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 essay on 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 Nature attempts to do just that, though I've just barely begun reading it.

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