Fwd: Re: Science?

[Kerim Friedman]

This got sent to me, but I think was intended for the list. My comments follow in a second post.


>Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 23:09:01 -0800
>To: Kerim Friedman <kerim.list at oxus.net>
>From: Lev Michael <lmichael at mail.utexas.edu>
>Subject: Re: Science?
>
>
>I would like to add to Kerim's intersting comments:
>
>>
>>In this sense I agree with Khun that science is a set of behaviors that are considered acceptable by a "community" of knowledge producers
>
>I agree wholeheartedly with the notion of science as a set of knowledge-production practices deemed acceptable by a community of practitioners, but that doesn't seem sufficient to distinguish science from other kinds of knowledge production.  Do you mean this to be a necessary part of the definition/description of science, but not a sufficent description by itself?
>
>I would think that literary crticism, history, divine revelation in certain religious communities, and astrology, all meet the criterion you set above, but I don't think that we want to lump these knowledge-production practices in with geology, micro-biology, and astrophysics, do we?
>
>It seems to me that we would want ot add the following criteria to a practice of knowledge-production before we would call it a science:
>
>1) the availability of discursive practice that is specialized for creating reapid and profound intersubjectivity on relevant topics,
>
>and 2) the community-wide acceptance of reasonably stable practices of proposition-falsification.
>
>
>>The reason I didn't want to discuss whether "linguistics" is a "science" is that I find too many people have a false conception of science that makes such discussions dogmatic and unproductive. No science meets most people's ideal conception of what science *should* be. But if we realize that science is an institution, like any other, and that it is specifically an institution devoted to the production of a certain kind of knowledge about the world, then we have a start. We can begin to openly discuss the values, beliefs, and practices that underlie such knowledge production, and not use it as a shield to protect us from such a discussion. I find both extreme positions (the denial of linguistics as a science, and the complete acceptance of it as such) to be moves to give legitimacy to a specific set of academic endeavors and not adding to our understanding of what such endeavors might involve.
>>
>>Just now I used the phrase "a certain kind of knowledge" - I think this is important. For the most part, science has been engaged in what can be called "instrumental knowledge" which gives people power over the world.
>
>I'm not sure I agree with this.  Certainly the ability of science to produce instrumental knowledge is one reason why it receives state support, and it has certainly produced impressive instrumental knowledge, but in my experience, if one opens up a physics, or a biology, or a chemistry journal, one does not find a lot of instrumental knowledge production there.
>
>> This has been true whether it is atomic energy or Taylor's methods of getting factory workers to be more efficient. (This is why those scientists get paid so much!) I think the major difference between the so called hard and soft sciences is the degree to which their work is demonstrably "instrumental".
>
>In this light, take the example of particle physics, which accounts for a considerable portion of post WW-II science expenditure in the US.  It does not seem to me to be very instrumental, at least in an economically relevant way.  Maybe you are using 'instrumental' differently than I do.  Does the fact that particle physics involve careful manipulation of small bits of matter make it instrumental, in your view?  I think of 'instrumentality' as inclding a sense of utility, especially economic utility.
>
>
>-Lev
>
>****************
>
>Lev Michael
>Department of Anthropology
>University of Texas at Austin

________________________________________________________
P. KERIM FRIEDMAN
			Anthropology, Temple University
			<mailto:kerim.friedman at oxus.net>
			<http://kerim.oxus.net>
________________________________________________________