Thanks for the thoughtful reply. There's a lot of territory there. One
place that I think isn't clear to me, for example, is when you write: "To
put it far too broadly,
the former is a description of physical characteristics valid for the field
of physics (a consensual domain with its own way of describing the world),".
Can I take it that you are saying that the truth claims made in physics and
the truth claims made in any other consensual domain (say the Catholic
Church) are equivalent and that there is no objective knowledge that one
possesses that the other lacks? In other words, does the validity of the
truth claims (a form of speech act) found within a consensual domain derive
from the fact of consensus or from a correct, though necessarily dynamic
and incomplete, objective knowledge. This seems to be what you are saying
when you write, "But these descriptions are only valid for two entirely
different consensual domains." This would seem to imply that Galileo's
statements about the position of the earth relative to the sun were not
valid (does that mean true for you?) unless someone accepted the premises of
his consensual domain. Is that what you want to say?
I must admit to not understanding what you are referring to when you say
"consensual domains". Do you admit of consensual domains in which objective
knowledge is not a basis for truth claims; i.e., distinguish truth claims
about reality from other types of truth claims?
You made the observation that, "Descriptions of
"things that aren't human", or better, "things that aren't living", are
much easier to make reliable (ie verifiable) truth claims about (at a
certain level) than are, for instance, descriptions about "things that
people think", or the way they think, feel, or etc. " This observation was
developed in detail by Leslie White, an American anthropologist and founder
of the cultural materialist school (actually originally called
'culturology' on the Soviet model) and since much debased by Marvin Harris.
I was very pleased to see that Mike included several references to White in
Cult Psych. and even quoted him--gave me a sense of continuity. In his
essay "The Expansion and Scope of Science." he explicitly addressed this
issue:
"Science, a particular way of dealing with experience, appeared first in
interpretations of a particular portion of our field of experience, namely,
in astronomy, where phenomena are most remote and insignificant as
determinants of human behaviour. From there its techniques have spread and
exxtended to other segments of experience. As science advances and expands,
the anthropomorphic philosophy of animism recedes and contracts; as the
concepts of natural law and determinism gain ground, the philosophy of free
will retreats. The logical conclusion is, of course, to have the whole
field of human experience embraced by the philosophy of science rather than
that of animism."
(of course White never experienced Mercury in retrograde, but hey!!)
However, your use of the notion of "verifiable truth claims restricted to
consensual commnities" muddies the picture for me so I'm not sure if it
allows of the progressive growth (including inevitable revolutions in
structure) of objective knowledge. If there is such a possibility, a
position that seems to me to underpin CHAT, then the objective knowledge of
living beings and social consciousness should, in theory, be as attainable
as our knowledge of the domain of non-organic matter. Our present relation
to that growing objective knowledge of cultural historical reality might be
comparable to Galileo's conception of physics in relation to Einstein's,
whose conceptions, it should be remembered, will someday be looked upon as
we look today upon Newton's. Nevertheless I do believe that those
directions derived from the dialectical materialist tradition (including
Vygotskian directions) provide certain "never to be lost truths" about
cultural-historical reality comparable to the truth of the laws Galileo
derived from simple experiments with falling bodies.
Paul H. Dillon
You noted that physics is