File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1999/bhaskar.9910, message 107


Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 16:51:01 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: BHA: howie's deduction


Hiya Howie,

Sorry if I'm being too fussy.  I'm in a bit of a cranky mood.  It's all
because I can't go swimming at the wonderful, warm pool tonight.  

Anyway, you wrote:
>Science has coexisted with belief for a very long time now. I cannot think
of >any reason that it cannot continue to do so forever, 

Yes, I think ... as long as you don't mean by "belief" claims that actually
function as competing accounts -- like, say, creationism in relation to the
theory of evolution.  "Beliefs" such as creationism should be thought of as
being contending, alternate accounts (I think), and should be evaluated as
such for their relative explanatory power.  On the other hand, if all you're
saying is that scientism is not a positon made necessary, or borne out, by
history, then that seems unexceptional. 


To continue:
>so one could be tempted to think that this may be one of the constitutive
>features of science.  

This second point, the stuff after the comma, doesn't seem to me to follow
from the first point.  I mean, scientism may fail as an epistemological
norm. But this fact, if it is one, doesn't imply *anything* about
non-scientific knowledge, as you put it, being a constitutive feature of
science!   

Howie:
>To put it another way, the existence of various forms of non-scientific
>knowledge would thus seem to be one of the transcendental conditions for
the >existence of science itself.

And here again, I don't think the "thus" is warranted.  I mean, you might
want to argue that you couldn't have science if you didn't have a whole
society, full of all kinds of people making meaning in all kinds of ways.
But that's a far cry from maintaining that the historical coincidence of
science and "belief" implies that the latter is a transcendental condition
for the former!


Ever on guard against radical epistemological pluralism [:)],
r.



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