Influences

Over the past two decades, four works have significantly influenced the way I think:

• Roy Rappaport ¹, who led me to understand the difference between descriptions and rituals;

• George Lakoff ², who persuaded me that much thought is based on metaphor;

• Alan Page Fiske ³, who convinced me that all forms of social structure are based on four ways of perceiving, which also are four basic mathematical forms; and,

• William Strauss and Neil Howe ⁴, who guided me into thinking of American history as being made up of generations that swing among four stereotypes.

Roy Rappaport pointed out that rituals bring into being certain states of affairs. "When authorized persons declare peace in a proper manner, peace is declared whether or not the antagonists are persuaded" to comply.

In addition, these states of affairs are judged according to criteria that are provided by rituals. If "a man is properly dubbed to a knighthood and then violates the code of chivalry, ... we do not say that the dubbing was faulty," but that the knight is faulty.

A descriptive statement, on the contrary, is "assessed by the degree to which it conforms to the state of affairs it purports to describe." A yellow house is accurate described only if the house is indeed yellow. The two sources of criteria are "exactly inverse."

Rituals create conventional states of affairs and conventional understandings. Magic is the extension of the process "beyond the domain of the conventional in which it is effective into the domain of the physical in which it is not." A war can be ended by a properly conducted ritual of peace, but a drought cannot. However, the two domains are hard to distinguish. As Rappaport says, "People do occasionally die of witchcraft ...."

Rappaport points out that 'the unfalsifiable supported by the undeniable yields the unquestionable.' This is an important insight.

Here is a link to a Web page containing more notes and quotations from Rappaport's book.

George Lakoff changed the way I understand metaphor. Rather than think of metaphor as `merely' a figure of speech or aid to thinking, he persuaded me that we often understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another.

In their book on "Where Mathematics Comes From", Lakoff and Nunez argue that mathematics is based on `conceptual metaphors'. A conceptual metaphor is an "inference-preserving cross-domain mapping". Put another way, a conceptual metaphor is

... a cognitive mechanism for allowing us to reason about one kind of thing as if it were another.

Lakoff and Nunez argue that mathematics consists of metaphor piled on metaphor, blended and transformed, so people often do not realize the basis of it all.

Lakoff also arges that in US politics, both conservatives and liberals (in the contemporary, conventional definitions) base their political programs on reasoning that derives from metaphors about how a family should be organized. However, the conservatives understand what they are doing and how they are thinking and the liberals do not.

Alan Page Fiske suggests that all social life is composed of patterns of interaction that are based on four types of scale: categorical, ordinal, interval, and ratio. The scales provide ways of perceiving, and thereby of organizing social interaction.

For example, your use of a hallway in a building is an kind of social action based on a categorical scale: if you are permitted into the building, you have a right to walk down the hallway; no one feels that someone else has more of a right to walk down the hallway. If you are in the Navy, you know your rank compared to someone else (ordinal scale), but there is no measure of how much one rank is `greater than' another, only that one rank is greater.

Strauss and Howe wrote a book about the stereotypical characteristics of American generations since the Puritans. The `Sixties' generation is a stereotypical generation, as are the `Silent' and `Lost' generations.

Strauss and Howe argue that there are four different stereotypical types of generation that occur in sequence in a cycle, not two. There is no pendulum that swings from one extreme to another. Instead, movement occurs among four (or three) ways of thinking and behaving:

• an idealistic generation, like the `Sixties' generation, whose leaders tend to be highly religious or ideological, and who make mistakes because of beliefs that fail to match reality;
• a reactive generation, like the `X' and `Lost' generations, whose leaders are highly practical;
• a civic generation, like the World War II G.I. generation, who rebuild technology and institutions; and,
• an adaptive generation, like the `Silent' generation, who try to make the world better.

This book comes across to me as being an somewhat an example of `pop psychology'. Moreover, I am unable to apply generational characteristics to my memory of European history, although there are some tantalizing suggestions. Nonetheless, the book influences me. It might even carry a good bit of truth.

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