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ED209
Joined: 17 Oct 2006
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 Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 8:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Rteacher wrote: |
| The man-made concept of falsifiability doesn't apply to the Absolute Truth. However, it may be used to indirectly prove the existence of the nonphysical soul. By reviving the consciousness of a dead body by some combination of chemicals, one can prove that consciousness can be materially produced. Otherwise, the assumption should be that consciousness is a symptom of the spirit-soul... |
That's you all over, assumptions.
and that's the Absolute Truth(although I prefer Absolute Peach) |
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mindmetoo
Joined: 02 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 8:49 pm Post subject: |
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| gang ah jee wrote: |
And mindmetoo - have you ever had the chance to read Gross & Levitt's Higher Superstition or Sokal and Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures? I think you'd like them. |
No. I'll keep an eye out. I'm familiar with the famous L'affair Sokal however. |
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mindmetoo
Joined: 02 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 8:53 pm Post subject: |
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| Rteacher wrote: |
| Otherwise, the assumption should be that consciousness is a symptom of the spirit-soul... |
Why? Everything in nature known to have a natural explanation used to have a supernatural explanation. Why should we expect anything different regarding the mind, especially since every single aspect of human consciousness has an associated neurological component.
The assumption should be the mind is like everything else in nature. If you have evidence to the contrary, present it. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 8:55 pm Post subject: |
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I like modern science, Gopher. They're pretty skeptical of themselves, and more often than not stay within their own concentration, let alone their own field.
Some of the atheistic nonsense is annoying, but I think its a rarity. You know, those hard-core evidence-based people who look with scorn on those who might believe that revelation has at least as much a foundation for certain truths as reason. But otherwise, I support the hard work and careful study that scientists do. Its fun to read their conclusions. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 8:59 pm Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
| I like modern science, Gopher... |
The funny thing is, Kuros, so do I. One interdisciplinary field that has particularly yielded much insight is "medical history."
And what I read, the conferences I have attended, etc., all of this has nothing to do with the kind of scornful, dismissive, "we-have-the-final-answers" arrogance our friends here demonstrate. |
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mindmetoo
Joined: 02 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 9:04 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| "we-have-the-final-answers" arrogance our friends here demonstrate. |
Strawman. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 9:06 pm Post subject: |
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| mindmetoo wrote: |
| Strawman. |
Certainly explains your eagerness to exchange contradictory views, Mindmetoo... 
By the way: remember this...?
| mindmetoo wrote: |
| We don't know anyone like that, right? |
This little exchange is part of what I refer to.
Last edited by Gopher on Wed Apr 04, 2007 9:36 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
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| Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 9:13 pm Post subject: |
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| Ya-ta Boy wrote: |
| Why doesn't anyone post about the savage noble anymore? |
Have you read nothing in the last six years? |
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EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
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| Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 9:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| all of this has nothing to do with the kind of scornful, dismissive, "we-have-the-final-answers" arrogance our friends here demonstrate. |
Seriously, who spilled the universal bottle of irony all over the neo-con/wannabe intellect set today? It's spilling all over this forum!
Not that I'm complaining, mind you... |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 9:23 pm Post subject: |
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| EFLtrainer wrote: |
| Gopher wrote: |
| all of this has nothing to do with the kind of scornful, dismissive, "we-have-the-final-answers" arrogance our friends here demonstrate. |
Seriously, who spilled the universal bottle of irony all over the neo-con/wannabe intellect set today? It's spilling all over this forum!
Not that I'm complaining, mind you... |
EFLTrainer makes a good point. Even though today we are blessed with having to suffer less violence, we now have to suffer people on chatboards who stalk others and pick fights with them even though it is demonstrably off topic. Is this civilized? |
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Manner of Speaking
Joined: 09 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 1:01 am Post subject: |
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| gang ah jee wrote: |
| Gopher wrote: |
Right. Who here has ever even heard of Ruth Benedict or Margaret Mead -- or Clifford Geertz's "thick description," Claude L�vi-Strauss, or Eric Wolf either, for that matter.
In fact, no one pays any attention to the humanities or especially cultural anthro. Applied linguistics on the other hand...well, even the Sun orients itself around applied linguistics, no...?
Your kind of self-centeredness and conscious disciplinary myopia does not lead anywhere productive. |
Well actually, people once thought that the Sun orbited Applied Linguistics, but the Copernican Revolution showed that the opposite was true. Under both paradigms, however, the underlying reality was that cultural anthropology was not a serious anthropological science.
Anyway, you've missed the point. The problem is not cultural anthropology or any other discipline, it's postmodernism/constructivism/perspectivism, and the general distain for logic and evidence that's common throughout the humanities. Once the lazy scholar decides that nothing is true all he must do is make a mere show of supporting his arguments, free from the oppressive, unfashionable constraints of verification and falsifiability. |
I think you both have a point there, and unfortunately it's a rather sad one. There seems to have been - IMHO - a rather tragic decline in academic rigor in Sociology and in Cultural Anthropology. I remember once I was photocopying something in a university library, and I happened to glance at some scrap photocopies a previous user had left behind. They were someone's notes from a first-year Sociology class. The notes themselves were fairly well-written...but what the prof was teaching this poor student seemed to be...well, only so much dreck. I think if researchers like Erving Goffman or Hannah Arendt were alive today they'd be shaking their heads in disgust. |
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gang ah jee
Joined: 14 Jan 2003
Location: city of paper
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| Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 5:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Manner of Speaking wrote: |
| I think you both have a point there, and unfortunately it's a rather sad one. There seems to have been - IMHO - a rather tragic decline in academic rigor in Sociology and in Cultural Anthropology. I remember once I was photocopying something in a university library, and I happened to glance at some scrap photocopies a previous user had left behind. They were someone's notes from a first-year Sociology class. The notes themselves were fairly well-written...but what the prof was teaching this poor student seemed to be...well, only so much dreck. I think if researchers like Erving Goffman or Hannah Arendt were alive today they'd be shaking their heads in disgust. |
Perhaps, yes, though to be honest I've been a bit uncharitable to cultural anthropology. I'm actually tempted to use the No True Scotsman move here - a willingness to reject scientific evidence a priori, as 'noble savage' proponents do, is grounds for disqualification from serious sciencehood. Postmodernism just provides legitimacy for these rejections.
I'd say the best way to understand postmodernist/constructivist thought is the map analogy. A map is drawn on the basis of exploration which is undertaken over time by thousands and thousands of individuals. Some parts of the world may be inaccessible and thus unplottable, perhaps permanently, and some parts of the map may be grossly inaccurate due to factors such as mistaken impressions, suppositions and bias on the part of the explorers. Some parts might not be constant and change over time - volcanic islands, for example. Some parts may be even be pure fantasy - perhaps the explorer got scared and decided to take his expedition funding to the pub instead. Several different paradigms of understanding the context of the map come and go, but despite discovering that the features that the map represents exist on a sphere rather than a plane, and were created by geologic processes rather than divine fiat, the map remains generally accurate - or at least the most accurate resource available at any given time.
All of a sudden a group of cartographers have an incredible insight: the territory doesn't actually exist -- the map IS the territory! The school of Critical Cartography is born, and promptly declares that Scandinavia is shaped as it is because it was discovered by phallocentric patriarchists and that the Americas are drawn so far away from Europe because Columbus saw native Americans as 'the other'. Contemporary maps are discarded on the basis that previous maps have been shown to have inaccuracies, and some even use this emerging legitimacy of the No Territory Just Map school of cartography to advance their case that the only correct map was drawn by God thousands of years ago. Moreover, a larger group of cartographers are generally content not to comment on the non-existence of the territory unless the territory isn't how they think it should be according to their own a priori notions about geography. But we wouldn't know anyone like that, would we?
Of course, the most absurd thing here is that despite all this, whenever these cartographers need to go somewhere, they get there using a map. |
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Manner of Speaking
Joined: 09 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 6:06 pm Post subject: |
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gang ah jee I've just got a few minutes before my next class, but wanted to say that is a wonderful analogy...particularly because my undergrad degree is in Geography.
Interestingly, a few writers have written on some of the cultural presumptions implied in the design and selection of maps and map projections. In Britain and other English-speaking countries, for example, the Mercator projection has tradtionally been popular in government publications and in school books, because the Mercator projection exaggerates the size of land areas in high latitudes. Old maps from the 1940s and 1950s of British Empire and/or Commonwealth territories - more "red" on the map, so to speak.
I did a quick search the other day in wikipedia and google for "history of sociology"...and what I got were all websites describing this theoretician and that theoretician...nothing about seminal works on the sociology/cultural anthropology of racism, poverty, or anything else involving original field research. Surprising and rather disappointing.
Last edited by Manner of Speaking on Sat Apr 07, 2007 2:55 am; edited 1 time in total |
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thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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| Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 6:49 pm Post subject: |
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What the hell are all of you arguing on about? I read the whole thread and don't really understand why you are arguing. It seems to me you all agree.
I recently read an article by a Scandinavian broad who said speaking only one language is a "mental disorder". Kinda related, but maybe not. |
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gang ah jee
Joined: 14 Jan 2003
Location: city of paper
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| Posted: Sun Apr 08, 2007 10:47 pm Post subject: |
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| Manner of Speaking wrote: |
| Interestingly, a few writers have written on some of the cultural presumptions implied in the design and selection of maps and map projections. In Britain and other English-speaking countries, for example, the Mercator projection has tradtionally been popular in government publications and in school books, because the Mercator projection exaggerates the size of land areas in high latitudes. Old maps from the 1940s and 1950s of British Empire and/or Commonwealth territories - more "red" on the map, so to speak. |
Heh, I was thinking about map projections with regard to Critical Theory. I'm quite sympathetic to the goals and some of the assumptions of critical theory, but in its regular postmodernist form it's philosophically incoherent and really quite toothless. Thus, I had been thinking that trying to use postmodernist critique for the emancipation and empowerment of disadvantaged groups is sort of like using the Gall-Peters projection to increase the amount of arable land in the Third World.
Oh, and it turns out that Critical Cartography actually exists, at least according to the google. |
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