Re: [Pen-l] pseudoscience [was: Jared Diamond and the New Yorker, part 2

[Doyle Saylor <doylesaylor@xxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
I had to think about this for awhile.  Over all the WWW which somebody  
(Tim Berners-Lee) from CERN propagated as an internet protocol is both  
an example of how economic interests (the WWW is a business oriented  
consortium about 'standards') shape a scientific technology for public  
use, and how the principle of agreement is poorly understood.  How  
else can we say a capitalist system works but by the majority having  
no say so in knowledge making. The internet protocols elide cognitive  
meaning.  If you don't understand, how can we communicate with you  
won't change that.

Certain sorts of judgments about science have to do with how people  
think.  And knowing the underlying explanations of cognition.  So in  
effect the current way of grasping what you are saying is based upon  
rationalist models of how to express knowledge.  I use rationalist as  
a way of labeling the narrowing down of what is science to specific  
ideas of what knowledge is.  Is knowledge rationalist then emerges as  
the foundational claim of rationalism?

The only way to answer that is to understand the brain.  And the non  
rationalist (asserting a role for emotional knowledge for example)  
view of knowledge seems more likely to prevail in a scientific sense.   
Rationalism at it's best tries to say that we can say or write math  
that is intelligible and meaningful for what we social beings have to  
do.  So for example economic interest shapes scientific inquiry is a  
common assumption leftist  understand and most agree with.

What rationalism doesn't say what connects knowledge and why in real  
human cognition.   Hence the influence of Cartesian dualism  
flourished.  So the question of 'consensus' is more or less a black  
box concept in so far as rationalism is concerned.  We use political  
mechanism called democracy in some cases to claim consensus.  We claim  
laws arise from the public arena and so on are based upon the 'common'  
law.

In economic terms though these claims are so rough and ready there is  
little science at all in the process.  The rationalism is out the  
window.  So science is narrowed down to niches in society that are  
granted conditional representations of what is socially acceptable  
thinking.  Mostly done through coercion by academic processes with no  
great attachment to how people really derive knowledge.

The anarchy is because the alternate course of action to jettison a  
rationalist science is waiting for the development of knowledge making  
means of production that mirrors real human cognition.  To be clear  
for Jim, I mean the rationalist lack of knowing what connecting  
knowledge means would be supplanted by realistic meanings of  
communicating what to know.  To remove the black box of how the brain  
works.  Hence make the connecting process (communicating) reflect how  
knowledge works best for producing stable accurate knowing in life.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
On May 9, 2009, at 8:09 AM, Jim Devine wrote:

> The critical side of science is supposed to weed out the nonsense,
> separating the wheat from the chaff. As I said, the other side
> (respect for one's peers, professional consensus) can undermine the
> positive role of criticism: dominated by consensus, criticism can be
> used to weed out good science (as with the Chicago school that Michael
> P. referred to). Of course, with insufficient professional consensus,
> criticism can go too far -- to produce intellectual anarchy (as in
> sociological or literary theory, I'm told).

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