What a thing is and what it means are not separate, the former being physical and the latter mental as we are accustomed to believe.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that the essence of an object and its significance are interconnected rather than distinct.
James J. Gibson's quote challenges the conventional separation between the physical properties of an object and its mental or symbolic meanings. He suggests that our understanding of what something is cannot be fully separate from its conceptual implications, indicating a deeper psychological and philosophical interplay between the object and our perception of it.
In practice
In a philosophy class discussing the nature of reality.
Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action. As long as you gotta sit-down philosophy, you’ll have a sit-down thought pattern, and as long as you think that old sit-down thought you’ll be in some kind of sit-down action.
Most people, they get overwhelmed by the religious stories, the nationalist stories, by the economic stories of the day, and take these stories to be the reality.
We are not as Christ-centered and cross-cherishing as we should be, because we do not ponder the truth that everything good, and everything bad that God turns for the good, was purchased by the sufferings of Christ.
Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.
The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without.
OBSTINATE, adj. Inaccessible to the truth as it is manifest in the splendor and stress of our advocacy.
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