Response to Lupton/Miller and Hadden

I believe that symbolism and mass deception was the dominant force in deceiving the german people into accepting the rhetoric of the Nazi party. Having said that, symbols can be a catalyst to allow for an emotional or contextual/cognitive understanding of ideas that might not be able to be coveyed through speech. An example of this is the self definition of the swastika itself that was stated in the article. By pairing the idea of the swastika having a noble and national pride, with the agenda of dominance over culture and fascism, the Nazi party was able to associate the to without directly stating the association;simple juxtaposition.

C.S. Pierce "How to Reason"

This article seems to parallel a psychology course I took over the summer called “Learning and Memory.” I took the course to understand how we interpret images and encode experience. As we were introduced to the course there were many examples of how we learn, the most notable being Pavlovian response, which is esentiall what Pierce is getting at. The bulk of this response will be pairing of experiments and phenomena to Pierce’s inferences.

His reaction section is interesting in that one phenomena described in the class was related to victims of armed robberies. In almost all cases of armed robberies the victims (those who interacted w/ the assailant) had trouble describing the physical features of the purpetraitor or even what color clothes they were wearing, but could identify the smallest detail about the weapon the criminal had bradished. This is because they were reacting, they were not processing on a cognitive level, but simply focusing all of their implicit energy on the task at hand.

I enjoyed his description of certain symbols existing in several forms. One example I can think of is by reading aloud a list of spelled out colors ie “red” “blue” etc but they are colored nonmatching colors a blue “RED,” purple “YELLOW.” What’s going on here is two forms of processing combined, the semantic symbol of language pulling up a subject that exists in our visual realm being combine with a visual cue that can be described in a vocal (back into semantic) manner.

Though I found the reading pretty consistant of how I know psychology and logical philosophy to work, I am often weary of artist as a psychologist or delcaring too definatively what is happening certain works of art. I think there is more here than Pierce can descern with psychology.