On Mon, 1 Dec 2003, Jon Johanning wrote:
> As much as many of us disagree with Lenin's politics, I think we have
> to agree that it was fortunate for him that the Tsarist educational
> authorities kicked him out of the university and he turned to hanging
> out with the workers in St. Petersburg. Otherwise he might have ended
> up as a distinguished professor of the law, instead of learning how to
> speak to the workers' concerns in a language they could understand.
>
> Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org
The assumption here is that everything to understand about the social world can be put in terms that "workers in St. P" can relate to. This isn't true of physics; why should it be true of society? A scientific understanding of X requires a great deal of training, creativity, innovation, and outright rejection of common sense.
Why do you think understanding society is so easy that people can do it by relying on everyday concepts and knowledge? That's like saying somebody can understand the structure of the solar by applying common-sense words like "sunrise" and "sunset".
Miles