Roger/Glen -
I would rework Steve's explanation. Just as infants babble to learn
the correct sounds for their native language by feedback, older
children babble explanations to see what works. Unfortunately,
correctly formed explanations can be uninformed opinions or fallacious
reasonings or imaginary evidence, and flawed as they are they can
still sound true to some social population, so people get positive
feedback for ridiculous explanations and build up self-consistent
systems of explanations. Voila, the party of tea or the birthers or
the church of scientology or sociologists crafting a bespoke
vocabulary for linear algebra.
I like this description. It is very mutation-selection and fits my
experience. Adding Glen's view of language-as-grooming (which is
growing on me over time), I prefer to think in terms of resonances.
We are (perhaps) driven to seek harmonizing notes like a barbershop
quartet. And if we have a pulpit/audience we play call-and-response.
If we don't get a consistent and confident enough round of "hallelujah"
(thanks to Dean's tip about Dictionaries I found the standard spelling
rather than using my own idiosyncratic choice of "hallelujia") from the
crowd, we review our sermon, modify it and try again, probably with more
fervor and conviction until our message (and it's delivery) gets a
satisfying response. This is where it comes in handy to have your own
choir to try your sermons out on (e.g. FRIAMers, teabaggers,
scientologists) but as the saying in that regard implies, "too easy of
an audience can be a problem".
The pursuit of Truth has an overtone of an absolute or objective rather
than the mere relativism of "finding resonance with others". Here is
where I think Natural Science emerged... from the activities of humans
that roughly fit the model of seeking resonance with nature, of
hypothesis and experiment as call and response. Strike one hollow tree
to hear it's frequencies, then strike another.
Unfortunately, capitalism and consumerism create another set of tuning
forks... The "free market" (or any market, no matter how overtly or
covertly manipulated or contrived) offers us resonances and those who
learn to hit the right notes get (some of) it's fruits. Those who know
how to manipulate it's resonances get the bulk of it (to use the 1%/99%
inequity argument). So we learn to speak the "language" of the
markets. Period.
I think this is what we used to go to church for... a weekly sermon on
some other counterpoint topic. Perhaps that is why some of us come to
FRIAM (in person or virtually?).
I really enjoyed reading
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Cant-the-Sciencesthe/142239/ this
morning. It's all about the evidence and the reasons.
I also read this and enjoyed it (at your recommendation here) but did
not find it to be directly responsive to the topic? It is a
fascinating analysis of the "Two Cultures" discussion with the topic of
"filthy lucre" thrown on the fire to fuel it yet more...
This particular vignette struck me:
/When Immanuel Kant called on people to "have the courage to use
their own understanding," to "dare to know," he had in mind a broad
expanse of inquiries, including those in the arts and sciences, and
even the testing of truth claims offered in the name of religion.
Although Kant wrote before practitioners of the various inquiries
distinguished themselves from one another as physicists, historians,
chemists, biologists, literary scholars, economists, geologists,
metaphysicians, and so on, these several /Wissenschaft /were
nurtured significantly by the same Enlightenment imperative, by the
same broad cognitive ideal.
/
It seems (sadly?) that there is yet another "two cultures" spread which
Glen alludes to and is definitely in the air today with all of the 99%
talk. It is the haves/have-nots, the elite, the plebians, the
ignorant, the informed, the ... and the ... . Glen suggests that
one "class" simply doesn't have the time or resources to think
critically while the other does. I think there *is* something to that,
but it isn't as simple as time/$$... it is also perspective or will.
I think Roger's article speaks a little to that... the differing ideas
of "whence critical thinking?".
- Steve
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