[KB] Sources for LASA

[Clarke Rountree]

Dear Burkelers,

I was reading Augustine's *Confessions *recently when I came across a
passage that must have offered some inspiration to KB's "naive verbal
realism" passage in *Language as Symbolic Action*. (Since *The Rhetoric of
Religion* preceded it by 5 years, this is not an unlikely influence).

Augustine is recounting his fruitless search for certain Truth and notes:
“Doubt, then, what to hold for certain, the more sharply gnawed my heart,
the more ashamed I was, that so long deluded and deceived by the promise of
certainties, I had with childish error and vehemence, prated of so many
uncertainties” (VI.5.). His standard for knowledge sought was downright
Cartesian: “For I wished to be as assured of the things I saw not, as I was
that seven and three are ten” (VI.6). Then he notes the shakiness of his
everyday knowledge: "Then Thou, O Lord, little by little with most tender
and most merciful hand, touching and composing my heart, didst persuade
me—considering what innumerable things I believed, which I saw not, nor was
present while they were done, as so many things in secular history, so many
reports of places and of cities, which I had not seen; so many of friends,
so many of physicians, so many continually of other men, which unless we
should believe, we should do nothing at all in this life; lastly, with how
unshaken an assurance I believed of what parents I was born, which I could
not know, had I not believed upon hearsay..." (VI.7).

Has anyone made this connection?

Cheers,

Clarke

-- 
Dr. Clarke Rountree
Professor Emeritus of Communication Arts
University of Alabama in Huntsville
clarke.rountree at uah.edu
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