Date: Fri, 09 Aug 1996 08:38:49 -0600
Subject: SCIENCE-AS-CULTURE Digest - 7 Aug 1996 to 8 Aug 1996


Forwarded Mail received from: Lisa Rogers

I thought some of you might find some of this of interest.
Lisa

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Date: Thu, 08 Aug 1996 22:27:19 -0600
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Subject: SCIENCE-AS-CULTURE Digest - 7 Aug 1996 to 8 Aug 1996

There are 2 messages totalling 165 lines in this issue.

Topics of the day:

  1. YoungGramsciSisyphus
  2. More STS links...

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Date:    Thu, 8 Aug 1996 11:31:25 +0200
From:    Hobson Sherren <hobson-AT-SESAM.IT>
Subject: YoungGramsciSisyphus

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.


I got the address wrong first try, hope this "forward" facility works OK
...


Message-ID: <3209B319.651E-AT-sesam.it>
Date: Thu, 08 Aug 1996 11:27:53 +0200
From: Hobson Sherren <hobson-AT-sesam.it>
X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0b5a (X11; I; HP-UX A.09.05 9000/715)
To: scienc-as-culture-AT-SJUVM.stjohns.edu
Subject: YoungGramsciSisyphus

What, even the Australians all on holiday?! There's a deafening silence
in this part of cyberspace. I, too, am away on holiday after tomorrow,
so I hope you'll excuse me if I insist on tugging at a thread that
hasn't been picked up: I shall then join the silent majority...

I don't know if net etiquette permits this kind of citation, but here
goes:

My favourite version of Bob Young's point about Darwin's metaphor is the
following:

> I am arguing that at the heart of science lies metaphor - a concept
> usually associated with literature, especially poetry. We think of
> science as literal but at its heart lie figures of speech, in this case
> the idea that nature selects rather like a breeder or a deity.
>
> Darwin is not alone in this kind of thinking. On the contrary, he
> points out that 'affinity' and other scientific concepts are no more or
> less scientific than his. The same thing applies to all basic concepts
> in science. The other candidate for Britain's greatest scientist, Isaac
> Newton, derived the concept of gravity from gravitas: affinity, natural
> selection, gravity - all these are metaphors drawn from ideas of human
> nature and projected on to nature as a way of seeing things and
> providing a framework for a philosophy of science. Not all such
> projections turn out to be so fruitful, but that doesn't set facts
> apart from values or literal statements apart from metaphors. The
> history of scientific ideas, like the history of other ideas, is a
> moving army of metaphors - some more general than others, but
> literalness is the enemy of scientific progress.

and can be found in CHARLES DARWIN: MAN AND METAPHOR -AT-
http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/papers/paper7.html
which seems to have been visited only 14 times since May 30.
It was published in Science as Culture 5:71-86, 1989 ... but I gather
that not everyone out there is yet a subscriber ...

I cite this to explain my interest in the passage from Gramsci,taken
>from his Notebook 11: the famous notebooks written in Italian fascist
prisons, between 1929 and 1935. The passage I wanted to share with you
was written in the context of a critique of N. Bucharin's 1921 Theory of
Historical Materialism, which Gramsci probably read in the French
version: La theorie du materialisme historique. Manuel populaire de
sociologie marxiste.

In particular, here, he is writing under the heading "L'immanenza e la
filosofia della praxis" (Immanence and the philosophy of praxis, i.e.
marxism) -  but makes the following general observation, which seems to
me central to our discussion of science-as-culture:

<<Usually, when a new world view takes over from a previous one, the
previous language continues to be used, but it is used metaphorically.
The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphors, and the
history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture: language is
both a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and past
civilizations.>>

I recommend reading this whole section, which concludes with the more
famous affermation:
<<It has been forgotten that in a very common expression [historical
materialism] it was necessary to put the accent on the first term
"historical" and not on the second, whose origin is metaphysical. The
philosophy of praxis is absolute "historicism", the worldliness and
absolute earthliness of thought, an absolute humanism of history. It is
along this line that the thread of the new world view is to be traced.>>

Remembering his earlier emphasis: <<Objective always means "humanly
objective", which can correspond exactly to "historically subjective",
i.e. objective would mean "universal subjective". Man knows objectively
in so far as knowledge is real for all of humankind historically
[underlined] unified in a unitary cultural system ...>>, I feel the
gramscian view is still very useful to our consideration of scientific
facts, theories, values and world views.

Coming back to Bob Young's formulation: I note the phrase "all these are
metaphors drawn from ideas of human nature and projected on to nature as
a way of seeing things and providing a framework for a philosophy of
science". The phrase "projected on to" I take to be a useful metaphor
which points to a mathematical metaphor for "metaphor".
Metaphors - or rather analogies - are like homomorphisms: mathematical
mappings, functions. The mathematical terms "mapping" and "function" are
themselves clearly metaphorical. Like homomorphisms, metaphors are
relations: i.e. you read them 'both ways round' ... homomorphisms are
like analogies ...

Let's apply Gramsci's and Young's observations to mathematical physics
and maths: the language of the universally-subjective "world-out-there"
...

As Bob continues to quote Camus, I can't help adding that Sisyphus can
probably be heard to sing snatches of 60's and 70's songs like "Still
crazy after all these years" and, some way up the slope, "Standing next
to a mountain ... chop it down with the edge of my hand ... pick up all
the pieces and make an island ...' etc. And happy or not, I think we
must imagine him sweating.

Ciao a tutti.


------------------------------

Date:    Thu, 8 Aug 1996 13:29:12 EST
From:    "Dr. Patrick W. Hamlett, MDS" <hamlett-AT-SOCIAL.CHASS.NCSU.EDU>
Subject: More STS links...

I have added several new STS-related links to my PSTS NEXUS Home
Page:

Two links to the Sokal Affair ("The Sokal Affair" & "Alan Sokal
Articles"), both of which contain Sokal's original _Social Text_
piece, plus commentaries

Two Unabomber links ("Unabom Information Center" & "Unabomber:
Tightening the Net"), both of which contain The Manifesto and various
commentaries

The European Association for the Study of Science & Technology (EASST)

The OTA Legacy, with links to all of OTA reports from 1974 - 1995

The EnvironWest Research Database, with scientific, social, & ethical
analyses of environmental issues in the western US

_Issues in Science & Technologgy_ Home Page, with archives of past
articles

These sites can be visited from the STS LINKS sub-page on PSTS NEXUS,
at the following URL:
http://www2.ncsu.edu/ncsu/chass/mds/psts.html

I continue to seek URLs for STS syllabi, course materials, etc.

Cheers,
Hamlett

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End of SCIENCE-AS-CULTURE Digest - 7 Aug 1996 to 8 Aug 1996
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