[lit-ideas] Re: Sciences and freedom
- From: "Donal McEvoy" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "donalmcevoyuk" for DMARC)
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2016 14:16:30 +0000 (UTC)
Social scientists entered the labs -- the very
monestaries of modern science -- to tease out the constructed character
of physics, biology and what have you.>
Did they really? I.e. enter the labs? How often? How many times did "social
scientists" sit in the labs - presumably observing - and watch as the true
philosophical character of the activities of natural scientists became apparent
to them? Where are the records of this?
In "Intellectual Impostures" Sokal and Bricont take a gentle sledgehammer to
philosophical claims about the character of science made by certain people -
many of whom might fairly be deemed kinds of 'constructivist' [or
post-modernist]. My (vague) impression is that these people, who may be fairly
deemed 'scientifically illiterate' in the way someone who cannot make accurate
sense of written French might be deemed not literate in French, _did not enter
labs_ and their views were not based on research by social scientists who
entered labs. Their views were of the sort that would more easily appeal to
people who never entered labs than people who did [e.g. like Sokal and Bricont
did] and were based on dogmas developed by people who (more or less) _never
entered labs_.
I could of course be wrong in all this idle speculation - which I have
concluded from an armchair and not by entering labs over the years to check for
the presence, or absence, of 'social scientists' [in some post-modernism, their
'absence' might even be claimed to be 'the highest form of presence', but we
all know this kind of claim would be just evasive bollix].
But if I am wrong, there will surely be an evidential record as to who entered
labs and for what purposes and what they established by this. So what is this
evidential record as to the entering of labs? Or is this 'entering the labs'
just another constructivist myth? That is, more 'intellectual imposture'.
DL
From: Torgeir <phatic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Lit Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, 27 September 2016, 22:26
Subject: [lit-ideas] Sciences and freedom
There is a moment in the analysis of the historical moment when the
disciplines emerged that has gone too lightly by when the so-called
constructivist made their final shout. What has often been granted as
the great defining characteristics of this moment -- let's date it
roughly to the 1870s -- is that these new constellations in biology,
chemistry, physics, and so on, based, as they were, on international
colloquia of research scientists who shared their findings in various
written and oral venues, centers, etc, relatively autonomously of
singular universities, which had been the home and hallmark of academic
endeavour prior to this moment just worked. They cured diseases. They
sent men to the moon. They invented plastics. Against this naturalist
dogma, constructivism held that there isn't -- as they would claim --
any such thing as just working. It works because it is placed within a
larger framework of expectations, valuations, regimes, that makes what
apparently works work. Social scientists entered the labs -- the very
monestaries of modern science -- to tease out the constructed character
of physics, biology and what have you.
However, and this is the moment that slipped past the inquisitive gaze
of the constructivists, what we should be mindful of when we talk about
science that just works isn't so much that flying to the moon or curing
a disease is naturalised as progress, but that the sciences entered into
relations that in a very important way freed their participants from
dogma. The way they were organised contributed to this, but what is most
important is that thinking about the limits of what would be possible to
achieve with academic training and rigour was liberated from strictures
that had governed the universities up until then.
Was it Kant that inaugurated this development with his critique of
theology as the captain of higher learning, suggesting that philosophy
should take its place as the custordian of proper knowledge? Not
entirely. What Kant and Humboldt acheived was surely as loosening of the
ethical and moral hypocrisy that governed truth telling before them.
What is cruical is that it was with the new organisation, methods and
objects that enframed the new sciences that discoveries could be
reported without reference to a metaphysical perspective.
Should not science be let loose, to find discoveries where they may be,
without hindrance from self-appointed moralists and structures imposed
by ethics and temporal values? The question of how many eggs it would
take to make a spearm productive comes to mind.
--
mvh. torgeir
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