Re: Conflict - Notre Dame and elsewhere

["Forstater, Mathew" <ForstaterM@xxxxxxxx>]

Tracy - Good point about the nature of the object of study.  One point
that should be kept in mind, though, is that the number of phenomena
unaffected by humankind and historical processes is shrinking. As
environmental science is showing us, the "ecological footprint" is
significant.  So it is less and less the case that physicists and others
can ignore the changes in their data.  This means that the "easy"
sciences are becoming much harder.  Since good social science has been
dealing with historically changing phenomena for some time, natural
scientists have much to learn from social science methodology.  Of
course, social scientists that have been treating their object of study
as static and universal will have little to offer. Mat