hairstreak

I could go on for hours about what is being taught in schools vs. what should be taught in schools. But certainly, people are NOT being taught to think logically at ALL, unless their parents are teaching it to them. The parents teaching it to their kids early on is obviously the best situation, but we shouldn't rely on everyone to be a good parent--and even if we could, reinforcement of the thought process would be beneficial.

I'm aware that everyone thinks and learns differently--but simply being able to take two facts A and B and be able to logically deduce C is something that most people simply don't know how to do. And it's not because they're not capable of it, it's because they've just been drilled to memorize facts from day one, not be able to figure things out for themselves.

I usually go straight from this into my "Tradition is the root of all evil" rant, but this is enough for one comment--I'm sure you have better things to do.

[Edited because no matter how many times I tell them, my fingers simply can't figure out the difference between "they're" and "their".]

[Edited on Dec 02, 2003 6:59PM]

So, to finally reply to your point about neurolgx., it's not so much that language is or isn't scientific, it's that the people who do the hard science end of it and the people who do the sociological end of it aren't interested in the same questions. They may not even know how to ask those questions- I can't imagine finding a sociolgx. theory about aprosodia or pathalogical language processing, and I doubt neurolgx. can explain my changing use of registers throughout a single interaction. However, in the terms Flux was using, she seemed to be getting at a very Chomskyan view of language as a sort of mathematics of communication, a view which has largely been disproven or at least heavily amended in both socio- and neurolgx.

Apropos your position on science, I'm with Minty- the idea of scientific inquiry is a major facet of contemporary culture in a way that hasn't been present in Western society for at least a couple of generations. If that leads to making some new questions that challenge current authorities, we'll be okay. I'm not too worried either way.