The ironic thing is that Latour is attempting to address precisely the problem you are complaining about (see the preamble to his essay on criticism http://www.pathguy.com/Latour.pdf). But one of the disturbing strengths of Rationalism is its insistence that everything that does not resemble itself must be in some sense a perversion of reality. Yet it has failed to adequately take into account its own historical biases, rooted in 17th century post-colonialism, and based more on a concept of power than on a concept of truth.
In any case, a system that presupposes a singular truth administered from on high is every bit as destructive as a system that leaves truth entirely up for grabs. In fact, the two have a tendency to transform into each other.
Rationalists who blame democracy are failing to first remove the plank from their own eye. The world has good reason to reject the technocracy that science is frequently caught wishing that it was. The question is not how to force the world to accept our particular version of natural reality; it is how best to assist others in pressing forward, towards greater solidarity and appreciation of the essential matters of concern. Yet somehow anyone who actually attempts such a reconstruction is ridiculed by the defenders of science, a sign that science itself has fallen into a kind of despair.
...for those getting tired of this philosophizing, I'll try to send some actual math out to the list later today to make up for it...
On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 11:19 AM, Michael Bishop michaelbish@gmail.comwrote:
Thanks for your thoughts Andrew. I know enough to know that I can't evaluate the ideas Landsburg presents. I go back and forth on the value of philosophy more generally even the parts of it which I find appealing.
As I've expressed on readings before, I am highly skeptical of Latour's value. To cite an example of what bugs me from your link to the Wikipedia page on Politics of Nature: "Latour argues that this distinction between facts and values is rarely useful and in many situations dangerous. He claims that it leads to a system that ignores nature's socially constructed status and creates a political order without "due process of individual will"."
I'm aware that the fact-value distinction has some problems in a deep philosophical sense. But we just finished a presidential election in which, as usual, IMO, lying about important things proves to be a good political strategy. It wouldn't bother me so much if the lies were about things that are hard to prove - I expect that. But even fairly obvious lies, e.g. Romney's budget numbers, make good politics. This really damages my confidence in democracy. So when I hear that Latour's biggest concern about our political life is that scientists with their emphasis on facts are undermining democracy I am unimpressed by his insight.
On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 11:54 AM, Andrew Dudzik adudzik@gmail.com wrote:
I'm actually about halfway through *Thinking Fast and Slow* at the moment.
I'd love to hear some more thoughts on this.
This is something I'm currently thinking about a lot, so you might want to ask me again in a few months. But sections 4 and 5 of this essayhttp://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/unger/english/pdfs/reorientation6.pdfon pragmatism by Roberto Unger, my favorite thinker, contains some choice quotations. Unger bemoans "the overwhelming influence that the disciplinary structure of the modern university, with its obsessive focus on the filtering out of unreliable people and ideas, has had upon the way we do science." But, as with most of Unger's work, you'll have to find the details elsewhere.
That essay, incidentally, is where I got the idea that the realism vs. constructivism debate is a pretty lie, covering up deeper, more unsettling concerns about how mathematics is actually practiced. Unger calls it a way of "keeping disagreement within the family", and notes that it is by no means confined to mathematics.
Related to the project of restructuring the social organization of the university system is the project of reorganizing the language surrounding science. Bruno Latour's excellent book *Politics of Naturehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Nature
- attempts to do just that, though I've just barely begun reading it.
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