 44 (0)1482 465743
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://150.237.76.29/www/ad/alandean.html
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