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The Truth Is/Is Not Out There. Or: I Do / Don't Want To Believe

No offense taken - but I think Andro wanted a serious, dedicated thread. Andro can argue the Semiotic/Logical perspective himself - no need for me to be here.

I'm backing out because having folk take issue with my 'ponciness' is only going to disturb the flow of the argument. Also, I don't really like being called a ponce.

Back to the thread, chaps. :)
 
but youre a deliciously pert ponce dear...

And a fully serious thread on this board is hard to find. It is a serious enough subject and Jerry's comment about Devereuax a good one...
 
I think you should stay if you have something to say about the original question. It's just that IMHO diverging into discussions about semiotics is the subject of a different thread, where that sort of discussion could go on and on ;)

It's not a case of being poncy but of not picking apart what we mean from a question rather than discussing the subject of said question :D

Perhaps the semiotic side of things needs to be pruned off into it's own thread?
 
erm..Jerry. Look back at what I said.

Here it is in a nutshell: the gap folk see between scepticism & Forteanism is an illusion brought on by the tendency to assume everything has an opposite. Thus, with an adjustment of perspective, a reconciliation is acheiable through viewing the two approachs as being complementary.

Yes, a linguistic analysis - but irrelevent?

Read it again. Carefully this time.

Damning it because it doesn't fit in with your expectations is not dreadfully Fortean, is it now? ;)

Seriously, I want to duck out of this one, so please accept that as my last word.
 
I know what you mean, but I think it's an aside to the main question here. So please stay, whether the gap is an illusion or not ;) I don't see why you should let me chase you off! As to it not being Fortean, read what I said in my initial post ;)

WRT to figures who tend to bridge the two camps, I guess Karl Shuker is another one - or at least, is a zoologist with a strong interest in cryptozoology. Then there's also people like Persinger who are dealing with how any mechanisms of what we percieve may actually work. Some of his work ties in with Devereux's, and AFAIK he has a large database of Fortean reports. And perhaps at another end of the spectrum, I know that there are others with academic credentials who are interested in the various aspects to do with UFOs, abductions, etc. - Mack, for example.

I think what will be a buffer betwen the two camps is readily observable phenomena - even tho' earthlights are somewhat tenuous in their frequency of appearance, they may seem more tangible than things like communication with the dead, ESP, etc (i.e. the sort of stuff the JRF have issues with).
 
JerryB said:
Then there's also people like Persinger who are dealing with how any mechanisms of what we percieve may actually work. Some of his work ties in with Devereux's, and AFAIK he has a large database of Fortean reports.
Click to expand...
Persinger's work on electromagnetic fields and their effects on the brain seems strictly scientifc and yet beyond the data there is a great deal that is open to a Fortean World of speculation and interpretation.

See the 'God on the Brain' Thread for further details.

Persinger's work sails very close to the boundaries of scientific orthodoxy and that seems to demand a certain amount of caution in the interpretation of the data.

i.e. Although electomagnetic field anomalies seem to produce reproduceable and hallucinatory effects in the human brain, no evolutionary advantage, or purpose for these phenomena is suggested (I could be wrong about that).
 
Yes, but his work brings him into contact with certain threads of Forteana, and thus some of the ideas behind his work are also shared by some Fortean researchers (i.e. the idea that abduction experiences and others may be linked to temporal lobe epilepsy).
 
Alexius said:
erm..Jerry. Look back at what I said.

Here it is in a nutshell: the gap folk see between scepticism & Forteanism is an illusion brought on by the tendency to assume everything has an opposite. Thus, with an adjustment of perspective, a reconciliation is acheiable through viewing the two approachs as being complementary.
Click to expand...


lets see if i can grasp the above:-

the gap is, lets say, a mirror. and the opposites are:-
the reflection is forteanism and the real person is scepticism.

now the aguement might be:-
which is real? the reflection or the person?

from the perpective of the reflection is "that theyre the real person" and vice versa, but from a onlookers pov. they (reflection & the person) are both real.

is that a good anology? :confused:
 
melf said:
the gap folk see between scepticism & Forteanism is an illusion brought on by the tendency to assume everything has an opposite. Thus, with an adjustment of perspective, a reconciliation is acheiable through viewing the two approachs as being complementary.
Click to expand...

The ''tendency to assume everything has an opposite'' is a comment I'd like to pick up on..

The assumption of opposites is more properly the apparency of opposites: the first step in understanding a thing is to reduce it into parts-- physiology, taxonomy, Mendeleyevean elements, etc-- and the simplest divisions are oppositional: material and immaterial, organic and inorganic, living and non-living, fact and fiction, true and false, hot and cold, up and down. But this is wholly perspectivist: to a man just in from a Siberian winter, the mug of tea is very hot-- to the man who's just been sitting in front of the fire for six hours, it's rather cool: Fort picked up on this, saying that we should strive to find things, not at their merging points, because very hot/hot/lukewarm/cold/very cold are all relative, and no strict boundaries can be made between, say, hot and very hot: it is at the extremes that we can find things as they are. There are, in fact, no opposites in Nature: only our imagining of them: the appeareance of opposites is the simplest step in our attempts to understand: cognitively, we divide and conquer. And it works.

Ian
 
Ha! This is the thread I flounced on! How f***ing embarrassing! :p

Trying to remember the point I was trying to make...yeah, pretty much as Ian said. We have a tendency to assume that everything has an opposite, when it is just not so. An artefact of how we order ourselves.

So scepticism and the Fortean approach may be different, but are not actually in conflict with eachother. They do seem to work well side by side, but for the fact that peeps tend to assume they must clash because they are different and they should cos that's what different things do.
 
ian your quote of mine, belongs to alex :D

if i could write right like that, id be very very happy indeed :)
 
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