This blog is primarily for communicating assignments and events for English V IB at South Pointe High.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Thursday
See yesterday's post: the assignment is the same for B-day.
For some real consequences to our discussion about words, photographs, and history, consider this: If a Supreme Court justice says he bases interpretations on the founders' intentions, how can he know what they were?
from historical documents which state the founders intentions. but there is no real way of knowing what somebody else's intentions are. so elly is right, from his interpretation. even if the founder were still alive, trust is all that can verify truth, not the truth itself.
but can trust verify any truth? with false memories and witness testimonies, truth can be twisted by this trust. thank you elizabeth loftus for your study on false memory.
to answer the orginal question, he cant. no one can really fully know what someone else thought was correct or believed was the right way to go about something. the only thing a person can do is guess and have faith that they know what someone in the past ment. but in reality you cant. i agree with both elly and andrew it is all based on how the orginal thought is interpretated. and to ellys thing basically if you think about there is no such thing as a truth for us to believe so all it ever is is faith not trust.
i agree with you, elly... i think trust and truth arent connected at all... truth is absolute... in fact its hard for us to wrap our minds around TRUTH because even in school we might never get the absolute truth... in chemistry we have all those percent error things... in history, the info could be skewed by ones point of view... even math is only a theory... but do we trust that we are being taught correctly??? taught the truth??? we can trust in false things... just because you trust something does not verify that it is true...
well, judging from the last 12 years i've been in school (plus kindergarten and preschool you guys, i'm not a flunk), we've either been trusting that we're being taught correctly or have MUCH faith in that we're being taught correctly. we complain everyday that specific teachers cannot teach (personally, these are teachers i hate, which may be a factor in my trust/faith in that i'm being taught correctly or not). so how do we compare teachers that teach us correctly versus those that do not? via faith! you can compare it to your religion/faith and what you believe when comparing negative things to your beliefs. (ex. you strongly believe abortion is wrong and when someone has one, you strongly oppose them)
Since there is no, real way of knowing the founders true intentions, the supreme court justice(s) have to use other sources, rather than the actual founders because they are all dead and did not write a document specifically stating "Our true intentions are..."
So how does the supreme court justice actually do it? I don't know go ask him. But...
I believe that, as Andrew Gorospe said, they use historical documents, primary sources. That is all they have anything to base anything on. Without using it is like someone saying a theme or an idea of OHYOS in class without giving a quote or direct details from the book.
So the Supreme Court justice must find primary sources such as the Declaration of Independence and others to interpret for themselves, and in a way, interpret the closest thing there is to the founders themselves, which are their ideas, written on parchment with black ink.
And yes I am going to relate this to OHYOS. Ok, when the insomnia plague hits Macondo, everyone begins to lose their memory and once Aureliano starts labeling things, it says that "thus they went living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters." Now how does this relate to the blog topic. Well...
Aureliano feared that someday they would forget what the words originally meant. And in a similar sense, the Supreme Court justice might not know what the founders' words actually meant when they first wrote the DoI. But that is all that they have left to interpret with, words, not recordings, not videos, words. As they say "one picture is worth a thousand words", I say that "one word is worth a million pictures" because one can interpret a word any way they'd like.
And (yes I am about to finish) the Supreme Court justice must interpret the document's tone, imagery, themes, etc... to make a less false interpretations. So there you go, the justice only has words, which outlived those who wrote them, to interpret the intended truth. There were no photographs (but there were paintings but paintings are not photographs).
And as Mr. Koon always says "you must find text to support what you say." And I think that relates to both us and the justice.
well no elly you are right. but so am i. the trust you are talking about with elizabeth loftus is false and therefore the person has the wrong truth. but the only source of truth that that person may know is from what elizabeth loftus can show her with the pictures. that is why its a trust. its the trust between the knower and the want-to-knower. the person who wants to know the truth may trust the teller and the teller be false but that is what that person now perceives as truth. from then on that story will be carried. this may mean what we think today is not true. but since that information was passed on it is the accepted truth. its like the game where you pass on a story and they final person does not get the whole story. it could be like that or maybe historical people do not pass on the real truth for the sake of the future... and thanks mr. koon, i made that up. :)
and might i add (even if it is a little late) some context from OHYOS as well... as i said in my previous comment, "maybe historical people do not pass on the real truth for the sake of the future". this is shown in OYHOS with the massacre of 3000 worker protestors. The government passed on to the public that nothing had happened, whereas Jose Arcadio Segundo, the only survivor of the massacre, would know that this is not the truth. The government would not pass on this truth because it prevented any further war, as well as ended the one that may have started. Then, Jose Arcadio Segundo would tell Aureliano (Babilonia) and he would believe him. I found a quote on page 390 that supports the consideration that the truth is not always the truth but what is passed on, by historical documents. The context of this passage is when Aureliano is having his usual conversations with Alvaro, German, Alfonso, and Gabriel...
"Everytime that Aureliano mentioned the matter, not only the proprietress but some people older than she would repudiate the myth of the workers hemmed in at the station and the train with two hundred cars loaded with dead people, and they would even insist that, after all, everything had been set forth in judicial documents and in primary-school books: that the banana company had never existed... So that Aureliano and Gabriel were linked by a kind of complicity based on real facts that no one believed in, and which had affected their lives to the point that both of them found themselves off course in the tide of a world that had ended and of which only the nostalgia remained."
15 comments:
from his interpretation of the founders' intentions.
o.o
from historical documents which state the founders intentions. but there is no real way of knowing what somebody else's intentions are. so elly is right, from his interpretation. even if the founder were still alive, trust is all that can verify truth, not the truth itself.
I like that, from both of you. Nice phrase: "Trust is all that can verify truth, not the truth itself."
but can trust verify any truth?
with false memories and witness testimonies, truth can be twisted by this trust.
thank you elizabeth loftus for your study on false memory.
to answer the orginal question, he cant. no one can really fully know what someone else thought was correct or believed was the right way to go about something. the only thing a person can do is guess and have faith that they know what someone in the past ment. but in reality you cant.
i agree with both elly and andrew it is all based on how the orginal thought is interpretated. and to ellys thing basically if you think about there is no such thing as a truth for us to believe so all it ever is is faith not trust.
i agree with you, elly... i think trust and truth arent connected at all... truth is absolute... in fact its hard for us to wrap our minds around TRUTH because even in school we might never get the absolute truth... in chemistry we have all those percent error things... in history, the info could be skewed by ones point of view... even math is only a theory... but do we trust that we are being taught correctly??? taught the truth??? we can trust in false things... just because you trust something does not verify that it is true...
well, judging from the last 12 years i've been in school (plus kindergarten and preschool you guys, i'm not a flunk), we've either been trusting that we're being taught correctly or have MUCH faith in that we're being taught correctly.
we complain everyday that specific teachers cannot teach (personally, these are teachers i hate, which may be a factor in my trust/faith in that i'm being taught correctly or not).
so how do we compare teachers that teach us correctly versus those that do not?
via faith! you can compare it to your religion/faith and what you believe when comparing negative things to your beliefs. (ex. you strongly believe abortion is wrong and when someone has one, you strongly oppose them)
aw crap you guys, i'm on the wrong gmail account.
editorials is totally elly!
Since there is no, real way of knowing the founders true intentions, the supreme court justice(s) have to use other sources, rather than the actual founders because they are all dead and did not write a document specifically stating "Our true intentions are..."
So how does the supreme court justice actually do it? I don't know go ask him. But...
I believe that, as Andrew Gorospe said, they use historical documents, primary sources. That is all they have anything to base anything on. Without using it is like someone saying a theme or an idea of OHYOS in class without giving a quote or direct details from the book.
So the Supreme Court justice must find primary sources such as the Declaration of Independence and others to interpret for themselves, and in a way, interpret the closest thing there is to the founders themselves, which are their ideas, written on parchment with black ink.
And yes I am going to relate this to OHYOS. Ok, when the insomnia plague hits Macondo, everyone begins to lose their memory and once Aureliano starts labeling things, it says that "thus they went living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters." Now how does this relate to the blog topic. Well...
Aureliano feared that someday they would forget what the words originally meant. And in a similar sense, the Supreme Court justice might not know what the founders' words actually meant when they first wrote the DoI. But that is all that they have left to interpret with, words, not recordings, not videos, words. As they say "one picture is worth a thousand words", I say that "one word is worth a million pictures" because one can interpret a word any way they'd like.
And (yes I am about to finish) the Supreme Court justice must interpret the document's tone, imagery, themes, etc... to make a less false interpretations. So there you go, the justice only has words, which outlived those who wrote them, to interpret the intended truth. There were no photographs (but there were paintings but paintings are not photographs).
And as Mr. Koon always says "you must find text to support what you say." And I think that relates to both us and the justice.
well no elly you are right. but so am i. the trust you are talking about with elizabeth loftus is false and therefore the person has the wrong truth. but the only source of truth that that person may know is from what elizabeth loftus can show her with the pictures. that is why its a trust. its the trust between the knower and the want-to-knower. the person who wants to know the truth may trust the teller and the teller be false but that is what that person now perceives as truth. from then on that story will be carried. this may mean what we think today is not true. but since that information was passed on it is the accepted truth. its like the game where you pass on a story and they final person does not get the whole story. it could be like that or maybe historical people do not pass on the real truth for the sake of the future... and thanks mr. koon, i made that up. :)
and might i add (even if it is a little late) some context from OHYOS as well... as i said in my previous comment, "maybe historical people do not pass on the real truth for the sake of the future". this is shown in OYHOS with the massacre of 3000 worker protestors. The government passed on to the public that nothing had happened, whereas Jose Arcadio Segundo, the only survivor of the massacre, would know that this is not the truth. The government would not pass on this truth because it prevented any further war, as well as ended the one that may have started. Then, Jose Arcadio Segundo would tell Aureliano (Babilonia) and he would believe him. I found a quote on page 390 that supports the consideration that the truth is not always the truth but what is passed on, by historical documents. The context of this passage is when Aureliano is having his usual conversations with Alvaro, German, Alfonso, and Gabriel...
"Everytime that Aureliano mentioned the matter, not only the proprietress but some people older than she would repudiate the myth of the workers hemmed in at the station and the train with two hundred cars loaded with dead people, and they would even insist that, after all, everything had been set forth in judicial documents and in primary-school books: that the banana company had never existed... So that Aureliano and Gabriel were linked by a kind of complicity based on real facts that no one believed in, and which had affected their lives to the point that both of them found themselves off course in the tide of a world that had ended and of which only the nostalgia remained."
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