Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1996 14:50:32 -0500
Subject: Re: ..cat


Jukka:

>Do you mean that we have today several epistemologies? One
>for quantum physics, second for, say, social history etc. If
>it's so, is there any relation between them? What is
>'epistemology' then (in a situation where it doesn't have
>any general relevance)?

You could say that we have several. More accurately, we can see a way that
our common sense epistemology is a limiting case of quantum epistemology.
The relation can be easily seen in mathematical terms. It is a statement
about successive approximation and not exactness, however. We may be
stretching the meaning of the term if we talk about a different one for,
say, history or sociology than for common experience.

>"... it makes a lot more sense to say that physical
>discoveries are here to stay and our basic conceptions come
>and go, or would if philosophers had even an iota of
>imagination."
>
>I take you mean our basic conceptions concerning natural
>world? At least in human reality there are some constancies
>of which there's no reason to construct new conceptions.

No. Actually, it's the other way around. Human social reality is far more
changeable than natural reality. Furthermore, the changes that we know of
in nature can often be described in simple mathematical terms (i.e., the
expansion of the universe), necessitating no new philosophical conceptions.
On the other hand, it is certainly the height of folly to think that we
have come up with human universals that will apply neatly to future
societies that we haven't conceived of yet. In general, the simpler the
system and the more easily described in terms of the laws of physics, the
more universal and timeless the things we can say about it. Newton's laws
of motion will actually stand much longer than Marx's analysis of class
society.

>(Well, I don't think this to be good example. Language and
>linguistics are, unlike physics, of some relevance for all
>human/social sciences. Other thing is that thinking social
>action somehow follows linguistic rules or be structured
>according linguistics structures is surely false. Rather
>contrary?)

This kind of crude reductionism is, alas, found all too often among
postmodern scholars. They start with the premise "All thought is
linguistic," which itself is a lie, and go on to say that everything is
stuctured like a language -- as Lacan's famous but meaningless dictum.

Rahul




     --- from list marxism2-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---