roachboy

this is kind of an aside maybe. there is no reason (in principle) why philo and scientific work should be separated from each other. scientific investigations happen within particular sociological contexts which function to provide de facto definitions of socially legitimate variables, forms of explanation, etc...: experiments are not assumption-free, and there is a tendency to assimilate anomolous results back into the pre-existing explanatory frame or discount them (pce thomas kuhn and bruno latour)....so any experiment involves data and the categories that order it and the assumptions concerning how these categories link to or impact upon each other (models for particular types of systems) and so is an epistemological exercise (addressing questions of fit between ordering terms and results of actions) AND an ontological exercise (here as a term that designates any type of thinking about relations to categories that goes beyond questions operational or of "fit") insofar as the operations involved with experiment are also practical exercises in meaning-generation/creation (this swiped from latour, stuff like "pandora's hope")...so the sciences unfold within social contexts that are determinate insofar as the shared assumptions within a given community structure the results of work done within it--so you find a set of assumptions amongst folk who work on subatomic physics, another amongst those who work in mechanics, another amongst those who work on mathetmatical modelling, another amongst folk who operate with complex dynamical systems assumptions, etc. these sociological contexts may or may not line up with the institutional spaces (departments etc) within which research happens--they can function across, say, journals that link up researchers in various institutions with each other and new research etc....

because scientific investigation is not some free-floating operation involving unconditioned heroic Individuals whose Gaze is so trained that they have direct access to the Inner Workings of Things, but rather by actual human beings in particular types of social contexts, it follows that (a) there is inevitably conceptual frameworks that inform particular types of work and (b) that the embeddedness of researchers within particular communities would entail that questions about these frames would be differentially posed and differentially addressed--this because the weight of the community is not nothing, and it is simply not the case that anything goes in terms of "valid" experrymental results or extrapolations from those results.

philo is a space that is geared around interrogation of categories and systems of categories--so you'd think that in principle folk in philo and folk in the sciences would gain from dialogue. it is strange that there is so little of it. the differences in approach between philosophical and scientific work would perhaps, in the context of actual contact between them, open up space for the interrogation of limiting/problem-generating assumptions.

for example: questions of the interactions between different scales is sometimes understood as a result of assumptions about the self-contained-ness of the idea of scale. this is a recurrent issue above...the problem may well be epistemological, in that it follows from the application of a category (scale) along with assumptions concerning the relation of a category to data analyzed in terms of it (e.g. that one is looking at a discrete space the logic of which would have to be comprehensible as discrete)--and so problems of articulations amongst or across scales would be the result of the use of the category and the ways in which that category organizes information. this example is also stolen (henri atlan)...

if this is the case, then it would follow that interrogation of differing scales of, say, matter or, say, biological systems would be at once scientific and philosophical, and that from a certain viewpoint there would be only differences in social position and approach (that is sociological differences) separating the two types of activity.

it seems a peculiar state of affairs that folk doing science can understand what they are doing as other than a type of philosophical exercise.
perhaps this follows as much from the trouble that philo in general creates for the ability to make simple claims like "we now KNOW this...."
i suspect the root of the problem lay with the popular ideology of science and the extent to which this informs the work within these various fields themselves.

anyway, another snapshot

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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