Self Park

Pictured (via
and via): 
That’s me yesterday while reading Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s

The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities

I read most of it on the plane ride to San Francisco and back last month, and
I’m on first thing Tuesday morning to lead a class discussion on its finer
points.  Here, for example, is one of the passages from a page I dog-eared:

Ed Hutchins studies the fascinating mental models set up by Micronesian
navigators to sail across the Pacific.  In such models, it is the islands
that move, and virtual islands serve as reference points.  Hutchins reports
a conversation between Micronesian and Western navigators who have trouble
understanding each other’s conceptualizations.  As described by David
Lewis, the Micronesian navigator Beiong comes to understand a Western diagram of
intersecting bearings in the following way:

He eventually succeeded in achieving the mental tour de force of visualizing
himself sailing simultaneously from Oroluk to Ponape to Oroluk and picturing the
ETAK bearings to Ngatik at the start of both voyages.  In this way, he
managed to comprehend the diagram and confirmed that it showed the island’s
position correctly. [The ETAK is the virtual island, and Ngatik is the island to
be located.] (51)

Via interlibrary loan, I went ahead and requested "Why the Islands Move" from
Perception–the journal that printed Hutchins and Ed Hinton’s short
article in 1984.  Why?  Well, phase two of discussion-leading is
writing a short essay due one week after the discussion.  And I’ve been
thinking about epistemology and virtual reference points in relationship to
cognition ever since I brushed against this passage.  So there it is. 

The rest of the weekend:

social network analysis
for
711, drafting a
long-ish project on a set of six (1999-2004) CCCC keynote addresses (need to get
down 10-12 pages by Monday afternoon to be on pace) for
611, and
tinkering on a talk for the

Humanities and Technosciences
conference in Albany next Saturday (if you
check the site, know that they’ve got our title wrong…we didn’t call it "Web
Blogs…." 

And lawn chairs.  Sixty and sunny, a laptop and wifi–we’ll need lawn
chairs for that.

2 Comments

  1. I know exactly where in our back yard I can get the airport and battery phone signals. (Cell phones don’t work very well in Earlville.) And I think I know where the lawn furniture is.

  2. Other than one-minute coordinations with D. and Ph., I only get one or two phone calls a month, but I have a cell phone just in case. I can manage on the back porch without a phone nearby, in other words. Been reading outdoors more than writing, but the wifi should sustain me throughout this afternoon. Grabbed up three new lawn chairs yesterday (all the rest was offed in the move to NY), including one with a leg rest, for, you know, relaxing the right way.

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