(no subject)

[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]

Conceiving of technology as a patterning of conduct has two important benefits. First, it becomes clear that deciding whether a technology lives up to its promises must be undertaken by communities, not isolated individuals or interest groups. At the same time, precisely because technologies exist between us as the patterning of our conduct, like all other institutions they are practically invisible or ambient - part of the very atmosphere of our lives. As such, they easily escape evaluative scrutiny. This is, in fact, one of the reasons why it is so easy to ignore the presence of technology and why we tend to concentrate our critical attention on tools instead. p. 22

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looks like he's proposing another control mechanism. one could argue that market is a community driven decision body, though an imperfect one.

[watertank.livejournal.com]

In short, every new technology amounts to a novel biasing or conditioning of the quality of our interdependence.

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control points of the third order. dictating the pace of change within an eco-system.

[watertank.livejournal.com]

...while we frequently discard our tools, we very seldom ever discard a technology. Once initiated, a technological lineage involves a co-evolution of useable and useful tools and patterns of wanting.

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again, talking about a control point within a system evolution pattern.