From shaming to intellectual challenge
Oct. 25th, 2017 02:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timeletsI see a beginning of a pragmatic shift within a more farsighted academia: away from shaming alt-right ideologues to challenging them intellectually. Shaming works only as long as the society is unified in its cultural norms. Once the norms fracture, one has to find a deeper cultural background for discussing ideas. For example, the tag "alt-right" itself is a misnomer akin to "horseless carriage." That is, it denotes what the thing is not, rather than what it actually stands for. This is a sign of an early-stage innovation where the future is highly uncertain and open to interpretation. No wonder it attracts amoral opportunists like Trump and Co.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-27 08:11 am (UTC)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_theory_(psychology)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force-field_analysis
Scientific research emerged as a provenly successful way to accommodate knowledge verifiable by independent competing parties and reusable without strings attached. Some previous steps of removing the strings were introduction of spoken and written language (as in "reproducible representation of opinion"), universal religion (as in "revelation not possessed by a particular person or common-origin group") and then philosophy (as in "reasoning on revelation-free grounds"). Phenomena discovered and explained by science are, consequently, experienced independently from the personal convictions of the observer or the persuasive power of the theorist. A sufficient reason to value scientific research would be, therefore, to value control - in a similar way as we, others equal, value a DRM-free DVD more than a DRM-protected one.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-27 08:36 am (UTC)What else is on your mind?
no subject
Date: 2017-10-27 08:52 am (UTC)Nothing or little more than a trivial corollary: normative claims used to express motivation for scientific (or engineering, for that matter) activity are nonscientific in nature. Such claims (as well as motives they express) can be highly reusable; they can be borne and spread by the same people and organizations that carry out actual research; it does not make them science any more than presence of canteens in universities and research centers makes nutrition scientific activity.
Or course such norms can be researched too. A study on engineering ethics would contain positive claims about these normative claims.
I would like to maintain this fine line wherever we go. Crossing it introduces a lot of confusion.
the current tech/biz revolution.
Is there any? (The very phrase sounds like "contribution of space flight to the resolution of the primary problem of philosophy" to me.)
no subject
Date: 2017-10-27 09:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-27 09:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-27 09:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-27 09:50 am (UTC)Both positive and normative claims can be used by a different person from the one who makes them, or the same person in different circumstances. This makes them suitable means of investment and exchange. Consequently, claims have their market valuation based on the desirability of accepting or rejecting them; the more reusable a claim is, the greater the market, the more accurate the valuation is.
I don't, however, see any room for the "better" comparison. They are perfect complements. There is no way to substitute acceptance of a positive claim with acceptance of a normative claim, or vice versa, for any particular purpose.
Complementary combinations of positive and normative claims can, however, be substituted if they produce actions that can.
Science and engineering deal with highly reusable positive claims.
Churches and political movements deal with highly reusable normative claims.
Tainting scientific research with normative claims undermines its reusability in the same way a universal religious teaching may be tainted with positive claims of its contemporary science. Think of inability to buy the idea of compassionate love independently from the idea of a global deluge.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-27 03:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-27 09:12 pm (UTC)A contract obligation or an administrative ordinance to use it for a particular purpose would be a normative statement.