roachboy

there are a number of issues on the table at this point and things are blurry because of that.

hard vs soft science seems to me a goofball non-issue. maybe this is because i am trained as a "social scientist" and have a quirk that makes me interested in the sociology of knowledge--so "hard" vs "soft"--or erect vs. flaccid, which comes to the same thing---seems to me mostly something that comes up in drunken imbroglios in graduate-student heavy bars between, say, a physicist and a biologist or either of them and a sociologist or historian. apart from too many beverages, what generally ends up leading our imaginary (and vague as to number) characters down this path to dullness is a sense of legitimacy or--more often--real or imagined threats to legitimacy. so it's an aesthetic question, whether one wants to validate counting things or modelling them by imagining it to be more erect a relation to the world than the relatively flaccid approach of someone who looks at bio-systems or, worse, how human beings think or, much much worse, how groups of human beings think and act. or the other way round.

it hardly matters.
this assumptions that accompany the separation of disciplines just make an already unfortunate state of affairs even more unfortunate by making it more than just dull in itself, but meta-dull, that it dull when it is repeated in conversations about the separation of disciplines.

there's another interesting set of questions that could come out of sapiens attempt to define scientific method. i have to go do something, so will get back to it maybe.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite