Paul,
A few more thoughts.
"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."
I agree, we do differ in this regard. To say its developmental would imply
taking knowledge out of one cultural context and putting it in the other.
While this is fine as part of cultural sharing, I think referring to it as
"developmental" misses the important relationship between knowledge and
culture. Once it was appropriated into the western scheme it became a
different thing which had a different relationship to western culture. It
would be somewhat like having a computer in one classroom and moving it to
another and argueing there is something developmental going on. The needs,
motives of one particular classroom may be entirely different from the
other. I think the same can be argued for history, but that's another
matter.
"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."
This is where we differ. I see knowledge as material, humans as material and
in some ways this is where I diverge from social constructionists. While
Latour loses me somewhat, from Miettinen article in MCA I am probally closer
to Latour. I reject the object-subject pole although I wouldn't necessarily
give artifacts constitutional rights or anything. But to the point I dislike
talk of constructionism because it implies intentionally or not some reality
as priori. If something is constructed it implies something as a priori. I
also don't accept the notion that there is a reality out there but because
of mediation or whatever we can never have access to it. What I do believe
is we are in this system in which artifacts transform us and we transform
them. That is reality. In this sense order would be an artifact. It
definately mediates, like the mind or biological processes.
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).
"My guess is that we have a folk theory of categorization itself. It says
that things come in well-defined kinds, that the kinds are characterized by
shared properties, and that there is one right taxonomy of the kinds.
It is easier to show what is wrong with a scientific theory than with a folk
theory. A folk theory defines common sense itself. When the folk theory and
the technical theory converge, it gets even tougher to see where that theory
gets in the way – or even that it is a theory at all (Lakoff, 1987: 121)."
This comes from Chapter 1 of Star and Bowker's book or at
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~gbowker/classification/.
Curious, which theories are those. The point being from cognition to
biological sciences it seems its more turning to different questions than
any building. We are still talking about classical accounts of concepts
because they are very much part of our psyche. Or, as Bruner argues, with
the dialectic of culture, it is possible for science to lead culture, but
highly unlikely. What he was pointing towards was the relationship between
head start and other programs and the 60's constructivism. A typical
cognitive science class has a developmental narrative of classical,
prototype, theory-theory etc. What gets missed in this story is classical
concepts are part of the dialectic of a particular cultural-historical
context. There was a lot of emphasis on perceptual qualities (classical)
because of the role geometry played within the particular culture. To talk
of building misses the point somewhat because our theories today are in a
different cultural-historical context. We are interested in different
questions than Aristotle not that somehow we have accounted for everything.
There of course is an attempt at accountability but that has to do with how
knowledge is reasoned about. It is assumed to be severed from culture or at
least leads it somewhat, rather than being inseperable from culture. An
assumption there is something "natural" or a-human, a-cultural, or
a-historical about knowledge which only exists in the realm of rational
reason. Of course, if we can keep the narrative a rational reason going,
knowledge continues to appear "natural" or transparent.
Nate
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