Re: BHA: society, santa, truth, etc.

["John Mingers" <orsjm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'd like to follow up Ruth's tale with my own.
When I was a similar age I was determined to
discover if santa was real (my parents wouldn't
say) so I set traps by tieing string across the
room (I was an experimentalist from an early
age). Unfortunately no one was ever caught and I
never really understood why until I was a parent
and realised that you could put on the light
without waking the children.

I see this as the starting point of my academic
career, and my distrust of experiments!

As to the debate I don't see the problem The
referent to the term "santa" does not exist an an
embodied being, but does as a concept and set of
cultural practices.

John


>
> I can't help but toss in that when I was little (4 or 5-ish?) I asked my mom
> if Santa Claus (the guy) was real.  She reports that she didn't know what to
> do at first, but decided that she didn't want to lie about it.  So she said
> no.  And that was that.  No lingering effects, except perhaps for a
> continuing preoccupation with truth. (I don't mean to belittle the real
> struggle that many parents do have with this, especially when they're poor,
> just to say that the situation with respect to Santa is not always as dire
> as it was starting to sound.)
>
John Mingers, Reader in Operational Research and Systems,
Warwick Business School,   Internet: J.Mingers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
University of Warwick,     fax:   +1203 524539
Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.      phone: +1203 522475
WWW: http://www.wbs.warwick.ac.uk/



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