Re: `Structure' and contingency

Pace Davidson, Dassbach, and some others, I've a little query, then
I'm going to run into the bomb shelter, or go wear a sophomore's cap
:)

What happens when the conditions of action crucially include how
those conditions are perceived? As, say, when confidence turns into
panic (or as the Wall St types might say, when greed turns into fear)
and everyone rushes for the exit gate precipitating a crisis in a
particular form.

It may still be right to say that, given the structural conditions, a
crisis of some sort was going to happen, but surely of what form is
crucial. And is that altogether given by the structural conditions?
Even more so, the responses?

Dassbach quotes the bit about conditions not of their own making, not
chosen by themselves. May I humbly suggest that equally important are
those sentences a little further down -- about conjuring up the
ghosts of the past, i.e. in how a situation is cast/described, and
then acted upon. And which ghosts are conjured up are not quite a
function of those 'conditions not of their own making', or are they?

It's fine to talk about particle physics, even ecology. But in
neither instance, I think, do we need to take account of how the
particles or the animals conjure up the various ghosts under which
they will describe their situation and then proceed to act
accordingly.

Of course all this is partly conditioned by where I'm seated, on that
time-tested adage of where one stands depends on where one sits,
namely the, dare I say, world-historical events that have occured in
SE Asia over the past year-and-a-half.

Cheers

KJ Khoo