[lit-ideas] Re: Sounds right to me
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:36:22 +0900
Good question, Phil. Off the cuff, I would say that 5. is included in the
list to encourage the attempt to unify knowledge but only "unifying where
possible, discriminating where necessary." To me there is value in the
effort, if only to counter the endless fragmentation of knowledge due,
first, to the sheer incapacity of any human mind to hold more than a tiny
fraction of what is to know and, second, encouraged by academic institutions
that stimulate what Andrew Abbott calls The Chaos of Disciplines (
http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Disciplines-Andrew-Abbott/dp/0226001016) . If
nothing else, this fragmentation makes it increasingly difficult to
reconstitute the common ground for rational discourse once provided by
liberal education.
John
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 3:24 PM, Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> John McCreery quotes:
>
> "According to Bunge, propositions should be:
>
> 5. unified, so that assertions are organized in a manner that subsumes
> the specific within the general, unifying where possible,
> discriminating when necessary"
>
> The other propositions strike me as being acceptable, but this one
> bothers me. The other propositions give us both internal and external
> consistency, so this proposition doesn't add the criterion of
> consistency. What does it contribute? Why should we accept it? One
> of the lessons post-modernism offered was that the desire to unify
> knowledge was both mistaken and dangerous. I think this is a good
> lesson and so I would be reluctant to accept the above proposition
> without some account of what good comes from it.
>
>
> Lacking unity,
>
> Phil Enns
> Yogyakarta, Indonesia
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
> digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
>
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
Other related posts:
