Replying to LO29523 --
Dear Organlearners,
Terje Tonsberg <tatonsberg@hotmail.com> writes:
>I think this question strikes at the heart of how I feel
>about using the MM concept to understand behavior.
>MMs cannot be objectively observed, they can only
>be inferred. As such, they bring you more assumptions
>as luggage that you don't need.
Greetings dear Terje,
I respect your viewpoint, especially that we have to keep assumptions to a
minimum. You are right that MMs cannot be observed objectively. But so is
it also with knowledge. For example, nobody can observe my knowledge,
except indirectly when i articulate some of it as information.
The only person who can observe a MM operating in the mind is that person
self. What other persons observe, is the resulting behaviour of such a MM.
It is usually a "one-track" minded behaviour. Here we have to bear here in
mind openness, one of the 7Es (seven essentialities of creativity). A MM
is usually associated with a serious lack in openness.
>Human beings are not computers and should not be
>assumed to be like them. When a computer misbehaves
>it makes sense to look into its hardware and software,
>there is no need to look at the environment as long as the
>electricity is plugged in.
Terje, this is indeed a timely warning. I am becoming year after year more
aware how people think of other people as computers -- plug-and-play,
upgrade, obsolete, etc.
>Even in the case of At's dislike of English textbooks, the
>solution to this problem was perfectly functional and observable:
>
>At said:
>"I was saved from this MM when, ....a fellow hostel
>student ... replied that i will never become a scientist if
>i keep on avoiding English text books."
Terje, the turning point came when i studied Polanyi's book "The Tacit
Dimension". Only then did i understand why my mother tongue was so
important to me, why i intuively felt a danger in articulating my thoughts
in English and why i had been so easily indoctrinated that English is my
enemy. Articulating inner tacit knowing into external information is an
ART which happens first in the mother tongue. Once this art has been
mastered, a person can proceed doing it also in another language like
English. Even then the person will have to learn some new facets of this
art. Or let me rather say, this is how it has been for me.
What white Afrikaner people accomplished in this country from the poverty
and desolation caused by the British-Boer war was phenomenal. Black people
accuse white Afrikaner people that they have accomplished this by their
policy of apartheid using cheap black labour. Part of it, since 1948, is
true. But what they do not understand is the part which came, since about
1910, as a result of Afrikaners wanting to do things in Afrikaans,
especially all their learning. This drive reached its maximum during the
fifties just as i was going to school. In other words, by using Afrikaans
rather than English, Afrikaners had an immense schooling how to articulate
their tacit knowing.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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