writing in good conscience

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One doesn’t theorize ethical life in order to learn how to live (unless you’re Woody Allen). No, one theorizes ethical life, normally, in order to get an academic promotion (joke). Also, it’s good for orienting one’s teaching of related topics (in which your work can be part of the syllabus), good for conference attendence (which is good for your CV), and something to share with friends.

Seriously, though, one theorizes in order to contribute to advancement of some area of inquiry (or, if you’re lucky, start a new area). But the advance can be very slow in the humanities (quite contrary to the sciences). You write a paper one year (year Y), circulate it, publish it in a journal with a lead time of a year or more (Y+2), get comment some years later, and get odd emails ever after (like Y+5) from recent readers long after you’ve forgotten about it and moved on. Important articles can sit for years before getting important response. And important response to important response, another few years. The conversation, the discourse might belong to Time, more than to a given conference discussion or contiguous issues of a journal.

growing up as exemplifying our humanity singularly

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I’m not going to dwell soon on child development, though Gopnik’s breezy The Philosophical Baby (see the last 2 paragraphs of last week’s posting) might be a good way into recent theory, e.g., Katherine Nelson’s important Young Minds in Social Worlds, Harvard, 2007.

Pleasures of developmental excellence after lush aspirations of a philosophical baby

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It’s been a long time. The previous posting, May 2008, “...a question of innateness as moot,” tacitly represented what might be called The Face of the Deep—the eonic biogenealogy expressed by prenatal epigenesis. The more-or-less self-contained narrative that details what “evo-devo” means in fact (merely my selection of extended quotation from Joan Stiles’s ending to her book) provides a coherence to brain development that can easily be invisible through all the details of her research-summarizing 380+ pages which can be overwhelming to the non-specialist.

Es gibt (It gives / There is) a question of innateness as moot

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[from the final pages of The Fundamentals of Brain Development: integrating nature and nurture, Joan Stiles, Harvard UP 2008]

“The view of brain development presented here is dynamic, interactive, and adaptive. Complex signaling cascades [of produced cellular-environmental proteins] direct the formation and fate of cell populations, specify the migratory pathways and final destinations of new neurons, direct the formation of connections, and even signal cell death [e.g., for neural net pruning] in targeted populations [having overexuberant neuronal genesis]. The developmental process can adjust to contingencies and even to direct insult [i.e., injury] to brain structure. Yet there does not appear to be a blueprint, an executive, or even a homunculus [So it goes, Terence Deacon] directing the continuous changes in the complex array of elements, systems, and processes that emerge, expand, change, and sometimes just disappear across [a] period of development... [379].

bioglyph

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This is one among many concepts I’ve been anticipating in recent years. This posting will be expanded beyond this brief note. Presently, it serves as a footnote for ¶1.2 of “enlanguaging mind.”

Cellular signal transduction is the primal form of biological “communication”. Terrence Deacon develops this kind of interest into a biosemiosis of hierarchic emergence (chapter 14 there) in neurocognition. But a Derridean prioritization of the “glyph” (or trope-ical trace) in linguistic expression may be interestingly mapped back into biosemiosis of cognitivity for a usefully “grammatological” reading of mentality.

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