From: Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu>
>
WS: I do not think so. I believe that there is a difference between science and narrative, the pomos do not. I think science propositions are empirically verifiable, or rather falsifiable, whereas the pomos nihilistically believe that since everything is relative - nothing can be falsified, and thus anything goes. Pomos are ultimate ontological idealists and epistemological realists (i.e ones who believe that abstract concepts denote real entities), whereas I am an ontological materialist and epistemological nominalist (i.e one who believes that abstract concept are mere linguistic conventions or shortcuts to denote multitudes of objects) - or perhaps somewhere between nominalism and conceptualism.
^^^^^
CB: Yes, I don't really think you subscribe to postmod theory. I was joking a little. Your comment that 75% of social science is poetry ( and mention of mythology and superstition) hit me as having some overlap with postmod. Postmod is not all wrong, in this regard. I don't know if you agree with that. I agree with you at the level of philo as you discuss it above.
^^^^^^
> In the old school it was said that this superstitious behavior is
commodity
> _fetishism_, ideology and false consciousness , and its study here
bourgeois
> social science.
WS: Perhaps the old school did not anticiaptae that ideas can become commodity - sold and bouth as any other schlock. Pomo is commodity fetishism of that stage - a belief that intellectual commodity has magical properties of transforming the real world.
^^^ CB: On the contrary, I think the old school does anticipate commoditization of just about anything, including ideas. My thought is that you are making an old school point. Good for you. In particular, when you mention mythology and superstition, you are describing fetishistic behavior, like what anthropologists "found" in "savages". You seem to be developing the theory of commodity fetishism by your thought here.
^^^^^^
^^^^^^
WS: I d not know what kind of anthropology Wayne State does, but sociology/anthropology of organizational behavior is often a powerful critique of established institutions and their bosses. The Marxist critique portrays the bosses as mere pawns of history - something that the bosses do not entirely object to, especially when things go wrong for them.
^^^^^^ CB: More like pawns of higher up bosses, no ? "History" is people acting; classes are made up of people.
^^^^^^
Organizational sociology/anthropology, otoh, often portrays the bosses as incompetent self-serving idiots who do not quite know what they are doing, but go by mainly by fooling other idiots by shibboleths and if these do not work by raw power. In other words, this line of thought deflates the image of the bosses and leaders, reducing them to that of "scurvy little spiders." That is precisely what the bosses hate to hear.
PS. my own little contribution to that line of thinking is the concept of Mosquito Intake Theory of Executive Compensation (MITEC) - mosquitoes do not have lungs, so they cannot suck - their blood intake depends solely on the pressure in the blood vessel to which they manage to tap. Likewise, the executive compensation in Amerika depends solely on the volume of other people's money these blood suckers manage to circulate.
^^^^^ CB: Yes, you develop a neat elaboration of what old school termed parasitic behavior.
Wojtek