Brad

Before we get back to the language issue below let us get further into the
science ethics thing.... The power of modern science lies in specialisation.
Scientific and technical work is organized today along the lines of its
particular specificity, the specificity of knowledge. The history of science
informs you that it has evolved, moved away from everyday lived experience. It
began this by inventing the processes of experimentation, empirical and
otherwise, that  are intended to produce objective results (that are regarded
as probably true - oh probability...) excluding all subjectivity, aiming for
proof.

One requirement of an ethics suitable for science, engineering and technology
is that it does not use, define the human as the 'measure of all things...' At
the centre of of things but places humans in the centre of scientific
discourse. Which in the present is still not the case, the abstractions we
invent are the centre of the discursive activity. One prime difference between
scientific and philosophical activity becomes obvious here in the philosophy
aims to explain and formulate the meaning of the structures of the universe -
a relationship to the human, to its inner and social life. Any scientific or
engineering theory is inextricably linked to a moral and political exigency -
theory as such is directly related to terror - (Kristeva is exceptionally
clear on this).  Scientific theories are in this sense 'simply' theories of
domination, and become quite frequently knowledge as political practice,
evidence for this can be seen in GM foods and the fascinating discourses
around this issue in the popular science magazine New Scientist....  As Serres
said 'To engage in a practice (is to be) implicated in the ideology of command
and obedience...'

According to Serres - knowledge for western humans began as a hunt - as the
western epistemologies  grew the hunt moved from outside the species - ' to
kill the lamb deep in the forest' to the inside, '...knowledge becomes
military...a strategy. These epistemologies  are not innocent: at the critical
tribunal they are calling for executions..' (Hermes). The unique contemporary
problem is that we, of necessity, have to migrate from the morality and ethics
based on experimentation as a system in which one may not cheat. (Remember
that in the science experimentation/theory game the more one cheats the less
one knows hence the primary sciencitific morality). In other words science and
engineering which is currently evaluated against its own internal rules,
morals and ethics has to move towards an ethics which is founded on external
values. Science and philosophy both have to accept that we must understand and
experience the terrors and love that bind us to this spaceship called Earth.

> I fail to see, however, how language is necessarily linked with
> empirical solitude (as opposed to being the transcendental
> condition for both solitude and community, etc.).

We are (I hope) familiar with the benefits that Kleinians have gained by
placing the depressive position at the heart of our capacity to speak. This is
founded  on symbolic castration which is contingent on negation, loss and
rejection, over-laden with  seperation and loss. But let's leave Klein and
move onto Kristeva - who suggests that psychoanalysis draws out a 'narrow
path  one in which  sexual experience resists language. This leads to
repression and to the related necessity that we use language  in order to
interpret hidden unconscious signs...' It is this which constitutes the reason
for our existential solitude (not empirical however)...

Beyond this I hesitate to discuss the positive values of the modest community
as a starting point towards a more interesting ethical perspective...

> I believe that language can be bene-dictory in our
> real here-and-now lives, even though I will readily
> grant you that, often in fact -- even once would be once too
> many times! but in fact the occurrences
> are "TMTC" (too many to count, as they say in the
> nuclear industry...).

> I agree, we need a kind of "biological reengineering":

yours in memory of 'the gernsberg continun...'
regards

sdv