Thursday 7 October 2010

Morning Scepticism: Gradualism

When we say knowledge is a cumulative process, it's fairly easily understood what that means. To take one area where I have some knowledge: computing. I didn't desire to learn overnight then woke up with a memory full of tools and procedures, rather it's come through years of use, study, exploration, and communication with others. It's a gradual process. Yet if I were to graph it, there would be points of stasis, points of rapid change, dead ends, and new directions. It would be mistake to conclude that it's not gradual because of these fluctuations in significance and periods of change. Stasis and rapid change is part of a gradual process.

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