(May 15, 2025 at 8:15 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(May 15, 2025 at 12:09 am)Paleophyte Wrote: Then what good are they? These words that you wrote that are apparently useless? Why do you write them at all? Sheer reflexive instinct?
What are words good for? Social coordination. Does that include persuasion? Yes, but not the cartoonish version of it that you think exists.
Let me see if I can summarize the fight so far. The vituperative tone here makes it all a bit obscure.
So, if I'm reading you right, here is the version which you call cartoonish:
Parents tell their children what is true, and the children believe it. Then, if they're lucky, at a certain age the children begin to think for themselves and may reject the "indoctrination" given them by their parents.
Is that about it? It seems to reflect the experiences of many people on line, whose parents took them to church, but who rejected the whole thing later on. Though I suppose the same pattern would apply if a child was raised atheist, but then began to think for himself at age 14 and became a Christian.
On the other hand, I think you are saying that children are much less passive than this. That they are works-in-progress all along, and not as likely to be little carbon copies as others suggest.
In this view, children will get diverse influences -- more than just parents -- especially now with all the different media available. And since even anodyne-seeming media content does contain loaded language (what a literature guy would call subtext) a child is likely to pick up on way more than just what he or she hears at home.
There's a kind of image we may hold to -- that the parents sit the child down one day and tell him "X, Y, and Z are true, and that's what our family believes" and then the child believes that until one day he doesn't. But in fact the child picks up all kinds of ideas in less obvious ways, and these remain dynamic.
(Or I suppose they remain dynamic until, as an adult, a person's identity and self-definition become bound up in one tribe or the other, and the child's open-mindedness is switched off.)
Is that roughly what you've been arguing for?
If you can point me to some not-too-technical books or papers I would be interested to catch up with the subject.
