The meaning of such things is derived from

Normally I cope with jet lag well, but for some reason it's hit me badly after three weeks in Rosetta Stone the US. Probably because I was on holiday, relaxed and got into a daily rhythm with Huw with regular meals and little stress. Not coping meant I was up at 0400 this morning. Rather than wake the household I made a cup of tea and headed for the sitting room with the Powerbook to check on email while watching early morning television.I was lucky enough to catch the two part episode of South Park which satirises Richard Dawkins. For those who have not seen it I will summarise. Cartman, unable to wait three weeks for a new games console freezes himself. Things go wrong and he is not woken until 500 years in the future. He finds three competing groups of atheists (one of which comprises intelligent sea otters) who go to war over the great question: what should atheists be called. The language is delightful, lots of phrases like Thank Science and Dawkins is celebrated as the first prophet of atheism.It's a great episode and makes the point that militant atheism is the same sort of thing as fundamentalist religion. Dawkins however Rosetta Stone Software does not get the point, to quote: I’m buggered if I like being portrayed as a cartoon character buggering a bald transvestite. I wouldn’t have minded so much if only it had been in the service of some serious point, but if there was a serious point in there I couldn’t discern it. I can sympathize with with his bald transvestite point, but his lack of discernment speaks volumes. Symbolic Interactionism (Herbert Blumer): 1. "Humans act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things." 2. "The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with others and the society." 3. "These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters."Semiotics (saussure, peirce, locke): Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer, their denotata Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures Pragmatics: Relation between signs and their effects on those (people) who use themTrivium (medieval education):Logic is concerned with the thing as-it-is-known,Grammar is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-symbolized, andRhetoric is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-communicated. Ok, now you couple the three above subjects with maybe "mind control / brainwash" and "hypnosis" and add some "pattern recognition" and "figure ground" art studies, and you may a pretty complete body of phenomenological humanistic understanding (yea I would advise saying understanding rather than knowledge). but of course everyone might get turned off the minute I said brainwash or hypnosis. This is precisely because I think they think what is actually "passionate" is mistakenly believed to be a pursuit or belief in what is "true". Science would love you to believe that atoms truly and really exist as if Learn American English the human did not invent the concept of an atom through some permanence of figure ground pattern recog.Its a simple conflict / confusion of ontology and phenomenlogy I think. resulting in epistemology being mistaken for concerning the acquisition of "knowledge" of an objective reality.