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[watertank]

...when Confucius, the most famous and revered East Asian teacher, was asked by his students to tell them the meaning of athoritative personhood or jen - the conceptual pivot of his entire philosophy - he refrained from ever giving them a a definition. In diametric opposition to the Platonic insistence on defining essences, Confucius related paradigmatic stories. Knowing what a word means is not knowing what it signifies, but how to conduct oneself in situations where it is used.

Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age. By Peter D. Hershock .p. 6

see also Eleanor Rosch, http://psychology.berkeley.edu/faculty/profiles/erosch2007.pdf

Comments

[watertank.livejournal.com]

Corporate structure is a managerial technology. It is a technology that arises especially in codependence with transportation, communication, and information-processing technologies. As the advance, so corporate structure advances. In this sense, the industrial and information revolutions do indeed mark a significant break with the rest of human history in the sense that the flow of energy through our societies is no longer geared toward particularly divine, planetary, natural/ecological, or even individual human ends. Some of this flow is indeed diverted into the production of wast and into transmission losses.