Hi Matt I think we are talking past each other. Have you got Philosophy and Social Hope, let's discuss some actual texts. I'll pull some quotes.
Here's one point before that though. If I say Rorty does not take descent account of the need to test our facts I mean something like this. Is there a biscuit in the biscuit tin? Whether it is or not is a fact, within the common language we are using. I do not think Rorty would deny this notion of fact. He would call it trivial. This is my problem. Not that we cannot agree what is going on here but that it is trivial for Rorty. I think this fails to understand what science does. Now sure Rorty and Kuhn are right that science makes paradigm shifts that change the language being used and therefore what constitutes the facts. But there is stuff going on in between these ordinary discourses and revolutionary discouses I would suggest. There is no simple period when a single language is being spoken, and the many languages being tried out by scientists do conflict and overlap. And scientists do real tests and experiments that domore than just set out the facts.The results of experiments do help scientists reach agreement and decide that one particular way of talking works better than others given the experimental reults. This is all open to revision, but for me Rorty is weak on the history of science here and vastly underplays the role of the interplay between facts and language selection and creation, and puts too much emphasis on the creative aspect of langauge and theory generation. It is more of a dialectic, which the philsopher of science Roy Bhaskar strongly points out. Scientists themselves clearly recognise that they have a dialogue with nature and nature speaks (and that is subject to all the problems post modernism explains to us but nonetheless we have this dialogue, we interpret, data as information/signs but still we listen to nature, even if the author has no authority). David M Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
