Dave said to Marsha:
Great find. Required listening for all if you want to try and understand the
nature of the social and intellectual levels both historically and now.
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/index.html
dmb says:
I get "Ideas" as a podcast. It's a Canadian radio show and it's almost always
good. Another really good one, if you're into intelligent conversations, is "To
The Best of Our Knowledge". It comes from Wisconsin public radio and it's never
bad. There are lots of good shows NPR and the BBC for folks with ipods or any
kind of audio player. You can learn about scientism while you're doing the
dishes. It's delicious for your brain.
As I understand it, "scientism" is the perspective that says the hard sciences
produce the best kind of knowledge and that all other forms of knowledge fall
short by various degrees. On a scale from one to ten, according to scientism,
physics is a ten and rhetoric is a one. Biology gets a nine and literary
criticism gets zip. Chemistry scores 9.5 and psychology gets a 4.5. You get the
idea. In short, it puts the emphasis on "objective" truths and it thinks
"subjective" things like morals and art are meaningless. For an extreme
version, check out what the "eliminative materialists" are saying about
beliefs, intentions and feelings. (There are none and never have been.) Regular
old Positivism would be the prime example in philosophy but it's also a
widespread, general attitude and a feature of our culture.
Scientology is another thing entirely. That the perspective that says the best
kind of knowledge comes from outer space and it is not the kind of knowledge
that's gained through inquiry or experimentation. It just takes lots and lots
of cash.
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