Paul,
In reading your message one thought that ocurred is that Star's chapter on
Aparthied might be a fruitful lens to carry on this discussion. I ordered
the book, just began reading, and it seems very connected to issues of
science and power. But, a few comments.
Where I think we differ the most strongly is in the relationship between
knowledge and power. I get the impression, maybe wrongly, that you are of
the impression that there is knowledge (scientific) that has a truth that
transends power.
As far as the ZPD, I think it can direct our attention to rather than a
linear A-B relationship that various time scales our involved. There are
teachers, artifacts, community, scientific concepts in which there is an
irreducible tension. The ZPD being more of a problem space than a linear
progression. Vygotsky was of course right about the process, but as his work
in *Psychology of Art* attests to he believed that psychology could keep
ideology in check. I see development in this light, not that change does not
occur, but development as an artifact mystifies or makes transparent that
complex process of change. When the complex process of culturalization
becomes mystified in the artifact of development what gets left out.
The conception of "development" in relation to scientific knowledge is
similar in this regard. I can't find it now but Star mentions that a
scientific classification system was limited to 200 not because of science
but because that was how many spaces the particular table in which it was
recorded had available. As Apple's work on school texts point to while it
appears all neutral what becomes invisable is the complex political
struggles involved in text creation. Or how do we decide what is a species
or not, sometimes its just because scientists want a species named after
them. My concern with development in both regards is how it makes knowledge,
culturalization appear value free. It is merely a conservative or liberal
technology that makes invisable the relationship between knowledge and
power.
I value scientific concepts not because they speak some truth, but because
of their relationship to power. Scientific knowledge is not value free, but
as Friere argued in reference to language,
"What I have actually said and for which I am beaten is that the educated
norm should be taught to lower-class children, but that in doing so it
should be stressed that their language is as rich and beautiful as the
educated norm and that therefore they do not have to be ashamed of the way
they talk; even so, it is fundamental that they learn the standard syntax
and intonation so that
A. They diminish the disadvantages in their struggle to live their lives;
B. They gain the fundamental tool for the fight they must wage against
injustice and discrimination targeted at them.
Nate
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Dillon [mailto:dillonph@northcoast.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2000 12:28 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: Non-western science
Nate,
Happy new year!
Your reply to my post covered a lot of ground but I think you miss the point
I have been making about science in general as well as my motivation for
posting about the BBC program. I've never disputed or disagreed with the
proposition that the function of experimental science, or any other
artefact, is defined/determined/etc by the totality of social relations in
which it is embedded. That's axiomatic for me. Of course what you or I
mean by "function" might differ but lets assume we mean something akin to
the purposes an artefact serves. In fact that's what I was pointing at when
I said that the differences in Christian and Islamic understandings of the
relationship between human rationality and divine design raised interesting
questions about artifacts and motives.
I think where we differ concerns the identity of the artifact when it passes
from one activity system to another. You seem to be saying that science in
the non-western Islamic cultural-historical context is different than
science in the western Christian cultural-historical contexts. For
clarification I would be curious to know if you are saying that they are in
fact not the same. This is where I think we differ and not surprisingly it
relates to your views on development as well. I don't think you accept the
idea that the science that originated in the Islamic tradition developed as
a result of its incorporation into the european/christian cultural
historical context. I most certainly do affirm development in this sense.
BTW what happens to a Zone of Proximal Development when we get rid of
development-- do we get a Zone of Proximal Anything Goes?
Let me be schematic about this:
a) scientific theories are human constructs that account for necessary
relationships, that is they reflect a reality that is beyond the will of
individuals or groups of individuals to change, relationships and realities
that are also not constructed by individuals or groups although (obviously,
duh) the theories are human and as a consequence social
constructs=artifacts.
b) scientific theories are never final and of course they are always
embedded in social relationships (activity systems) but any scientific
theory that supersedes an earlier one can both account for everything the
earlier one accounted for and also explain why the earlier one correctly
accounted for what it did but most importantly it can also account for
anomalies present in the earlier scientific theories (this pretty much
straight from Thomas Kuhn on normal science and paradigm revolutions).
Other points:
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "its not enough to say . . . etc".
Not enough for what? My point is that science, as an activity of forming
theories that account for necessary relationships, is a pan-cultural human
activity. Some scientific theories are more developed than others because
they account for everything that the others do as well as things that are
mysteries/anomalous/etc in the other scientific theories. None of this says
anything about whether the cultures in which the more developed scientific
theories occur are better/superior/more advanced/more developed. But yes,
some scientific theories are more developed/more advanced and in this sense
better than others, regardless of the social relations in which they are
embedded. Post-einsteinian physics is more developed than pre-einsteinian
physics even though it is used to make weapons of mass destruction, for
example. The theories of genetics after the discovery of DNA are more
developed than the theories of genetics before the discovery of DNA even
though that discovery lends itself to all kinds of eugenic possibilities
that I personally find abhorrent.
Let me blow off some steam: If we're right about the cultural-historical
basis of mind we'd better get to working really hard before the capitalist
voodoo doctors take all of this superior technical knowledge and do some
really nasty (nastier) stuff with it. We've got a lot of people to persuade
and a world of ideas constructed on the ideology of individuality to
convincingly debunk. I really don't want my kids and grandkids to live in a
world where everyone needs to look like an Icelander to get a good job.
Things look pretty hopeless however.
End of steam blow off.
I think you confuse the issue of subject/object with the questions of
necessity and also measurement. (a) Subject object dichotomies do not
imply or require measurement nor vice versa. Hegel spent nearly 200 pages
of the Science of Logic showing how measurement (the passage to the infinite
in the calculus in particular) obeyed the laws of dialectical passage from
quality to quantity and back to quality, the same movement in which the
unity of subject and object are posited (b) The tradition that runs from
Spinoza through Ilyenkov flatly denies the existence of a knowing subject
separated from a known object. In this tradition knowledge of necessity
comes from understanding the dialectical relationship of which subject and
object are aspects. Furthermore, this insight is not restricted to the
dialectical tradition however. G. Spencer Brown, a British logician working
in symbolic logic, wrote the following in his book "Laws of Form".
"Now the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account,
himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the
very particulars he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and
obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record.
"Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in
order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself.
"This is indeed amazing."
Finally, in my work the money comes not so much from the numbers I produce
(which actually are used in ways that contravene the dominant tendencies in
institutional research) but from the fact that we are weaving together
different segments of higher education (community college and state
university) into collaborative relationships. The tracking system really s
erves as one of the artifacts through which this collaboration is
achieved--but then that's a cultural historical embeddedness which
nevertheless doesn't change the numbers I do come out with. I do that
myself :-) And I would point to Ilyenkov's notion of 'concrete universals'
in conference papers but am counseled to take it out since it just confuses
the audience and they like it without knowing or caring how I theorize it.
To paraphrase Hegel, you don't need to know how a shoe is made to be able to
appreciate what it does for walking on rocky ground.
Paul H. Dillon
Some parts of your post seem to confuse issues that I don't think are
related.
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