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Showing posts from February, 2014

On Our Two Extremes in Literature

   Regardless of age, sex, or background, we are more or less conscious of our contingent life. Shakespeare once made his famous Gloucester say as follows; "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport... "  (King Lear, Act 4).    One extreme response to this uncertainty in the form of literature was verbalized in many ways as Romanticism in the 19th century. De Lisle Adam's (French writer, 1838-89) young Count Axel, for example, persuaded his beautiful runaway nun Sarah to kill themselves in denial about the stupidity of life in his age, claiming, "As for living, our servants can do that for us." The opposite extreme of this is found in Meursault's insensibility to the ultimate "indifference of the universe," who was fully characterized by Camus in his 1942 book, "L'Etranger" (in a sense the world neither cry nor wry at our death at all). Few people mull over death and we usually stay too blunted to pe

Can We Catch A Black Cat on Waves?

Science, It has ever given us challenges to test for an unalloyed answer. Take an example of expanding waves of inquiry on water, For the symbolism of science, such as in TED's. Within these circles of water, Truth manifests beautifully like the wavy topography. Validity turns both stable and yet malleable... However, ironically enough, It is the humanities that give us a "fire" to test. Gives us more primitive impulses of validity for us, At the extensive edge of its watery wave. As Stuart Firestein (2012) reminds us, The " nippy " black cat we seek-- i . e., truth--is,  Not there, next moment! Like it or not,  We are desperately inclined to seek it, As this feline blue eye is watching us.   ao

Darwin's Belief

  As in the words of Baars' (1997) expression that both Newton and Darwin made great leaps which had led to the new understandings , respectively,  of planetary motion and of primate evolution,   the methodological key to open the newly figured worlds is always a variable; how we will see and set one by regarding once assumed constant as "a variable" to observe.       For example, as we have already known, Darwin's question started from the belief that the shown difference between man and the higher animals (apes) were a matter only of degree, not of kind. In this respect, he was a true behaviorist in that he observed that the occurrence of similar patterns of behavior in different species was evidence of mental faculties of them. Understandably, he spent thus dark days of oppression from people in those days. Being as behaviorist must be also difficult in his time.  ao

Human Tree

   Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995) said that organizational knowledge creation is a distinctive trait of Japanese management. In their view of making tacit knowledge explicit, they present three implications: 1) a whole different view of the organization itself as a living organismic metaphor, 2) on-going re-creational process of personal and organizational self renewal, 3) a grasp of the importance of the Japanese view by "unlearning" the old Western view. Three keys :  ・ Figurative language and symbolism  ・ Sharing; from the personal to the organizational  ・ Ambiguity and redundancy    This apparently is a perspective of complexity theory applied to the organizational, social management. However, it is practically an ideal merger of the individual view of and the collective view of human brain for us who has been imprinted individualism at school to break through with. This is why, therefore,   their ideas also have to date been able to permeate to the Western people&#

Rules and Contingencies

"No rule can be derived from the contingencies... We need a separate term only to describe the deriving of a rule from the contingencies." B. F. Skinner (1974), pp. 148-49     Among the era of dubious mentalism and chaotic postmodernism, when it comes to engaging in rules and contingencies, we tend to be the extremes: i.e., deductive, or inductive, hardly giving any thought to abduction, the third, long-forgotten recourse for us to have for the issue of rules and contingencies.       According to Skinner, the heart of induction is; First there was contingencies (=chance), then when human learned to reason or infer, rules were derived from the contingencies. What he obviously says above is that rules cannot emerge by itself. It means that we use our inferences to describe what seems regularly to happen in nature. This is pure principle of science.    Further, Skinner also says, "The extraction of rules was evidently a secondary stage" (p. 150). The initial stag