Alan and all
I just want to add something to what I wrote on Friday that might make Alan
happier - I think that the most important point - and this applies also to
what I was speculating about 'knowing' and was the point also of my
reference to Rod Brooks' robots - is that a lot of our knowledge of the
world is contained in the world - the mental and the environment are not
strongly separated things. This is one of the things that excited me so
much about Bill's ideas when i first read them. The social and the spatial
are intimately intertwined lines running through the argument. Although a
lot is speculative about the nature of the social/psychological line we
mustn't forget that it is there everytime we mention depth, integration or
any other 'purely spatial' measure. Also I'm guessing that we are talking
about not accessibility or anything instrumental like that but rather how
we appropriate space to ground our lives in the real. It might sound like a
fine distinction - but it means for example that we don't go out into space
to 'retrieve social rules' (this sounds rather like space as an instrument
of the social) but rather that space becomes part of the social just by
virtue of the fact that we do things in it. We don't so much go out and
retreive social rules from space as live the social within socio-spatial
patternings. We don't seek things in a neutral environment, (spatial cues,
correspondence with preconstituted 'mental maps' etc.) the social is just
done in space and is spatial. It's difficult to keep the dualism at bay
unless one thinks in terms of spatialisation and then it becomes quite
easy.
I think its important to remember that space is not just a fact of nature
with 'common-sense' instrumentalities and meanings but that it has a
multiplicity of meanings and can express many objective qualities depending
on how it is produced through social practice.
Stephen
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