--- "Charles A. Grimes" <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
> Examples very much like the above were used in my
> anthro courses to
> illustrate differences in htinking, language,
> perception and culture,
> in order to introduce the idea that differences
> amoung peoples imply a
> much more relativistic human world than we are
> acustomed to thinking
> about. This idea in turn was used to note that our
> own pre-conceived
> ideas are not necessarily objectively fabricated,
> but rather
> predicated on similar, perhaps misunderstandings
> about the world and
> other people.
[WS:] I think you are pushing it too far. The fact that our cognition is context-dependent (which was the idea advanced in the article in question) does not mean that every "social construct" is of equal value. A person who operates in the field of religion or sorcery certainly thinks differently than a scientist does, and one is not necessarily more intelligent than the other, even though one would score poorly on the other one's tests. This was the main point of the article. But the article also makes it clear that there is objective difference between religion/sorcery and science - the latter has predictive validity, the former does not.
This multi-culti relativism that equates science and cultural narratives is where otherwise sensible criticism of dogma gets strayed way into the left field.
Wojtek
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