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Stenka25 Posted 11 years ago
Vocabulary
What 'the moral' refers to?
What 'the moral' refers to?
The passage below is from ‘the Blank Slate’ by Steven Pinker.
http://evolbiol.ru/blankslate/blankslate.htm
Writers who use plasticity to prop up the Blank Slate assume that if primary sensory cortex is plastic, the rest of the brain must be even more plastic, because the mind is built out of sensory experience. For example, one neuroscientist was quoted as saying that Sur's rewiring experiments “challenge the recent emphasis on the power of the genes” and “will push people back toward more consideration of environmental factors in creating normal brain organization.”
But if the brain is a complex organ with many parts, the moral does not follow. Primary sensory cortex is not the bedrock of the mind but a gadget, one of many in the brain, that happens to be specialized for certain kinds of signal processing in the first stages of sensory analysis.
In this passage, I am not sure about the meaning of the underlined sentence.
I think I know the meaning of 'does not follow,' which implies 'something, in this case, the moral, is invalid inference.
(Am I right?)
Then the crux of the problem I cannot figure out this sentence is that I don't know what the underlined 'the moral' refers to.
Can anyone illuminate what 'the moral' refers to and what it means in consequence for me?
Regards.
The passage below is from ‘the Blank Slate’ by Steven Pinker.
http://evolbiol.ru/blankslate/blankslate.htm
Writers who use plasticity to prop up the Blank Slate assume that if primary sensory cortex is plastic, the rest of the brain must be even more plastic, because the mind is built out of sensory experience. For example, one neuroscientist was quoted as saying that Sur's rewiring experiments “challenge the recent emphasis on the power of the genes” and “will push people back toward more consideration of environmental factors in creating normal brain organization.”
But if the brain is a complex organ with many parts, the moral does not follow. Primary sensory cortex is not the bedrock of the mind but a gadget, one of many in the brain, that happens to be specialized for certain kinds of signal processing in the first stages of sensory analysis.
In this passage, I am not sure about the meaning of the underlined sentence.
I think I know the meaning of 'does not follow,' which implies 'something, in this case, the moral, is invalid inference.
(Am I right?)
Then the crux of the problem I cannot figure out this sentence is that I don't know what the underlined 'the moral' refers to.
Can anyone illuminate what 'the moral' refers to and what it means in consequence for me?
Regards.
Top answer
My understanding is that we learn by experimentation in life. We verbalize this by saying ‘the moral of this experiment is…’ (meaning ‘what we have learned by this’). If that is the meaning, then ‘the moral does not follow’ means that we cannot assume that we have learned anything, when we didn’t have all the facts (of the experiment).
- My understanding is that we learn by experimentation in life.
- We verbalize this by saying ‘the moral of this experiment is…’ (meaning ‘what we have learned by this’).
- If that is the meaning, then ‘the moral does not follow’ means that we cannot assume that we have learned anything, when we didn’t have all the facts (of the experiment).
- IMHO
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2 Answers
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My understanding is that we learn by experimentation in life. We verbalize this by saying ‘the moral of this experiment is…’ (meaning ‘what we have learned by this’). If that is the meaning, then ‘the moral does not follow’ means that we cannot assume that we have learned anything, when we didn’t have all the facts (of the experiment). IMHO
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What 'the moral' refers to?
The passage below is from ‘the Blank Slate’ by Steven Pinker.
http://evolbiol.ru/blankslate/blankslate.htm
The most highly publicized discoveries about cortical plasticity concern prima
The passage below is from ‘the Blank Slate’ by Steven Pinker.
http://evolbiol.ru/blankslate/blankslate.htm
The most highly publicized discoveries about cortical plasticity concern prima
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