I can relate to your concerns about ecological
devolution, Jay, if you wish to speak of a "day
of reckoning". But a "final exam" is something
certain persons in positions of social power impose
on certain other persons who lack the social power to
block the imposition. I am firmly convinced
that an examination of the structure of
giving and taking exams will always show
an alienated social order in which
universalizing we-subject is split (<--that's
a word from psychopathology) into an us
and a them: an un whose discourse determines
aspects of the life opportuities of a
them who, as parents like to say: had
better "listen" (which does not mean
to acoustically detect and semantically
decode).
Jay Hanson wrote:
[snip]
> >So scientists are a separate species? I don't think so, they seem to
> >be able to breed with non-scientists...
>
> Brown-eyed people can breed with blue-eyed people too. How many scientists
> do you know personally Eva?
I'm not Eva, and I haven't known many scientists, but the few I have
known have struck me in varying ways as having "split" (<--that
word again) their experience. They live a shared dialogical life as
scientizers, but, generally, the content of that dialog in no way
engages with a reflectively clarifying exegesis of that dialog itself,
except, of course, when they "split" again, and talk about the business
of science rather than "doing" their science. The most cartoon-like
case I personally have encountered was a nuclear researcher who was
a shaman in their after-hours life.
And there's a new development in the area of "child development"
that kind of fits in here: This woman who has discovered that parents
do not affect their children's development (except in terms of how much
the kid likes the parent). This lady has discovered that while, at
home, children adapt to develop a certain modus-vivendi with their
parents, with their peers they develoop a completely different
personality structure, and the two are completely "split" (<--that
word again). This is a bit "off the subject", but insofar as
it is true, it well fits in with all the other splitting that
goes on in our so-called "society", where -- to return to the
subject --, e.g., wha scientists *do* and what they *think
they are doing* need have no logical intersection (the
union of what one does and what one thinks one does may be
the null set).
>
> WHAT IS SCIENCE?
> " ...science is no longer the specialized activity of a professional elite.
It sure isn't something "the American [or other] people" do. Most
people believe in atoms these days for no better reasons than
their ancestors believed in God. Both "atoms" and "God" can
explain everything.
[snip]
> "Science, to put its warrant as concisely as possible, is the organized
> systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condenses
> the knowledge into testable laws and
> principles. Its defining traits are first, the confirmation of discoveries
> and support of hypotheses through repetition by independent investigators,
> preferably with different tests and analyses; second, mensuration, the
> quantitative description of the phenomena on universally accepted scales;
[snip]
> Jay
OK, Jay, how do you measure an idea? "The cat is on the mat (actually,
she is on the file cabinet, as I write this)" We can measure the
length, weight, ambient electromagnetic force fields, etc. around
the cat, we can measure the distance between the measuring instruments
and the cat being measured, etc., and I do not deny the potential
utility (and even grant-potential) of such activities, but where
in all this does what even that likely autistic, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
said, come in (citing from his _Philosophical Investigations_,
from memory:
Though the ether was filled with electromagnetic waves
all was dark, until man opened his essing eye
and there was light.
I have no desire to denigrate "science", but only to *situate*
scientific praxis in the overall horizon of human existence,
wherein alone there is anything and it is anything at all,
or at least, "if there is anything else, whatever that might
mean", we can, on principle, have no more access to it than
we can experience anything we do not experience (or not
experience anyting we do experience).
But "final exams" do exist. Persons create them and they
create the whole "regional ontology" of testers, testees,
testing science, rewards and punsihments based on test
results, etc. Here, too, however, there is a "day of
reckoning", and it starts with the very projection of this
terribly banal Idea[l]: *splitting* "the conversation we are"
into those who discuss and those whose fates they discuss about
without the latter participating symmetrically in this
discussion (but, of course, there are discourses of the
objects of the discussion, which, sometimes, lead to
the end of the discussion, as when the objects shoot
the subjects, which is called a "revolution").
To engage in the endeavor to try to understand what
mensuration is is not simply another act of
mensuration. If only mensuration is "science"
then the serious, disciplined study *of* science
cannot be scientific.
\brad mccormick
--
Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world.
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
-------------------------------------------------------
<![%THINK;[SGML]]> Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
