Re: ἰδίοις vs. ἑαυτοῦ
Posted: February 26th, 2015, 12:00 pm
Thank you for that comment, Stephen. I think it is true and well said. When you are learning an area on your own, you can easily feel that you are "boldly going where no man has gone before", only to find out that you're actually on a tricycle, and the discipline masters are in jets!Stephen Hughes wrote:I'm not so keen to stick my nose in, but perhaps I coud share some observations of colleagues and students iver the years.Stephen Carlson wrote:There's a third option, which I mentioned in my original reply: admit one's ignorance and not make stuff up.
Autodidacts often seem to be making things up. Looked at it a little obliquely progress withun a developed field of knowledge is a kind of guided making up knowledge. Without guidance some misunderstandings and misorientations can easily happen. Those type of things straighten themselves out to a large degree given time, exposure to a breadth of material that established the field in the first place or the discipline of structured education. Any one teaching, after the first 2 or 3 autobiographical / egoistic self-discovery tend to come to focus on the material, and the needs of the students require even the autodidact to go beyond their own interaction and discovery - sometimes looking like it's made up - and develop ways to bring others to the subject. It usually follows its own path.
Admission of ignorance requires an appreciation of the limits of ones own knowledge, and when the awareness of ignorance depends on the self-referential body of knowledge that one has oneself, that can be very difficult.
Still, that's not what happened here. I responded neither to the question asked, nor to Runge's work, but simply to the idea that "change has meaning" (as it was originally stated). I was reflecting on whether that statement can really be put forward as a general principle. And so I was quite surprised by Stephen's initial comment. When I thought about it a bit more though, I saw that he was right- not that I was pretending to know what I did not know, but that I was not addressing the question asked at all, nor was I intelligently commenting on Runge. It was a careless and undisciplined comment - especially as the first comment in response to a topic. Thus.as I said, I accepted the correction - and so I do. At least early in a thread one should not distract from the question with rambling reveries.