Ordinarily, were I told that a spat had developed between Lou & ravi I
would automatically assume that the initial offending party was Lou -
ravi's posts are almost always both cogent and unofffending, whether or
not one agrees with him. But it seems to me that in the present case
ravi simply hijacked one of Lou's posts for the sake of riding is own
private hobby horse. Hence his suggestion below to use a filter is
really quite obtuse. No one (I should think) would wish to filter out
ravi's important contributions to many threads, which only makes his
behavior in the present instance more objectionable. Lou's original post
had nothing to do with the various controversies over the nature, scope,
and limits of western science. Moreover, to carry out his hijacking ravi
had to launch a wholly unprincipeld attack on Diamond, since the whole
of his comment was founded on the implicit claim that he was capable of
telepathy at a distance and therefore had intuited Diamond's motives.
His intuition was almost certainly wrong. Intellectuals are far too
divided on the issues ravi raises for Diamond to have had the motive of
achieving status among them. In fact he probably knew he was risking
loss of status.

Unless a writer develops a contrary case, "science" does NOT mean what
ravi makes the word mean here. Rather "science" in the first instance
means the achievents within narrowly  specified domains, of (for
example) Planck, Einstein, Darwin, Lister, and so forth. That science
makes none of the calims that ravi implicitly ascribes to it.

There is great need to debate science in its various aspects and as
conceived by various thinkers. Ravi has only confused the possibility of
such discussion here by his strange hijacking of a topic interesting in
its owh light.

Carrol
ravi wrote:
> 
> On May 8, 2009, at 8:51 PM, Louis Proyect wrote:
> > ravi wrote:
> >> My notion of science doesn't matter. The question is: which side,
> >> of the two described above, holds the centre (and power) in science
> >> today?
> >
> > I can't stand the fact that something I wrote on my blog has
> > triggered such a useless discussion so I have changed the subject
> > heading.
> 
> Learn to use a mail filter, instead.
> 
>         --ravi

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