roachboy

dave:

if you want acceptance and dialogue about something that a segment of the population finds outmoded on scientific grounds--and there's nothing you can do about that--but you want to talk about it anyway because you find it interesting, then it seems to me the way to go about having that conversation is to shift the grounds. there's no particular reason why ustwo's positions regarding astrology and more contemporary cosmology should end the discussion--his posts simply exclude a particular direction.


like others i doubt there is a single tfp consensus on astrology.
but it is not obvious that you have to accept the cosmology built into the astrological game to find that game interesting.

cosmology at this point is a scientific enterprise, dominated in large part by astronomer/physicists and so the discourse is that of science.
so if one were required to accept the assumptions in order to find astrology interesting (or to find it uninteresting as the case may be) and the terms across which those assumptions have to be debated are scientific, then what ustwo is saying would effectively end the conversation.

but there is an obvious split between one's immediate experience and the way in which that experience is framed by metagames like cosmology--so for example we might know at many levels that constellations are only coherent objects from a particular viewpoint, but we still refer to constellations. and i can imagine (as i am sure you can) a range of situations in which you can find yourself running through different relations to the notion of constellation--think pointing out patterns in the stars for a child as over against laying on a hill having a stoned "what's it all about, man?" conversation with an astrophysicist....

you can see astrology as a kind of predictive system that may be based on assumptions no longer in force from particular viewpoints, but which nonetheless corresponds to naive perception (this term only to distinguish it from institutionally circumscribed perception)....and it's not as though the fact that the science that once subtended or was of a piece with astrology has shifted means that astrology therefore does nothing except demonstrate to dysfunctionality of all views of the world that are not ours.

by which i mean a pretty obvious thing: we are here, now, in part because previous generations muddled through and reproduced using systems to understand and make predictions about their world. at the very least atrology is an element of that history. if it works in certain ways to predict dispositions in someone born in a certain place at a certain time, then fine. and if casting charts is something that folk like doing, then fine.

so shift the grounds of the discussion and keep having it.
there's no reason for you to argue that dialogue and respect and its attending virtues require that folk accept as scientific in 2007 the assumptions around which astrology is built.
it aint gonna happen.
but this is not the only conversation possible.
so make a different one.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite