Bingo, Lilly! That's the sort of analog that gets the blood flowing, for
sure! And it's the next step toward making the familiar strange, and then
finding a piece of the analog which may hold the clue for the real
situation whose paradoxical problem requires a solution.
This method allowed you to "honor" you own experience in a manifest way.
You recalled knowledge you had recently acquired. That's why as a form of
expression this analog method was so powerful in my classroom with younger
students from every imaginable walk of life.
Your comment about Karl Poper sent a shiver up and down my spine. On a
completely different tack, your words (his theory about theory) conjures
the ignorance and relative isolation of those in the U.S.A. who see
conspiracy in every corner, who think the U.N. is out to rule the world
(ha!), and that world government (whatever the hell that is) is over the
next rise. Theories from these people are rife. The anti-intellectual
tide in this country is now its own kind of storm surge (it's basis,
perhaps, is growing inequality of life--another story).
And when such ignorant, closed-minded individuals gather and feed off one
another, and product their theories, these theories, as you said in your
posting, "can never [be] proved. They stand until someone finds the way
to disprove them." Who is disproving this lunacy for these people?
And to think that some of these reactionary Americans are just over there,
just in the next electronic room, just in the next wire down the path of
this Internet group, looking perhaps for gun deals and drawings and plans
and conspiracies and fuel for their scared and sacred imaginations.
I tell you all, it's as though through this list we are become the
remnants of thought in a future-story by Ray Bradbury. Let's be loud.
Let's be clear in our desire to communicate, share, listen, exchange,
synthesize. There's no other course.
Pardon my rambling. I'm one who believes it never hurts to send ourselves
a card of cheer.
-- Barry Mallis bmallis@markem.com