|
ok so maybe this is not the best thread to raise the question because i am unclear as to what it's about...but anyway:
where does this tendency to defend "Science" always come down to an opposition between "Science" (some Unified (and thereby drained of all content) notion of Science as if the contemporary sciences provide a single coherent account of the world and our modes of being in it (um....)) vs. "Loopy Shit"?
in any number of particular scientific fields there are types of work being done by particular sub-communities that has quite radical philosophical implications--implications that extend to upending much of what happens in the realms of normal science within the wider fields (o think maybe complex dynamical systems theory in the bigger context of cognitive neuro-science or cognitive science, whatever that is as a field)....if you defend "Science" against "Loopy Shit" you duck problems of the conservative-to-reactionary nature of many fields of scientific investigation which often follows from the institutional spaces within which they happen. there are any number of examples that i or anyone else could mention.
in history of science-type debates, this is pretty banal, the topic: basically it's a version of the debates that surrounded thomas kuhn's history of scientific revolutions. it comes back over and over when sociologists of historians of philosophers or anyone sociologizes scientific work.
fact is that scientific work involves particular communities which are shaped socially in basic ways by the contexts within which they operate. there is no "Science" in general--there are particular disciplines, each of which is made up of networks and modes of social legitimation and social reproduction. it is not obvious that agents in scientific area 1, sub-group/field A know or need to know anything at all about what is happening in discipline 4.
or even if there is a single coherent meta-discourse.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|