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Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Example from Humanities and Social Sciences |
Posted by: | Leslie Smith |
Date/Time: | 2011/10/8 20:31:14 |
Thanks for this! Yes, I'm with you - well mostly; it was along the lines that you set out here that I had in mind in my "objections [i] + [ii]"?in my email below; no doubt there is much more to said here as to what is distinctive and essential in the arts. Then again in science, the same is the case, and Piaget's work was in no way intended to say the first and last word on that. Then again, there are links, commonalities, even identities: take these Shakespeare quotes: What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Romeo and Juliet [Piaget: Child's conception of the world] To be or not to be, that is the question. Hamlet [Piaget: growth of logic - 1958 + 1964 books; Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, etc] Is this a dagger I see before me? Macbeth?[Piaget: Mechanisms of Perception} Nothing can come of nothing: speak again. King Lear [Piaget's constructivism - passim: see my "sans fin" references in Cambridge Companion to Piaget chap 3. It would be very easy to see how each of these raises questions of the sort that Piaget's work sets out to address and answer. Take Hamlet and his disjunctive syllogism A or B not-B therefore A So easy for an adult: but how did I become adult enough to understand that as a necessary deduction, as opposed to a trite sequence? Of course, in reading Hamlet or watching the play, most people focus on the beauty of the poetry, human drama of high quality, and so on Note: it's taken for granted that "anyone" understands logical deduction - alas, alas. And tooour novelist Julian Barnes [Nothing to be frightened of] is not averse to reckoning that as a novelist he is in the business of searching for truth - just like his brother, the philosopher Jonathan Barnes [Aristotle scholar]. And of course: neither of the Barnes boys - famous though both are - wanted reliable evidence about human action/thought, still less valid theoretical principles to systematise interpreting the evidence. Did Piaget get into the Arts? No; at least as far as I know - right till the end [am just about to make public his final interview in 1980 some 7 months before he died] he denied that he had ever had "a theory",?there had been no such thing as "Piaget's theory"; the implication being that there were still unsolved problems about the formation of knowledge in science, and so business enough there. |