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Originally Posted by roachboy
so to go back to the idea of experiment, you can see a structure of expectations built into an experiment's design.
these expectations are hedged round by any number of frames--the history of other such experiments, the accepted definitions of the phenomena being investigated, the collection of descriptions that enables results to be anticipated, etc.
so correspondence operates.
once established as valid or true, an experimental result can then be inserted into broader images of the world as coherent, as true or valid--these broader conceptions are not subjected to anything like the analysis that the experimental data is, but nonetheless, in a strange way, the inserting of experimental data into a "set" ordered around these other, unexamined signifiers (like god) functions to validate them.
this seems inevitable---if anything about husserl's time consciousness idea is correct, we mostly live in networks of expectations which are either met or not as we move through particular perceptual regions or fields.
it is not easy to separate different registers of expectation...and those who engage in scientific work are no more equipped to do it than anyone else necessarily--personally, i think this a consequence of the separation of scientific investigation and philosophical investigation, which to my mind should be talking to each other, but which in 3-d tend not to, particularly not in the states (as a function of the separation of disciplines)....
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The stuff that you wrote preceding this in #61 needed a referent for
us, and here it is. A bit too conceptual at first, Husserl's ideas take form in your application of them to the idea of experiments. What I find interesting is that this seems to me to tie into my original reference to power/knowledge as conceived by Michel Foucault in that what we deem as knowledge (or truth) is that which has been accepted and "verified" by those with the authority to do so. The problem with this (even so within the context of internal time consciousness) is that knowledge is invariably effected (perhaps corrupted) of the ideological desires of those very authorities who empower it.
Take research, for example. The problem with research reports is that the data can be manipulated and presented in such a way to reflect the bias of those responsible for it. One can essentially have their answer before the question is even asked. "Knowledge" can be engineered by scientists out of the materials of what philosophers would call "truth." What, then, can we do to fill this void between "knowledge" and "truth"? What, then, can we do to undermine or circumvent the authoritative powers that not only create this knowledge but also apply it in great factors throughout society?
The problem with this thread is that it encourages people to fall into the easy trap of blindly criticizing "religious truth" as dangerous while doing so out of the more so affecting "scientific truth" that surrounds us in practice. We have removed much of the Church from our governments and schools, but we have done so at the cost of further empowering the power/knowledge problem.
Does this in anyway tie into what you're haunted by, roachboy? Or is it a misleading tangent? The only shift I can see is that I've pointed out the impact of accepted results, whereas you've focused on expectations.
I haven't read Heidegger. I haven't read Husserl.