Tony Padgett wrote:
> I have never been able to understand the meaning of this story ...
> Can someone enlighten me on what this story is getting at?
There is a clue in "Turtles" where the title of James' lecture is "Can One
Prove the Existence of God?" (they also note that the story may well be
apocryphal). It is one of those cases where the argument is
self-fulfilling because it is circular (or better helical) or
self-referential. In "Turtles" it is a metaphoric introduction to a
discussion on epistemologies -- "the human discipline which systematically
explores the possibility of human knowledge -- beginning with questions of
what we can know and how we come to know what we think we know,
epistemology moves on to the question -- can we know anything at all?"
If it is true that I know what I know because I know it -- or more subtly,
I am what I am because I am -- then it's turtles all the way down ...
Or maybe it means something completely different to you even though you
can't make sense of it yet?
Best regards
Bob
--Bob Janes Webster & Janes Ltd PO Box 211, Welwyn AL6 0EX UK +44 (1438) 84-0206 mailto:bob.janes@webster-and-janes.co.uk http://www.webster-and-janes.co.uk/co.re/
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