[lbo-talk] On witchcraft (was how rad. Derrida?)

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Sun Nov 8 05:41:02 PST 2009


The distinction between science (technology, actually) and witchcraft is that the former works and the latter does not. It is this track record of working that causes me to trust scientists, for instance, regarding their claims about the reality of climate change, as opposed to the claims of witches or climate-change denialists. If witches had a proven record of summoning demons, I would trust them too.

----- Original Message ---- From: James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>

An argument that cannot distinguish between science and witchcraft is a victory of rhetoric over sense. The distinction between natural thinking and science is at the core of rationality (cf. Hegel, who usefully insists that it is not that they are made of different stuff, but that the latter is a refined form of the former). To say that medical science is just as good as witchcraft is a kind of performance, but nobody who says it really believes it.

That surely is the failure of the sociology of knowledge writ large, its inability to defend the superiority of scientific understanding from superstition. Without that there can be no Marxism, no Darwinism, no critique of religion.

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