Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (125328)	11/22/2009 2:45:50 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543356

It HAS NOTHING TO DO with whether or not those cultural norms are scientifically valid. I agree, if you define "cultural norms" very narrowly as only values. And exclude the cognitive elements. Fine. But it would help to make the argument more explicitly narrow. As I hopefully pointed out somewhere along the way--those norms are varied and science is but one of our values and these norms compete against each other in our culture. Apples and oranges. "Science" is an odd kind of value since it's a form of knowing. And everyone in the US right now values "science" since we could not live our lives without so doing. Regardless of what we say. So we attribute "value" by our doing much more than by our saying. I just don't think it makes any sense to try to give some credence to Bachmann's claims by invoking the cultural relativity of science. Just leave it in the realm of values. It is a debate then, a conversation if you please, about values and how honestly they are held. On the first score, while someone who is homophobic and I have different values, I don't, for a single moment, consider those sets of values equivalent. In fact, I reserve the term "bigot" for those folk. And am quite prepared to discuss with them why I think that. It has to do with the value of inclusiveness. I think, but am not sure, the literature/authors you cited previously would just be commenting on the different norms we use and how they compete against each other. Not exactly. I threw those names in just in case you wished to pursue those topics but tried to say I wasn't eager to do so. Just takes too much time to work up posts. Kuhn and Feyerabend are philosophers of science and aren't interested in "norms" in the usual sense of the term. Here's the Wikipedia entry for Thomas Kuhn. His most influential book is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. en.wikipedia.org Paul Feyerabend was an influential philosopher of science. Spent most of his career at Berkeley. MS may have heard of him. His Wikipedia entry is here. en.wikipedia.org Rorty is/was (died fairly recently), the most articulate American voice of post-modernist thought, melded with pragmatism. Wrote one of the great, publicly accessible, philosophy books in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. amazon.com His arguments would relate to your own but would be helpful only if you were interested in pursuing all this. You can check him out in Wikipedia. It's a fairly good entry. en.wikipedia.org My guess is we have worn out the threads patience on the topic. If you wish to pursue it, we could do so in PM.