I'M A FISHEROLOGIST!

I’M A FISHEROLOGIST!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 16, 2008

“Ideas are cosmopolitan. They have the liberty of the world. You have no right to take the sword and cross the bounds of other nations, and enforce on them laws or institutions they are unwilling to receive. But there is no limit to the sphere of ideas. Your thoughts and feeling, the whole world lies open to them, and you have the right to send them into my latitutde, and to give them sweep around the earth, to the mind of every human being.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813 – 1887), American clergyman



A READER WRITES:

A reader of my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) writes, "I am a psychologist, and you don't write like a psychologist. My brother-in-law is a psychiatrist, and he says you don't write like a psychiatrist. My next-door-neighbor is a professor of sociology at the university here, and he says you don't write like a sociologist. One of my favorite professors was an anthropologist, and he says you don't write like an anthropologist. My minister who majored in theology and philosophy at university says you don't write like a theologian or philosopher, and adds that your 'fragments of a philosophy' are just that, fragments. So, how do you explain yourself?"



DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Easy, I answered, I'm a Fisherologist.

The good doctor could have mentioned that I write on statistics and I'm not a statistician. I have on occasion written on the loopholes in mathematics, which are not unlike the loopholes in literature. I am not a mathematician nor am I a professor of literature. In fact, I am not an intellectual or member of the intelligentsia.

But I am a doctor of philosophy, a Ph.D., which the training is meant to imply I have a love of learning, not earning, learning! And yes, learning for learning's sake.

So, I write from the perspective of my training, experience, reading, reflection, wandering and pondering the lessons life has taught me and continues to teach me.

I confess I do write on all the subjects the good doctor mentioned but from a Fisherologist perspective. Additionally, I write on ecology, history, science, urbanology, demographics, engineering, chemistry, religion, mental health, and medicine, to name a few.

Am I qualified to do this? Of course I am. This is the age of the amateur as it was 500 years ago, when priests put aside their priestly duties, and lawyers their adjudication aside to develop what we now call "science."

I am still a living, breathing, thinking man and have a right to my views on this as of everything.

My intentions, often stated (repeatedly in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD), are not to create consensus views. I make no claim to expertise but do state emphatically that I am a critic, sometimes provocatively, and critical examiner of ideas that cross my mind.

My objective in so doing is to stimulate more relevant and appropriate thoughts in the reader regarding the subject I am discussing. In many cases, the reader's mind might tear off in a totally different direction to what I am saying. Often, that has happened to me, so I know something of this hiccup syndrome, and fully approve.

In either case, I am satisfied with the reader.

When people attempt to define you, and there have been far less with me than with a more public and popular figure, they do so to get a bead on you, identify with you, or nullify or neutralize you so they can dispense with you.

A publisher of some of my stuff calls me "a fisher of men." I have been called worse. Whatever it is I think you’ll admit the inclination tells us a lot about ourselves.