Dragaera

What's a duck, or thinking in pictures

Steve Simmons scs at di.org
Sat Aug 17 12:47:19 PDT 2002

In relation to the discussion of language and thinking in words --

Yesterday evening we went to dinner with friends and then afterwards
walked thru the riverside paths in Brighton, MI.  While there we saw
a kind of duck we'd never seen before.  Definately ducks, and since
there were three of them we were pretty sure it wasn't a fluke or
weird cross-breed.

I took a mental snapshot, came home, and headed for the bird books.
The closest I got to verbalizing my intent was `I've got to look up
at <duck picture> in the <picture of bird book>.'  It would be more
accurate to say I had a moving picture in my head of grabbing the
book and opening it to the index.  Not really thinking in words at all.
-- 
"Deconstruction is [when] a work is interpreted as a statement about itself,
using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Godel used to try
to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties."  -- Chip Morningstar
    in <http://www.dourish.com/goodies/decon.html>