Re: [xmca] Language as a Biological Function

Of course.

At a conference I attended last year, Dr. Marc Jeannerod explained how he
had located the site of agency in the brain with experiments on a mouse. In
the discussion of this paper John R Searle frequently used his favourite
instance for agency - raising his arm. He uses the same instantiation of
agency and free will in his book, "Mind. A Brief Introduction." Different
academic discipline are concerned with "agency" at quite different levels.
That's fair enough, but in the above book, where Searle finds that free
will is inexplicable, he does not even recognise the existence of a problem
of free will at the cultural-historical level. He is blissfully unaware of
the fact that he is himself a shining example of someone lacking reflective
self-consciousness at a cultural-historical level.

Andy

At 01:00 AM 9/09/2007 -0700, you wrote:
>PS: Andy: I'm not so sure I can live with your hand-raising example. Of
>course, we cannot control our behavior any more than a shadow can carry
>stones, but surely there is a difference--a dialectically QUALITATIVE
>difference--between a hand waving and a flag waving! According to
>chaos/complexity theory, neither one is really random, but one is surely
>deterministic in a sense the other is not.
> dk

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Received on Sun Sep 9 01:38 PDT 2007