I like very much the quotes from Mary Follett (whom I'd never heard of).
It's intriguing that she was a classical scholar; and it's particularly
exhilarating to hear her identifying and berating "intellectualist
fallacies" that I had glibly assumed were devised only within the past
two decades.
I want to comment on one particular passage:
> >You can often get a specious consensus on the intellectual level which in
> virtue of the prestige of verbal agreement arrests the activity of your
> mind, but the only real consensus is that which arises on the motor level.
> The theory of consent rests on the wholly intellectualist fallacy that we
> think with our 'minds' and we don't.
This has enormous repercussions. The great downfall of "Good
Old-Fashioned AI" -- as Hubert Dreyfus loves to refer to it -- was a
direct consequence of just this fallacy.
Along another dimension, too, it relates to a component of the "What is a
L-O" thread: a group can agree amongst itself, verbally, that it is a
learning org, and nonetheless fail. Organizations, if they do think,
don't do so in committees and memos.
--
Regards
Jim Michmerhuizen jamzen@world.std.com
web residence at http://world.std.com/~jamzen/
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_ - _ If our software were _really_ hardware independent _ -
- _ _ - we wouldn't need computers at all. - _ _ -