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most everything we do or know or know about is frame-contingent.
i think that there's only anthropological or sociological explanations for different types of faith. the faith in engineering to the exclusion of other ways of thinking is a function of the social and intellectual norms that shape a particular community's relation(s) to information. same kind of thing with religious people (different communities, different norms obviously). very little about what people know or believe is self-contained.
this includes the knowing of people who try to understand communities, what the norms are, how they operate, how people come to bind together their worlds through them, by using them, what those processes are like, how you account for them, what accounting for them means, who gets to say.
because it seems to be the case that what's true is only true because it's run through a proof (explicit or implicit) and doesn't violate the rules.
if that's the case, then there's only zones and scales of knowing. which is fine once you get used to it.
that's one of the most basic reasons why empiricism is so limited, why claims to "universal" reason are one-dimensional. both operate within social spaces one of the defining quirks of which is to deny the fact that the operate in social spaces.
it's not much different from the way a christian evangelist might think, structurally
magic. well, you go to a magick show and you walk in the door and you're already deciding whether or not you want to suspend disbelief. and you either do or you don't. there's not much in the way of Higher Understanding in it, i don't think, unless you assume people are really fucking stupid. and there are really fucking stupid people. i met one on friday. he put his index finger into my beer. but i digress. there are stupid people but it makes little sense to assume that about people and still less to assume that about almost everyone. people suspend disbelief in significant measure because the social space of a magic show invites it. that works because you know the codes that make a magick show recognizable, and your recognition of it as a particular kind of situation pushes you into making choices about how you're going to interact.
think contemporary art except you know how to act.
so it's not like religion, really, except in the ways that it is.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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