Semantic & Epistemological traps:
2. Semantic Trap - This is similar to the notion of a thing being "lost/added in translation".
Easy example:
- A slave is someone you pay money for and force to work for you under threat of death.
- An adoptee is someone you pay money for and lives with you as your biological child would.
Trap = Both the slave and the adoptee are acquired with money so an adoptee is a slave also.
You can't take one element that is the same in both cases and say they are completely the same because one element is the same. The thing is when you use someone elses language to communicate how your culture brakes down reality samantic traps happen all the time. This happens because the translation is built on what word in the target language is "close enough" to the native concept.
3. Epistemological Trap - This happens when the only way you know to think of/describe a thing is through a given language/worldview.
Trap = Both the slave and the adoptee are acquired with money so an adoptee is a slave also(because I know of no other concept but "slave" to compare "adoptee" to).
Epistemological Traps are easier to dodge though. All you simply need to know are multiple languages/worldviews.
........
X = [a,b,g,h]
Y = [a,b,j,k]
Semantic Trap ---> X==Y because they both contain [a,b,_,_]
NO X & Y are distinct as in some attributes are the same while others are different.
If I say [a,b,...] don't assume [...,g,h] is coming next.
NOTES:
Conceptual Incarceration –
The knower is given a set of predetermined concepts and definitions to utilize in the process of knowing. This amounts to European hegemony. In this regard, the alien or Eurocentric ideas inhibit us from fully understanding African reality. The African thinker is, in fact, conceptually incarcerated.
-Wade Nobles
Psychology Serving Humanity: Proceedings of the 30th International Congress of Psychology
...our ability to regain balance as African intellectuals has to do with the recognition that concepts have the capacity to lock you up, concepts have the capacity to limit the parameter of your knowing and understanding. The concepts you use as the critical discourse have the ability to prevent you from engaging in critical thought. That's what I call conceptual Incarceration, the concept puts you in jail. ...It's not any different on the street than it is in the academy. It is the intellectual discourse that is the jail so we start thinking with white thought, thinking with western ideas, those ideas themselves lock us up and it is insidious, it is very difficult to talk about it because I'm speaking English. I'm not speaking igbo, not speaking fulani, even the language itself becomes difficult.
-Wade Nobles
2006 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP Conference
Conceptual Incarceration –
The condition of African thought under the influence of the European Worldview. It refers to the conceptual universe or boundaries imposed on African cognitive-intellectual functioning by the internalization of the European Worldview. Consequentially, such a condition reflects one which defines, i.e. limits/constrains or "imprisons," the conceptual universe of African thought under the influence of the European Worldview
- Kobi Kambon
Epistemological trap -
The epistemological traps is what John Henrik Clarke mentioned when he said Europeans didn't only colonized Africa, they colonized thought itself. ...European hegemony requires the disenfranchisement of the discursive outputs of African cultural systems, and knowing & understanding is a cultural output. Knowing is a cultural output, just as knowing & analysis are cultural inputs. So we got to begin to talk about how we're crippled by trying to blackenize white thought. Trying to blackenize European thought. Even trying to compare African things to give them legitimacy ...cause we find counterparts in European things. We do that all the time in our intellectual discourse.
...before we were tiptoeing on the platform because we weren't sure about it and we in fact had this sort of mentality were we always look over our shoulder to see if some white professor or some white scholar legitimized our thought. So we were happy when some white person said Egypt, ancient Kemet was black. You say "well finally finally they telling the truth". Who gives a (....) about what they think.
- Wade Nodes
2006 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP Conference
The insidious aspect of the epistemological trap is the process wherein the. Black social scientists (sic) accept a set of White defined assumptions...
- Wade Nodes
Epistemology
Epistemology is the study of knowledge: what we know, how we know it, how we know we know it, and how to keep track of it without driving ourselves crazy.
epistemology - Dictionary Definition
" when you're anti illegal immigration is really silly. There's nothing wrong with your opinions overlapping with people you normally don't agree with.
face from here on out: 0
