Re: [peirce-l] Slow Read : "Sciences as Communicational CoDear Sally, list,
I've been occupied, and I guess that it's too late for me to catch up with the rest of the slow read, anyway I won't be miffed if nobody replies to this. Here's a cut-down version of the draft that I was working on for Segment 1. It's interleaved with a previous reply from you. Thank you for all your careful efforts, Sally, they've been a success. Best, Ben ---- Original Message ----- From: Sally Ness To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU Sent: Friday, September 02, 2011 5:03 PM Subject: Re: [peirce-l] Slow Read : "Sciences as Communicational Communities" Segment 1 >[SN] Dear Ben, List, >[SN] Thanks for your response. Sorry about the subscription wall. If there >are others who ran into this problem, I have a .doc copy that I can send >off-list (I don't think the list serve will allow me to attach it to a post). >[SN] Ben, I'm glad to see your comments about JR's commitment to developing >new forms of communication that were not elitist--at least in the >paper-credential sense as you put it. Elitism and arrogance are terms that >reoccur in JRs paper and in the discourse relating to it. It would seem to >afford the slow read an opportunity to reflect on how JR lived and worked in >relation to these ideas as well. I think your examples of his working against >elitism of certain kinds are very well chosen. Peirce seems obviously to have >been a model for JR in this regard. However, Peirce seems also to have been >painfully aware of forms of elitism that permeated his own character, and >which left him far from perfect in his own view of himself (I wish I had >quotes to back this up, but I'm mainly thinking vaguely back to some >biographical material from Joseph Brent's and Kenneth Ketner's works, and >various phrasing patterns in Peirce's writing--nothing easy to reference). >Peirce wasn't just fighting the elitism "out there." That is part of what >imbues Peirce's work with such a moving spirit of humility, in my reading >anyway. I imagine JR was similar in this regard, although I don't really get >a strong sense of it in this particular paper. [BU] Elitism gets involved with arrogance and so on, but they're not the selfsame thing. Peirce confessed to and regretted his sometimes contemptuous manner (e.g., towards William James, see CP 6.174-182 or here), but his contempt didn't mean that he misunderstood the topic (one of Zeno's Paradoxes) that occasioned it. Peirce was also something of an elitist (e.g., in "The Fixation of Belief," see CP 5.380), but never made a contrite kind of confession of it that I'm aware of, and I don't know that he ever saw it as a flaw. To judge of Joe's attitude in his article - was he getting into elitism? - it doesn't really depend, for example, on whether he had a peremptory tone about Kleinman. One needs collateral information both on Kleinman's topics and on what collateral information Joe had about those topics, because those topics involved particular circumstances, from 15 or more years ago. >[SN] I'm not sure I'm following your analogies about the architects and >engineers (they represent the scientist/insider, I think), ... [BU] Yes, I got mixed up. I'd have to revise to say, "somebody playing engineer who yet lacks interest in developing something reliable" and suchlike. That would be a closer parallel to people criticizing scientific methods from an unscientific standpont, in an unscientific spirit, etc. >[SN] ... but your explanation of where JR sees "the shadows springing up" is >very helpful, particularly when you foreground the role of "official" >interests. JR's paper also makes this strong distinction between forms of >expertise that are the consequences of technical practice and seemingly free >of officialdom and forms of authority that are based in institutional contexts >and are utterly disconnected form such practices. A lot would seem to be >hanging on this dissociation. I'll try to zero in on this in the next segment >or the one after. In any case, I do read JRs paper as being written with the >science wars of the 1980s and 90s very much in mind (the original version was >presented before the 1996 Sokal hoax, but it was still in the news when the >revised versions were written). I have wondered if JR made a strong link >between Kleinman's ideas and those of Foucault. Foucault seems more in the >background here than Derrida to me, but that's not to say both aren't exerting >an influence. [BU] Thanks to your generosity, I've read the Kleinman article in question, "Why Science and Scientists are Under Fire" (September 29, 1995). Also, I've found another one online cowritten by him that goes over some of the same territory, "Democratizing Science, Debating Values" by Abby J. Kinchy and Daniel Lee Kleinman, summer 2005, _Dissent_ http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=213. But Kleinman's earlier article in turn criticizes another unnamed article by named authors, and both of Kleinman's articles depend to some extent on representations of particular circumstances from years ago. I don't know what collateral information Joe may have had about Kleinman's earlier article's topics. [BU] Kleinman argues that arguments for "sound science" as a basis for political decisions ignore relevant other social values and value choices. Sound science isn't enough, he says. However, if he is correct about the _biases_ that other social values contribute to science, then his argument implies that the science - and in particular the claims and policies made on the basis of the science - are not really _scientifically_ so sound. Hence he does not logically support his devaluation of "sound science" arguments in general. [BU] He builds a case that therefore supports at most the devaluation of the _kind_ of "sound science" arguments that he wrote of hearing lately. By his _general_ devaluation he implies that which Peirce argued was not predestined to arise from the use of scientific method -- doubt about the scientific method itself in general. Actually, Peirce had more than mere doubt about the efficacy of slow, stumbing scientific reasoning and conduct - in urgent practical matters. The problem seems that theoretical concerns and practical ones are getting confused amid their increasing entanglement, an unavoidable concomitant of contemporary civilization. [BU] Kleinman supports calls for better science education, so that non-scientists can engage in issues of science more intelligently, but he also desires that science be taught as being subject to political, economic, cultural, societal frameworks as viewed by him politically. There's a good argument to be made that scientists should be aware of social biases so as to avoid inquiries' being decided or influenced by authority that consists in power, wealth, glamour, or status. But Kleinman's solution seems to me to easily mask a ratcheting-up of the problem. [BU] Even if the AIDS activists discussed by Kleinman in both articles were right in their criticisms of test methods (I'm in no position to prejudge the matter), I'm quite doubtful about systematically and presumptively empowering and elevating outside critics, throughout government-funded science, in decision-making about methods' effectiveness. (Methods' ethics are a somewhat different issue, one that I don't recall either Kleinman or Joe raising in the articles that we're discussing.) Kleinman in 2005 sees that kind of systematic empowerment as advantageous to a host of political causes that he supports and, at that time at least, doesn't address what a double-edged sword it could be for those causes. In any case, such official systematic empowerment to roles of presumptive critical legitimacy seems like it would subject science to destructive forces, forces much less careful and nuanced than Kleinman. I think that Joe very likely had that sort of thing in mind. He wanted to warn scientists. I wanted to warn scientists (which I may have stated unclearly in my previous post) in the early 1980s about such a process beginning in academia. Well, maybe the science wars had already started and I didn't know it. I've since encountered post-modernists who do really appreciate literature, but what I encountered back then in the Deconstructionists was a stampeding indifference and incognizance toward literary reasons in literary art, and, at that time, I extrapolated to expect the same toward scientific reasons in science. Kleinman does not directly represent the latter, but he seems to open the door to it. [BU] Depending on the facts of the cases discussed by Kleinmn, different philosophical questions are courted. I'd agree that, if amateurs have good logical criticisms based in facts, then professionals should hear them out and at least not summarily dismiss them. Best is if the actual scientific process is healthy enough to incorporate valid scientific criticism from whatever source without too much delay. It is not by mere definition that a field or discipline of science is legitimate, sound, and healthy. James Randi has made plenty of criticisms of work in parapsychology, and I don't know that he has ever earned an academic degree or tried to get published in a journal. I don't know about parapsychologists, but I doubt that many psychologists or other researchers would dismiss Randi as an ignorant or misled outsider acting to harm inquiry. [BU] Peirce distinguished the theoretical from the practical, quite strongly sometimes. In practical matters he thought the best guides, far better and saner than scientific reasoning, were instinct and traditional sentiment. One example of his was that he would not fight his abhorrence of incest although he lacked a scientific theory to support or justify that abhorrence. On the other hand he held that scientific research should not be trammeled by practical concerns and by the unscientific methods of settling opinion (tenacity, authority, and congruity) that he outlined in "The Fixation of Belief." [BU] During Peirce's career, the US government did not invest in scientific research so massively as it came to do in the 20th Century. The Allison Commission (1884 to 1886) investigated the US Coast Survey among other agencies, leading to the dismissal of several officials but exonerating Peirce. That commission was, according to the online US History Encylopedia http://www.answers.com/topic/allison-commission, "among the first to explore the question of whether federal intervention politicizes scientific research" (though its investigation of those officials was not in regard to politicization). [BU] I don't recall Peirce's addressing the issue of today's kind of massive entanglement of theoretical and practical concerns - the increased dependence of practical matters on current theoretical work, and the increased dependence of theoretical work on government funding. Now, I say - and it's easy for me to say - that it's good for the government to take into account _good_ criticism from outsiders about methods' effectiveness in government-funded research; but how does the government decide, amid political pressures, what is good criticism? Well, there are probably mountains of discussion seeking or arguing over answers to such questions. >[SN] Your comments on the concept of discovery have hit the nail on the >head--thank you for this. It does seem that the discovery/invention >contrast--as Jon A has also pointed out--is not the most helpful here. >"Discovery" as JR emphasizes it draws attention to that which is processual, >unfinished, uncertain, not yet known or under control, initial, and not yet >"product"-ive or critique-oriented (to some typical relations between the >Objects of scientific inquiry and their Representamen, I guess?). I see that, >now, and it helps to identify one general way in which, as you say, Peirce's >theory of science is unusual, even among scientists themselves (like the ones >JR was addressing in this paper). I hope we can pursue that particular line >of thought further. It does seems that JR is at many points in this paper >trying to bring out what is distinctive about Peirce's notion of science, and >this is also evidently the case with the Socratic Tradition paper, judging >from the quote you supplied. >[SN] The quote you brought out on negotiation is one that I have puzzled over >myself: >[SN quoting JR] "I omit discussion here of the way in which something like >negotiation does in fact play an important role in the sciences, which I would >argue to be secondary and not truly negotiational except in a very loose >sense." >[SN] I wonder if the concept of negotiation is somehow causing problems for JR >in his attempt to characterize scientific inquiry in terms of inquirers who >arrange, as you say, to yield to and be determined by the truth of the Object, >whatever it may be. Perhaps negotiation would grant to much agency to the >sign/scientist somehow. Objective truth is "non-negotiable." Anything that >attempts to negotiate would then be a distorting influence--to borrow Jon A's >terms. I wish JR had explained the "loose sense" of negotiation he had in >mind in more detail and made clearer its "important role" in the sciences. >This might help also with the contrast you draw between the "method of >science" and the "method of authority." I'm not sure that I see science and >authority as concepts that can be set up in such a parallel way, but it does >seem right that JR is concerned about the trammelling possibility you identify. I wish that Joe had done so too. I can only guess, and probably will guess wrong. In my personal (non-scientific) experience, sometimes a kind of instinct to negotiate and compromise leads me to reconsider issues that I had passed over lightly or considered closed. Occasionally I have seen that, by the principles that I thought that I was defending, I was in error. But somehow I don't think that Joe was alluding to that sort of thing. Best, Ben >[SN] Thanks again--I'm moving on to the post on segment 2 beginning tomorrow. >Something should be up over the long weekend. >[SN] Sally Sally, --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
