@Frank Apisa,
You Frank, and igm, are both falling for the Crusoe myth aka the Pure Visitor myth. It's self flattering I know. That's why you both fall for it. And others on here. It helps folks think of themselves as aloof. Above. Beyond.
It is absurd because it is impossible. It implies being uncontaminated by the world having passed through the furnace of doubt. Not that it's all that hot mind you for the average person but calling it a furnace adds to the illusion of how tough they are. Having come through is a feat if it is a furnace.
You have to be cognitively virginal. Do a conceptual striptease and stand naked. A real
tabula rasa. Only then could you inspect the world without having been corrupted by it. And there is no chance of that. Imagine watching a shuttle take off in such a position. John Voight acted it a bit on first seeing the streets of NYC.
The self seen as the last, indeed only, redoubt of certainty. Everything else not contained in such an island of consciousness to be treated with suspicion and, where it inhibits the satisfaction of the senses, all you have to go on if the furnace is actually purifying, glowered at and attacked.
The existentialist tried something like it and discovered that the world is not a spectacle but a pickle from which it is impossible to escape and particularly obviously in cities. The purification goes out of the window and only pride remains.
You cannot divest yourselves of conceptual "fashions" and be receptive to the world as it really is because you can only judge it by some conceptual frame of reference. To become untainted by that frame of reference is impossible although one might admire attempts to achieve it as one might admire an attempt to teach a dog to eat decorously.
Thus language, culture, social patterns seen as a totality cannot be judged from outside. As a Pure Visitor. A mistake many anthropologists make. Or, should I say, half-baked anthropologists which is the best one can say about having majored in the subject.
What are you left with then? Millions of competing egos is the only answer and complete confusion only avoided by the horrible expedient of power settling every decision.
I recognise that cultures, languages and social patterns are not coherent. That they contain inconsistencies, and may they always do, because such incoherence is obviously essential to their working.
Science is coherent as far as it goes, or as farmerman condescends to let it go, and that is the reason science is only a tool and not a way of life. So also with logic. With rationality. With empiricism. They won't work because they are dealing with illogical, irrational and unscientific human beings in vast and interdependent numbers.
Only those who think our system is not passably viable, pessimists, would be tempted to think they will work and the fact that they never offer any proof or even justification that they will work, it's a real blank spot in their thinking, if such it can be said to be, tells us all we need to know about them.
They take the "judge each case on its merits" approach, go in circles and sink ever deeper into the intellectual swamp. They don't even know that that is what they are doing. Each case looks clear cut if it is avoiding connecting with the general picture and viewed in isolation.
That's where they are either taking the piss, if they know, or just plain stupid if they don't.
"Vee heff vays off mekink you razional".
I'll see what I can do (as I say, 'if you're not winding us up!') but you do want my reply don't you because I have this feeling it may be a waste of my time? Convince me that you're on the level? Why are your questions so important to you and my possible response?
