File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2004/bhaskar.0401, message 22


Subject: BHA: RE: reason, faith and constructivism
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2004 14:30:21 -0500
From: "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu>


Hi Meera,

I downloaded the second half of your essay, read it with pleasure, and sent the url to the Bhaskar list.  I hope you don't mind that I am sending my remarks to the Bhaskar list, as well as to you.  As with the first half of your essay, I agree substantially with your argument.  Any disagreements are more in the nuances of how you have stated some of your points, I think, rather than with the core of your argument.

Your discussion of reductionism provides a good example of what I mean.  Although I agree that we have to analyze complex wholes in terms of their simpler elements, this does not necessarily imply "reductionism," as many of us understand it.  Anti-reductionists like to invoke the principle of "emergence," claiming that higher levels of organization cannot be completely explained in terms of the properties of the simpler elements into which they can be broken down.  Michael Polanyi uses the example of a machine.  The physical parts of a machine are organized so as to perform a function intended by the engineer who designed the machine.  We cannot completely explain the functioning of the machine simply in terms of proporties of the parts.  Polanyi argues that biological organs have machine-like properties.  The are emergent properties which cannot be "reduced" to the properties of the component parts.

So, while I agree with what I take to be your main point, that scientists have to be analytical, have to understand more complex realities in terms of their components, that these more complex realities cannot be adequately understood or explained simply by some kind of "holistic intuition," I disagree that the necessary analytical phase of scientific work must be "reductionistic."

My disagreement on the meaning of "reductionism," however, does not diminish my agreement with your main points.  The ideological use both of sacred myths and science corrupts them both.  Myth and science need to be distinguished, and both need to be distinguished from ideology.  The tendency of at least some postmodern thinkers to claim that all knowledge (or all "texts") are radically ideological makes it impossible to maintain these distinctions, and so plays into the hands of ideologues.

In your post of January 5, you wrote:

"I agree that one must not dogmatically insist on "demystifying" each and every component of pre-modern local knowledges. We all need some ground to stand upon and there is no need to go about demolishing the many harmless myths, traditions and other articles of faith. 

"The problem is that the components that make empirical claims and those that are matters of faith, and existential comfort are often very closely intertwined. It is not possible to only question, for e.g., the cosmological/ empirically-testable claims of local knowledges and still leave the faith intact. I suspect that it is this unintended but real destruction of faith that the critics get angry about."

I don't believe that the big problem is in the criticizing of the individual components of pre-modern local knowledges.  Or, to put it in other words, I do think it is possible to question specific claims of local knowledges while leaving the faith intact.  My experience with this was in Nepal, where I taught in a Jesuit high school eight miles outside of Kathmandu.  We also ran a dispensary, and local villagers -- Hindus, Buddhists and devotees of highly local divinities and spirits -- readily came to get Western medicines that had local reputations for being effective.  But their acceptance of specific remedies did not radically change their overall worldviews.  

Pre-modern people are just as able as moderns to modify specific beliefs on the basis of experience, and are able to make minor adjustments to their view of the world to incorporate these changes.  A good example of this were the many modifications of the goecentric vision of the heavens that was dominant prior to the Copernican revolution.  

But a world-view can be discredited by too large an accumulation of adjustments to incorporate new empirical observations.  Sometimes people convert.  Sometimes they despair.  And sometimes they resort to what anthropologists have called "revitalization movements."  

In many ways, the Hindutva movement resembles a very large and very well organized Hindu revitalization movement -- an attempt to redefine a traditional world view so as to be able to preserve it, while at the same time incorporating many elements, as elements, taken from a very different world view.  This avoids both conversion and despair.

Best regards,

Dick   


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