The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 52

Imagine immersing yourself in an artificial world and actively exploring it, rather than peering at it from a fixed perspective through a flat screen in a movie theater, on a television set, or on a computer display. Imagine that you are the creator as well as the consumer of your artificial experience, with the power to use a gesture or a word to remold the world you see and hear and feel" (p. 16).

In an Internet interview with Rheingold, Sherry Turkel points out that computers and networks are objects- to-think-with for a networked era. She predicts, "I believe that against all odds and against most current expectations, we are going to see a rebirth of psychoa.n.a.lytic thinking" (cf. Brainstorms, http://www.well.com, 1996).

Literacy, Language, and Market

Reference is made to the works of Margaret Wheatley (Management and the New Science); Michael Rothschild (Bionomics); Bernardo Huberman (Dynamics of Collective Actions and Learning in Multi-agent Organizations); Robert Axtel and Joshua Epstein (creators of Sugarscape, a model of trade); and Axel Leijonhufvud (Multi-agent Systems), all published as Webtexts.

Transactions as extensions of human biology evince the complex nature of human interactions. Maturana and Varela indirectly refer to human transactions: "Coherence and harmony in relations and interactions between the members of a human social system are due to the coherence and harmony of their growth in it, in an ongoing social learning which their own social (linguistic) operation defines and which is possible thanks to the genetic and ontogenetic processes that permit structural plasticity of the members" (Op. cit., p.199). They diagram the shift from minimum autonomy of components (characteristic of organisms) to maximum autonomy of components (characteristic of human societies).

A Walk Through Wall Street, in US News and World Report, Nov. 16, 1987, pp. 64-65. One from among many reminiscences by Martin Mayer, author of Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Men and Money.

"Wall Street as price setter for the country dealt with much more than pieces of paper. Commodities markets proliferated. The fish market was on the East River at Fulton; the meat market on the Hudson just to the north.... The 'physicals' of all commodities markets were present...there were cotton sacks in the warehouse of the Cotton Exchange, coffee bags stored here for delivery against the contracts at the Sugar and Coffee Exchange on Hanover Square and often a smell of roasting coffee.

"In the 1950's, this was a male world-women were not allowed to work on the floor of the Stock Exchange, let alone become members. The old-timers explained with great sincerity that there was no ladies room."

The report points out that today Wall Street "sees less of the real world outside, depends more on abstract information processed through data machinery and more than ever responds to forces far from its borders."

Zoon semiotikon, the semiotic animal, labeled by Paul Mongr (also known as Felix Hausdorf).

Charles S. Peirce gave the following definitions: Representamen: a Sign is a Representamen of which some interpretant is a cognition of a mind (2.242). Object: the Mediate object is the object outside the Sign; ...the sign must indicate it by a hint (Letter to Lady Welby, December 23, 1908). Interpretant: the effect that the sign would produce upon any mind (Letter to Lady Welby, March 14, 1909).

In reference to the symbolic nature of market transactions, another Peircean definition is useful: "Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs.... We think only in signs.... If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts" (2.307).

The pragmatic thought is, nevertheless, inherent in any sign process. Markets embody sign processes in the pragmatic field.

Winograd and Flores state bluntly "A business (like any other organization) is const.i.tuted as a network of recurrent conversations" (Op. cit., p. 168).

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (with the a.s.sistance of Takashi Hikino) Scale and Scope. The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism.

Cambridge MA/London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990.

"...the modern industrial Enterprise...has more than a production function." (p. 14). Chandler further notes that "expanded output by a change in capital-labor ratios is brought about by economies of scale which incorporate economies of speed.... Wholesalers and retailers expand to exploit economies of scale" (p. 21).

James Gordley. The Philosophical Origins of Modern Contract Doctrine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Mariadele Manca Masciadri. I Contratti di Baliatico, 2 vols.

Milan: (s.n.), 1984.

John H. Pryor. Business Contracts of Medieval Provence. Selected Notulae from the Cartulary of Girard Amalric of Ma.r.s.eilles, 1248. Toronto: Pontifical Inst.i.tute of Medieval Studies, 1981.

ECU: In 1979, the process of European unification led to the creation of the European Monetary System (EMS), with its coin being the European Currency Unit (ECU) and the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). As a basket of European currencies, the ECU serves as a reserve currency in Europe and probably beyond. It is not the currency of choice for international transactions, and as of the Maastricht negotiations, which affirmed the need for a Community currency, the ECU was not adopted for this purpose.

Although predominant weight in the basket (over 30%) is given to the German mark, the ECU is designed on the a.s.sumption that it is quite improbable that a certain currency will move in the same direction against all others. Therefore, exchange rates are statistically stabilized.

Michael Rothschild. Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem. Webtext, 1990.

Robert L. Heilbroner. The Demand for the Supply Side, in The New York Review of Books, June 11, 1981, p.40.

He asks rhetorically: "How else should one identify a force that debases language, drains thought, and undoes dignity? If the barrage of advertising, unchanged in its tone and texture, were devoted to some other purpose-say the exaltation of the public sector-it would be recognized in a moment for the corrosive element that it is. But as the voice of the private sector it escapes this startled notice. I mention it only to point out that a deep source of moral decay for capitalism arises from its own doings, not from that of its governing inst.i.tutions."

Literacy and Education

Will Seymour Monroe. Comenius and the Beginnings of Educational Reform. New York: Arno Press, 1971, (originally printed in 1900).

Adolphe Erich Meyer. Education in Modern Times. Up from Rousseau.

New York: Avon Press, 1930.

Linus Pierpont Brockett. History and Progress of Education from the Earliest Times to the Present. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1860.

(Originally signed "Philobiblius," with an introduction by Henry Barnard.)

James Bowen. A History of Western Education. 3 Vols. London: Methuen, 1972-1981.

Pierre Rich. Education et culture dans l'occident barbare 6-8 sicles. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962.

Bernard Bischoff. Elementrunterricht und probationes pennae in der ersten Hlfte des Mittelalters, in Mittelalterliche Studien I, 1966, pp. 74-87.

James Nehring. The Schools We Have. The Schools We Want. An American Teacher on the Frontline. San Francisco: Jossey-Ba.s.s, 1992.

Irene Henri Marron. A History of Education in Antiquity. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956.

Jacques Barzun. The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (Morris Philipson, Editor). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.

The review mentioned was written by David Alexander, Begin Here, in The New York Review of Books, April 21, 1991, p. 16.

Polis (Greek) signifies settled communities that eventually evolved into cities.

The City-State in Five Cultures. Edited with an introduction by Robert Griffeth and Carol G. Thomas. Santa Barbara CA: ABC-Clio, 1981.

J.N. Coldstream. The Formation of the Greek Polis: Aristotle and Archaeology. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1984.

Individual and Community: The Rise of the Polis, 800-500 BC. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Will Durant. The Story of Civilization. Vol 4, The Age of Faith.

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950.

In 825, the University of Pavia was founded as a school of law.

The University of Bologna was founded in 1088 by Irnevius, also for the teaching of law. Students from all over Latin Europe came to study there. Around 1103, the University of Paris was founded; by the middle of the 13th century, four faculties had developed: theology, canon law, medicine and the seven arts. (The seven liberal arts were comprised of the trivium-grammar, rhetoric, and logic-and the quadrivium-arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.) Some time in the 12th century, a studium generale or university was established at Oxford (pp 916-921).

The name university derives from the fact that the essences or universals were taught (cf. Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, Micropedia, Vol. 12, 1990.

Logos: (noun, from the Greek, from the verb lego: "I say"): word, speech, argument, explanation, doctrine, principle, reason; signified word or speech.

Ratio (from the Latin "to think"): reason, rationale; signified measure or proportion.

Some of the work linking the early knowledge of the Latin and Greek heritage of European thought, especially that part shut off to Christendom in Moorish Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Tunis, Sicily, and Spain, was transmitted by the Jews, who translated works in Arabic to Latin. The Moslems preserved the texts of Euclid and works dealing with alchemy and chemistry. In 1165, Gerald of Cremona studied Arabic in Spain in order to translate works of Aristotle (Posterior a.n.a.lysis, On the Heavens and the Earth, among others), Euclid (Elements, Data), Archimedes, Apollonius of Perga, Galen, works of Greek astronomy and Greco-Arabic physics, 11 books of Arabic medicine and 14 works of Arabic astronomy and mathematics from the Arabic to Latin. Beginning 1217, Michael Scot translated a number of Aristotle's works from the Arabic to Latin (cf. Will Durant, Op.

cit., pp. 910-913).

Galileo Galilei. Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche (Two New Sciences: Including Centers of Gravity and Force of Percussion, translated, with a new introduction and notes, by Stillman Drake) Toronto: Wall & Thompson. 1989