Of course not. Why do you think so?

Hi Lars, 

I appreciate your sense of humor. 

But first thing first, I am not a neuroscientist. However I did some research involving the brain functioning carried out from an unusual perspective – I investigated various forms of human expression (language, math, engineering, art, etc) to find out what they have in common and how this could relate to the way the brain is organised. The perspective I adopted emphasises sensations and sensory representation which makes my approach different to yours.

I generally agree with everything you said in the article and understand your motivation. I especially like your statement that “our individual capabilities for action will inevitably reflect how we construct our artifacts and social institutions. Thus, the “universals of the external world” are not something that exists out there before mankind appeared on earth; rather these reflect “universals” of our brains, which evolution has brought about.”

I have a silly question which is related to the passage above: Do we experience objects, or the effects those artefacts have on our bodies and ultimately on our sensory cells?  

A Happy New Year to you,

Wes

Hi Wes

Thanks for your appreciative comments. Regarding your question I would say, yes, we experience sensations from objects, but the " nature of an object is constituted by the meaning it has for the person or persons for whom it is an object" (Blumer, 1969, p.. 68). The meaning of the object is not intrinsic to the object but arises from how the person is initially prepared to act toward it. In other words, the sensations we experience "come from objects which are human constructs and not self-existing entities with intrinsic natures" (ibid.). We always contextualize our experienced world.

And a Happy New Year to you as well!

Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall

Hi Lars, 

That was quick. Many thanks for the reply. 

Let me rephrase the question by using an engineering example. Think of the needle of an ammeter moving to a new position when the circuit is completed. Does the needle show current, or the effect something out there (we might call current) has on the instrument?

I wonder.

Wes

Hi Wes,

My thinking would be something like this:

- There is a physical reality, existing independently of humans.

- As biological creatures, we have evolved to survive in this reality, for example, by evolving coordinative capacities for acting relevantly in various situations.

- At one point in time Ampere observed the effects of something we eventually would name “current”.

- That word, “current”, became over time established as relevant in a community of people interested in electromagnetic phenomena.

- However, the meaning of “current” is, in a fundamental way, always indeterminate; everyone coming across it is by necessity makes his idiosyncratic interpretation of the meaning of “current”

So, in my view, which is heavily inspired by Integrational Linguistics and Critical Realism, there is no object “out there”, which lives its own life as “current”. “Current” is the label we give to the observed phenomena indicated by the change in needle position.

Sorry for this complicated answer to your simple enough question. But that’s bound to be when we march into the quagmires of epistemological and ontological issues.

Hi Lars,

Thanks again for the quick reply. This does not happen on RG very often, at least in my experience.

Your reply is not complicated at all. I agree with everything you said. I like your closing statement “there is no object “out there”, which lives its own life as “current”. “Current” is the label we give to the observed phenomena indicated by the change in needle position.”

You provided an answer to my question indirectly when you said that “At one point in time Ampere observed the effects of something we eventually would name “current””. Basically, you are saying, so I think, that we know something out there (we decided to call “current”) by the effect it has on an instrument constructed in such a way that it can interact with something out there and signal this interaction to the human observer by means of the moving needle. In summary, we do not observe the current as such, only its effects.

My original question marks the attempt to invite you to look at things from a different (yet complementary) point of view. What I suggest is the upwards view as seen from the scale of sensations. Just like atomism, the sensory view I propose is inadequate for describing high level social phenomena such as natural language. At the same time, just like atomism, the proposed view can explain why the brain is organised in a particular way and why languages, and more generally, human expressions have certain structure, etc. Are you ready for a brief detour in your professional/personal life?

Best, 

Wes

Hi Wes,

Certainly, I'm always ready to modify/change my thinking based on trustworthy arguments.  At the same time, I want to stick to the ideas outlined in "The Activity Modalities – A-priori Categories of Coordination". So far, I have not come across contributions that refute these. However, the thinking certainly needs to be articulated further, but I cannot do so without collaboration with other scientists, preferably neuroscientists. It seems that starting from a sensations point of view aligns well with the capacity-dependency model illustrated in fig. 3; indicating that a sensation capacity needs to be actuated in order to actuate other capabilities for integrating and coordinating actions.

Best,

Lars