what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Monday, March 18, 2024

MEANINGS

Last week I discovered no fewer than 3 books I needed to add to Just Words? A sceptic’s glossarywith the hyperlinks, that adds a couple of thousand pages you can now access to the dictionary. The books are -

ed 2007) This may have been produced by a conservative thinker but the conservative tradition is an honourable one and the 750 pages seem to offer very fair and acceptable definitions
  • I had forgotten that Ralston Saul had produced The Doubter’s Companion (1994) which he sub-titled ”a dictionary of aggressive common sense” and introduced thus

In the humanist view, the alphabet can be a tool for examining society; the dictionary a series of questions, an enquiry into meaning, a weapon against received wisdom and therefore against the assumptions of established power. In other words, the dictionary offers an organized Socratic approach.

The rational method is quite different. The dictionary is abruptly transformed into a dispensary of truth; that is, into an instrument which limits meaning by defining language. This bible becomes a tool for controlling communications because it directs what people can think. In other words, it becomes the voice of Platonic élitism.

Humanism versus definition. Balance versus structure. Doubt versus ideology. Language as a means of communication versus language as a tool for advancing the interests of groups.

John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards – the dictatorship of reason in the west(1992) was already there – with its stunning portrait of Robert McNamara first as a bean-counter whizz-kid at General Motors, then as an infamous “body-counter” in the Vietnam War and finally as the ruthless head of the World Bank who inflicted “Structural Adjustments” on poor countries.

Fleming 2016. A curious endeavour from an ecologist with the full list here and random entries available below

https://leanlogic.online/glossary/anarchism/

https://leanlogic.online/glossary/community/

https://leanlogic.online/glossary/lean-economics/

So if definitions are your thing, click on….


No comments:

Post a Comment