Guest guest Posted October 29, 2003 Report Share Posted October 29, 2003 Ken, I'd like to take you up on some of your email below. With respect to: It's hard to talk about how to design > a thoughtful study that relates to > Chinese medicine with a room full > of people who share no common understanding > of what qi is. Many years ago, a member of my Zen meditation group was a physicist who taught at the University of London. He decided to leave physics, in order to, as he put it 'cultivate his own garden.' I asked him why he was leaving physics. His main points were that physicists spoke in terms they didn't understand. He said that no one really know the meaning of even basic terms, such as 'time' or 'space'. Another reason he was giving up physics was that in order to engage in the discipline of physics, one had to engage in a discourse in a language that any physicist, anywhere, would understand. He had come to feel that real understanding was personal, and couldn't be conveyed to other people through a process of standardisation. [i think this is all evidence that Zen ruins people's lives.] If we look at Kuhn's work, as I previously quoted, he argues that terms are not translatable from one paradigm to another - the terms 'time' and 'space' have quite different connotations in Newton's and Einstein's theories of gravitation. They are not translatable from one paradigm to the other. The way I would put it is that the value and meaning terms have is emergent from the context of their usage, and can't be defined apart from that. And, going back to physicist mentioned above, you don't really know what they mean anyway, in the sense that you can't define them independently of their contextual use. So, when you write about sharing a common understanding of what qi is, it is interesting to enquire what one means by 'understanding'. I bet you can't define what qi is, nor can anyone in this group. I'll be very happy to be proven wrong. I think that you have been right to put emphasis on language, but that doesn't mean that I think language has the answers. So, if a person attempts to define what Chinese terms mean, or have meant at various times, I would argue that this is a deceitful exercise. You can't specify what a term means or meant separately from the entire context of its usage, and even then you can't define it. And we can't claim to know or understand the entire context of the usage of Chinese medical terms in the past in any definite sense, and they undoubtedly meant different things to different people at the same time, and different times, and even different things to the same individual at different times... Please show me that I'm wrong, Ken. Best wishes, Wainwright - " kenrose2008 " <kenrose2008 Wednesday, October 29, 2003 7:21 AM Re: Statistical inference - invalid research > Wainwright, > > I've never once said that anything > I've talked about is all we should > be thinking about, talking about or > paying attention to. I do believe > that issue related to nomenclature > and developing real access to the knowledge > base of the subject are primary issues. > > It's hard to talk about how to design > a thoughtful study that relates to > Chinese medicine with a room full > of people who share no common understanding > of what qi is. > > There are lots and lots of things to > talk about, worry about, study, learn, > practice, and so on. The subject is > not over stated as an ocean. > > It's best to explore it as such > and not with the bearing of landlubbers. > > Ken Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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