(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]

What is glaringly absent from any mass=mediated contact with other cultures and the alternatives they provide for the construal of reality is the immediately dramatic interweaving of our life stories with those of others. We may become quite familiar, say, with a particular pygmy family that a documentary film maker live with for six months and whose lives are the subject of a twelve-hour series on pygmy culture. ... But we are not friends..
..In short, we are not part of that family's story and they in turn are not truly part of ours.