I have been so wrapped up in preparing the next lecture for
my course on Karl Marx's Critique of Capitalism that I have allowed a number of comments
to go by without proper responses.
Perhaps a Sunday morning, now that the crossword puzzle and double crostic
are out of the way, is a suitable time to catch up.
I have a special treat for my UNC students, by the way. They get to watch an octogenarian attempt to
employ modern technology. It seems that
the classroom in which I teach is equipped with whatever device it is that
allows me to project prepared images of one sort or another onto a screen. I have been creating these on my home
computer and transferring them by way of a flash drive to the laptop I plan to
take to Paris. I will take the computer
with me to class and, with the assistance of some of the students, connect it
to the device. All of this will produce
yawns in my readers, but this is the first time I have attempted this, and I am
enormously impressed with myself.
Herewith some responses:
To Andrew Blais, who asks, "Aren't your comrades
a result of your socialization and other extra deductive causal factors?
"I'm with the rabbit whompers like my father and my father's
father...." Why, then, is it a matter of choice?" Yes, absolutely, but that is the human
condition. There are countless examples
of people who have made life commitments very different from what their social
location might have led us to expect, but enough probing usually exposes causes
and reasons for those choices. That is
the human condition. There is no escape
from it, not into pure reason, not into an Original Position.
To Carl, who wrote: "I showed this post to a friend who's a
philosopher of science. He notes that the more commonly cited Cognition in
the Wild (http://hci.ucsd.edu/hutchins/citw.html) advances the same thesis,
and comments, "The big problem for the view is why, if scientific
reasoning is 'fundamentally identical' to tracking cognition that has been part
of the human cognitive endowment for 100k years, did modern science only arise
in Europe in the 1500s?" I think
Liebenberg's response [and mine] would be that the fundamental structure of scientific
reasoning has been a part of human intellectual capabilities for 100,000 years,
but social, religious, economic and other factors explain why the distinctive
explosion of knowledge that we identify with modern science is a very recent
development. The ancient Greeks thought
"scientifically," as do all other peoples of whom we have any
knowledge. If you look at what sorts of
thought processes Kalahari trackers go through, you will recognize them as the
common possession of all human groups, though manifested in many different
ways.
Again to Carl, who remarked, a propos my post on Deflate-gate, "The
argument for disqualifying the Patriots is not that they won because they
cheated. The argument is that they should be disqualified because they cheated." I know that.
I was just snarking at the TV commentators who talked as though the
inflation of the ball had anything at all to do with the outcome of the
game. Besides, I am a Patriots fan.
Jerry Fresia responds to my rendering of the
wind-up of my last Marx lecture: "Thanks
for the summary. This is quite a course! I love the parallels you are drawing.
I can't remember: what level are the students? What has been the reaction thus
far? I suspect a few heads are exploding."
The course has seven graduate students in it and twelve undergraduates,
almost all of whom are Juniors or Seniors.
I really am not sure yet what the reaction of the students is. I suffer from a life-long character defect --
I cannot stop talking. I warned the students
about this on the first day, and told them that if they waited until I fell
silent before making a comment or asking a question they would never get a word
in edgewise, but so far the tsunami of words coming out of my mouth has all but
swamped them.
As Porky Pig used to say, "Tha tha tha
that's all folks." Keep the
comments coming.
My friend responds:
ReplyDelete"Mentioning the Greeks is a cheat since they're the most plausible society outside of post 1492-Europe for engaging in science. Thousands of other societies in the past 100k years don't come close.
'social, religious, economic and other factors explain why the distinctive explosion of knowledge that we identify with modern science is a very recent development' - This could be mostly correct; it's an extremely difficult issue.
A central problem with the approach is that then scientific reasoning plays only a small role in explaining 'the distinctive explosion of scientific knowledge'. My view is that that probably speaks against a classification of hunter-gatherer and scientific cognitive processes that types them as highly similar.
There's certainly an appeal to highlighting the similarities -- they're both inductive and abductive inferences based on available evidence. But that doesn't mean there aren't fine-grained distinctions that potentially should be emphasized by accounts of scientific reasoning. Hunter-gatherers didn't formulate highly general regularities in the language of mathematics via idealization and abstraction, Galileo did.
The issue also depends on how unique social conditions in post 1492-Europe were compared to other societies in which science didn't arise. China in the middle ages is particularly puzzling in this regard. Lots of information, communication and travel opportunities available, the upper classes had leisure time and nobles supported intellectual pursuits, etc. Yet no science.
Of course anybody trying to understand the scientific revolution faces problems of how and why it developed, and why it didn't develop elsewhere. But I think placing lots of emphasis on social/cultural/economic factors while downplaying differences between scientific and non-scientific cognition has unique difficulties."