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From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Is Common Sense Explicit or Implicit?
Message-ID: <Cwuu1z.KxM@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <1994Sep26.114409.4876@oracorp.com> <CwrB04.9JI@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> <Cwsys7.K9w@spss.com>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 1994 19:27:35 GMT
Lines: 41

In article <Cwsys7.K9w@spss.com>, Mark Rosenfelder <markrose@spss.com> wrote:
>In article <CwrB04.9JI@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>,
>Andrzej Pindor <pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> wrote:
>>As I have pointed out, in some case we already say "he has very high testerone
>>levels" instead of "he is a very amorous guy, Don Juan type, loves all women".
>
>I agreed with most of the rest of your post, but here I think you're 
>misanalyzing.  "He has a very high testosterone levels" *is* a statement
>of folk psychology.  Just because it uses the jargon of scientific study
>of the brain doesn't make it a scientifically informed statement.
>
Are you saying that it is not scientifically true that men with high 
testerone levels devote more of their attention to sex oriented activities?

>>The letter was the only explanation available when there was no notion of 
>>body chemistry.
>
>Well, this is not true even if you consider the medieval theory of the 
>humors to be a notion of body chemistry.  We still retain some of the
>terminology from that time: good-humored, ill-tempered, lose one's temper,
>sanguine, choleric, melancholy, bilious.  Folk psychology has always been
>content to mine the science of its day to add to its explanatory repertoire.
>
Good for folk psychology, although I do not think it invalidates what 
I wanted to say.

>In ancient times astrological theory could be mined for the same purpose, 
>and indeed we can still describe people as mercurial, jovial, saturnine.
>And Plato had his theory of the soul as well.  People were not limited
>to descriptive statements before the development of chemistry.

I am not sure what you are driving at here. Has vitamins then become a part
of folk medicine?


Andrzej
-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
