On Living Our Explanations
By Lee Thayer
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All human worlds (that we know anything about) function as they do based upon the meaning of their worlds and them in it. Most of the other animals on earth dont have much to say about their pasts or their future. People do because they invented the concept of the past and the concept of the future in order to think and talk about them. Those who superseded us in our particular cultures invented explanations to give virtual reality to everything they wanted to talk about or do something about. We live in and through those explanations, as we understand them. We invent our explanations on top of those we inherit, and that we and our progenies will grow up living in and through.
This counter-intuitive premise is that we do not live in any natural world. We live consciously (and even subconsciously) in our worlds as we have explained themor could explain them. Physiological or biological events certainly do occur. But we deal with them according to what they meanto us. Random events like accidents do occur. But we can explain them before they occur and after they occur. There is nothing that occurs in our worlds that we cannot explain or justify in some way. Whether or not it rains is something we do not control. But to talk about it or think about it, we have to do so in and through our explanations. Your lover may be dumping you for his or her own a priori explanations. How you deal with it depends upon how you explain it to yourself. We liveand we diein accordance with our explanations of our worlds and of us in them. We live our explanations.
Lee Thayer
Lee Thayer is a scholar and writer known around the world for his many years of research and publications on the human condition. He has taught or lectured at many of the most prestigious universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and China. He has been a Fulbright professor in Finland, a Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard, and was twice awarded a Danforth Foundation Teacher Award for excellence in his teaching. His background is in music (composing and arranging), the humanities, engineering, and social and clinical psychology. He was one of the founders of the field of communication as a university discipline, and is a Past President of what was at that time the largest association of human communication scholars in the world. He was also the founding editor of the influential journal Communication, which was devoted to pragmatic insights into the human condition by the top thinkers in the world. His early work consisted of 14 books of research on the connection between communication and the human condition. More recently, he has summarized his long life of research into all matters human and social in such books as Communication: A Radically New Approach to Lifes Most Perplexing Problem, two collections of essays, On Communication and Pieces: Toward a Revisioning of Communication/Life. The present Doing Life; A Pragmatist Manifesto is a summary of his innovative perspectives on this subject for past 60 years. There is also his proposed alternative to the reach of biological evolution into the social sciences, Explaining Things: Inventing Ourselves and our Worlds. He lives in Western North Carolina with his artist/wife Kate Thayer. He is also renowned for his current work as a CEO coach of choice.
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