Emma Whelan wrote:
>
> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:
> A more rational
> > position than either Laplacean scientism or credal theism is
> > methodological reflective agnosticism -- Husserl's "bracketing of
> > experience" -- with the aim of elucidating the structures of experience,
> > and not just the structures of objects in experience.
>
> Hmmm..I haven't read Husserl, but isn't this a substitution of realism
> about the structures of experience for the realism about the objects of
> experience you're critiquing? And how does one capture these structures?

Husserl worked for a long lifetime on this project, and he always
thought of himself as only making (and redoing yet one more time,
but better...) a beginning.  Descartes *almost* got it right:
Cogito ergo cogitationes sunt (if my Latin is right).  Even if one
is deceived by an "evil demon" [what is deceived about]
must be real, or else the deceiver has not
*deceived* anyone but, at best, killed them.  What turns out
to be real is first of all meanings, as opposed to their referents.
[snip]
> One of the things I've been wondering about is whether one of the main
> reasons that scientists and a lot of other people have trouble with
> social constructivist arguments is because of the hyperbole the latter
> tend to employ. In Foucauldian medical sociology one finds statements
> like "bodies are created by medical discourse."
[snip]

Certainly there has been at least some hyperbole by such
persons as Derrida (except when he's on his good behavior, as in
the little book _Deconstruction in a Nutshell_! -- in which cases
he tries to assure us that he is not only entirely harmless,
but even *conservative*!).  Husserl, Enzo Paci, Eugen Fink,
Alfred Schutz et al. were not any kind of "postmodernists".
They did not mock people with their discourse.

As far as scientists qua scientists go, social
constructivism [at least accordng to Husserl's, Norwood Hanson's,
et al. understanding of this phrase]
does not affect what scientists do very much,
since social constructivism's *model* of human experience
is precisely to act into the world (e.g., to conduct
a physics experiment...) --
Except for those borderline types who poke around
inside other persons' skulls and/or skulk around
behind one-way mirrors, instead of being
decent enough to conduct their psychosurgery and
mind f-cking on their
*own* heads!  We have long since figured out that
messing around with the "gray matter" inside a
living person's skull can have consequences for their
subsequent behavior.  As for the psychologists who
secretly spy on people from behind one way
mirrors, even they admit the wrongheadedness of their
methodology when they acknowledge that telling their
experimental "subjects" (i.e., *objects*) about the
experiment will spoil it.  For to be human is not to be
an object, but to be a subject, i.e., a peer
participant in conversation [about whatever objects].

Reflect on what it is like to be an object of other
persons' conversation (e.g., a child whose parents
are discussing how to punish him).  Now reflect on
what it is like to be a peer participant in a conversation:
Neither "yourself" not "the others" appear as objects
in the experience, but rather the conversation almost
"takes on a life of its own", and even the words in the
conversation do not appear as objects in the experience,
but rather whatever is being talked about.  Now reflect
on what it is like to be one of the persons in a conversation
talking about (e.g.) how to punish a child [drug or ECT a
"crazy person", etc.].  The only kind of human
life psycho-physicists and peeping-Tom psychologists
can know about is what people are like when they are treated as
objects [of conversation] and not as subjects [peer
conversants in conversation].  To imagine oneself as
an object of their activities is to know the only kind
of human existence their "science" can accomplish
(in a society more advanced than ours, to treat a
person capable of participating in conversation as
merely an object the disposition of which is to be
conversed about [employee, student, mental patient, etc.]
would constitute a criminal act).

The main area where social constuctivism would
affect the lifves of physicists is not in their
narrowly scientific activities (e.g., reading
a photographic plate from a cloud chamber),
but in their relations to the socially constructed
lower life forms (lab techs, grad assts, janitors, etc.) who
generally make their experiments practicable.

"Yours in discourse...."

+\brad mccormick

--
   Let your light so shine before men,
               that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)

   Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)

Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [log in to unmask]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
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