Footnotes to Jenny Cool's

Of Tools and Toys: Donna Haraway's Cyborgs and the Power of Serious Play

  • Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900.

  • book.

  • Feminists and postmodernists come to "recognize" difference by separate routes: while the former came down decolonization's road, learning difference from black and "third world women", the latter came down deconstruction's road,learning of it from dismantling of the humanist subject, performed by such philosophers as Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard.

  • That is, theorizing must move closer to hypothesizing. I draw here on Owen Barfield's discussion of the almost lost distinction between the word "hypothesis" and the word "theory". A theory is a "proposition which is hoped may turn to be true", a hypothesis "a proposition the truth or untruth of which is irrelevant". Barfield writes : "The geometrical paths and movements devised for the planets were, in the minds of those who invented them, hypotheses in the latter sense. They were arguments -- devices -- for saving appearances; and the Greek and medieval astronomers were not at all disturbed by the fact that the same appearances could be saved by two or more quite different hypotheses... All that mattered was, which was the simplest and the most convenient for practical purposes; for neither of them had any essential part in truth or knowledge." (1965: 49)
    • me admin@mishkan.com
    Copyright © 1994-today Cyborganic Media