I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Gene,
ReplyDeleteDo you think that your reading is the *only* conclusion to be drawn from Oliva's post? In other words, are you claiming that Oliva is being disingenuous, incoherent, or just reckless? If is is possible to read Oliva's post differently than you do (which seems likely; it is a difficult thing to prove that denying your conclusion is tantamount to logical incoherence), and that reading is more charitable, then it is incumbent upon you to grant that charity. If not, however, then your critique stands.
"and that reading is more charitable, then it is incumbent upon you to grant that charity."
ReplyDeleteStephen, I gave this a *very likely* reading. And since we are talking about the sort of rhetoric which has, in the past, led people to fly a plane into an IRS building and blow up a Fed building in Oklahoma, it is, I think, incumbent upon Oliva to guard much more carefully against such a reading.