On Acquiring a Worldview

Bibliographic Data

ID23713240
AuthorsMark E Clark (0000-0002-5660-2153, San Diego State University, corresponding author)
Year1989
Pages213-242
Publication date1989-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueAriadne's Thread (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/978-1-349-20077-1_8
OpenAlexW2500005750
ISBN9781349200771
LanguageEN
References cited18

One day I found myself in the library searching back and forth between the QP and R sections for the P books. Finally, in desperation, I asked the two student librarians: ‘Where have you put “P”?’ ‘Try the floor below!’ they replied. To their great amusement, I wandered off, repeating the alphabet to myself. Until we become senile (or have a temporary lapse of memory), the alphabet and simple arithmetic are part of our mental furniture that we automatically use to make sense of the world. Everyone shares these mental images, and we communicate on that assumption. It is ridiculous, laughable, not to know them. Yet in Moscow, my problem would not have arisen; the Cyrillic alphabet contains no ‘que’ to confuse with ‘pje’(π). In China, there is no alphabet at all. Characters in Chinese dictionaries are listed under the 200 or so different sound symbols they contain, followed by the number of brush strokes needed to write the character. 1 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Alphabet · Amusement · Arithmetic · Art · Character (mathematics) · Linguistics · Literature · Ridiculous · Chinese history and philosophy · Computer Science · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology

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