Barry's remarks brought two things to mind.
(1) "The not-said undermines the said". From Michel Foucault's
ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE in which he stressed that the intuitive response
to some pronouncement is often to sense the absence of some critical point
or points. This is one of Foucault's arguments for revisiting the
structuring of knowledge, and for remodeling "The Old Citadel".
(2) The thought that everyone could become a scientist. I suppose
Einstein's greatest finding was that matter could be converted into
energy. When I was in high school, I was taught the "Law of Conservation
of Matter" and the "Law of Conversation of Energy". Presumably the whole
scientific community had agreed on this, and all of us were fortunate to
be given this insight at very modest cost.
Had I or anyone else thought to focus on those ideas and to question them,
I might well (or someone else might well) have realized that the living
human being had been converting matter into energy throughout recorded
history (as far as we know), and that I had been doing that at the very
instant I was being taught the conservation laws.
KANT SAID: "Enlightenment is man's release from his self-imposed
tutelage"
How true. And the implication for us is to question all authority on
everything, not in an abusive way, but in the sense of Charles Sanders
Peirce's "community of scholars" charged with the responsibility to
question always the received doctrine in an effort to enhance not only our
individual insight and capacity but, indirectly or in a summation mode,
the enlightenment of all people everywhere.
I believe that leadership understands intuitively, if not overtly, the
significance of these ideas, and wherever you have bad management you will
often find "mushroom management" being practiced. As explained to me
yesterday, this means "keep them in the dark and feed them s---.
-- JOHN N. WARFIELD Jwarfiel@osf1.gmu.edu