Friday, December 26, 2014

How many PhDs can name their five favourite philosophers?

Reading cavalier statements by the likes of N. D. Tyson, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking, promoted by their PR teams as the prophesies of objective truth, makes my blood boil. Well, in the first instance. Then I come to my senses and remember that there is definitely a practical need in unquestioning foot soldiers in science, people who will do their allocated job without asking big questions, and just keep refining and confirming the established bias until it's time to move on to the new paradigm. In sciences too, it takes every kind.

On that note, however, I am positively convinced, that scientists should by no means be awarded a PhD, Doctor Philosophiae, degree, unless they complete a foundation course in, at least, epistemology and prove beyond any doubt that they understand how the process of knowledge manufacturing works. If they refuse, they should graduate with a Doctor in (Specific Field) accolades.

Monday, December 22, 2014

Can social sciences contribute to the betterment of the humankind?

Based on the humankind's experience so far, it is highly doubtful that more social engineering, even of a more enlightened kind, would ever make much difference in how human societies work.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Human group dynamic inevitably produces hierarchies, warring cliques, and waste. Simply improving living conditions does not result in better human beings, simply in more comfortable and more energy-intensive environments to produce hierarchies, cliques, and waste. Like Dostoyevsky once asked to the effect of  "what do you do once everyone's fed?" Real change starts only within.

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Seeng both sides: combining social and psychological approaches in understanding the human condition

From my experience, it appears that only those who have looked  into both the social and the psychological, achieve any kind of meaningful understanding of how society and humans work. When the scientist's blind spot includes an entire dimension of the human condition, all their work will amount to an exercise in futility. In (the more familiar to me) case of anthropologists, often deliberately ignoring the psychological aspects of observed practices (e.g., in  Rabinow's Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco) results in culturalist reductionism, where perhaps the most important aspect of a ritual is omitted. 

This understanding, however, is hard to win allies for. I remember Scott Lash, who himself studied both sociology and psychology, warning me that I would hardly come across academics even aware of the issue, let alone interested in any aspects or implications of it. Looking on both sides of the dark veil separating social and psychological facts, creates a transformational experience, a true Zen moment, a temporary dissolution of the object/subject separation, whose memory, however, lasts and influences all your perceptions for the rest of your lifetime. That is why, I would never be truthful, should I have to stick to only one part of the proverbial elephant. The blindfold may have been off for just a moment, but after that there's no way back.