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"ideas are in the process of communication between one thinker and another, and we perceive the ideas of another brain only by having them communicated to us. It is the same with oneself: one perceives one’s own ideas only insofar as one is in a communicative mode." https://t.co/DkP325TKJs
(from the introduction to "the sociology of philosophies: a global theory of intellectual change" by randall collins) https://t.co/iFs4ftrNd0
"The history of philosophy is to a considerable extent the history of groups. Nothing abstract is meant here—nothing but groups of friends, discussion partners, close-knit circles that often have the characteristics of social movements." https://t.co/FTV1s9h8qC
"Creativity is not random among individuals; it builds up in intergenerational chains." https://t.co/gJbEY8E6AF
"The third characteristic of intellectual fields is structural rivalry. Intellectual work is almost always concentrated at the same time as other work of a similar degree of innovativeness and scope." https://t.co/pEmkHNxvyA
"A human mind, a train of thinking in a particular body, is constituted by one’s personal history in a chain of social encounters. For intellectuals, these are special kinds of social chains, and therefore special kinds of minds." https://t.co/zvZSWk3lwz
"thinking would not be possible at all if we were not social; we would have no words, no abstract ideas, and no energy... thinking consists in making 'coalitions in the mind,' internalized from social networks, motivated by the emotional energies of social interactions." https://t.co/I8h0MJ9BaO
"The second... tacit assumption is that the criterion of truth exists in free-floating reality, along with the free-floating thinker-observer. But the very concept of truth has developed within social networks, and has changed with the history of intellectual communities." https://t.co/Ksos4sxFtZ
"we have never stepped outside of the human thought community; and the sociology of thinking implies that we never will step outside of it. The very notion of stepping outside is something developed historically by particular branches within intellectual networks"
"Yet a language is not static. New conceptual terms are produced by philosophical arguments; the development of philosophy is the development of its language." https://t.co/KJOPKXy9Bc
"Individuals are nodes in networks of social interaction, human bodies where emotional energies accumulate and streams of idea-symbols crystallize into coalitions in the mind." https://t.co/BIPOBm1KBg
"Culture, on a macro-level, is the medium in which we move, just as thought and feeling are the medium of micro-local experience in our own conscious bodies." https://t.co/9rBwOz4RQN
"You and I are thus, as particular individuals, with all our uniqueness, and yet uniquely constituted by the flows of emotion and thought within us and through us." https://t.co/sQgVmCWXEf
"The social structure of the intellectual world, the topic of this book, is an ongoing struggle among chains of persons, charged up with emotional energy and cultural capital, to fill a small number of centers of attention." https://t.co/FnQCdbXQNx
"The identities that we call intellectual personalities... are not fixed. It is precisely because the social structure of intellectual attention is fluidly emergent that we cannot reify individuals, heroizing the agent as if each one were a fixed point of will power..." https://t.co/03hhD21VT0
