Week 6 Questions

1. In chapter fourteen, Hauser discusses Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. He does so to point out some of the problems with quasi-logical arguments. In doing so, Hauser takes a quote from Kundera, part of which reads, “The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”

This made me wonder about the human psyche. Do people only want to mould the future just so they can feel better about their past? Or is it possible that they want to shape the future in order to redeem humanity’s past?

Then again, could people want to influence the future in order to make things better for themselves, not because of the past but because of the excitement of what is to come? Or better yet, do people want to be “masters of the future” to make the world a better place for the future generations? Or the negative side of that, do people want to change the future in order to make future generations look back on them as people to be revered?

2. In his chapter on narrative, Hauser also examines the arguments made by psychologist Jerome Bruner. Bruner, on page 188 says, “There is no such thing as ‘life itself.’ At very least, it is a selective achievement of memory recall; beyond that, recounting one’s life is an interpretive feat.”

On the following page, in his second paragraph, Hauser talks about how, according to Bruner, humans re-interpret our past experiences every time we remember them. We give meaning to our lives through our interpretations, giving ourselves a storyline to define ourselves by. He goes on to say, “…that as these experiences defy this storyline, we must make cognitive readjustments, such as reframing the event so it fits or altering the basic storyline.”

Does this not mean that everything has a bias? Can any memory truly be objective? Does our understanding of “life itself” then also have a bias?

3. Barbara Warnick and Edward Inch, in their chapter Reasoning: Making Inferences, list and explain several different forms of informal logic. One of these forms is generalization. Their definition is stated as, “In a generalization one reasons that what is true of certain members of a class will also be true of other members of the same class or of the class as a whole.” However during their explanation of generalization, they point out its flaws and how it so easily falls short. This led me to wonder if generalization even really works as a form of informal logic. Would it even work on an audience?