---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2009 11:47:43 -0500
>From: Matthias Wasser <matthias.wasser at gmail.com>
>Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How radical was Derrida
>To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>
>On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 3:18 AM, James Heartfield <
>Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Miles writes 'the "superiority" of one mode of knowledge over another has
>> nothing to do with the sociology of knowledge...It's irrelevant to their
>> work.'
>>
>> Yes, that's what is wrong with the sociology of knowledge. It dances around
>> the outside of knowledge, fascinated with the tangential and esoteric
>> questions, like what was the name of the man who payed for it, ignorant of
>> the substance of the thing itself, is it indeed knowledge, or is it just
>> prejudice? Knowledge is the one thing that eludes the sociology of
>> knowledge.
>>
>> The baleful influence of the sociology of knowledge is all too evident on
>> this list, where we have to dash to the holocaust for an example of
>> something that is wrong, and then confuse that issue with the wholly
>> unimportant question of eating meat (human and animal are not equivalent in
>> morality) or cannot bring ourselves to say that selling snake oil is
>> reprehensible?
>>
>> And incidentally, where is the sociology of the sociology of knowledge?
>> Where is the account of the social forces that brought the sociology of
>> knowledge into being? Wouldn't that fix the sociology of knowledge firmly
>> into the regulatory mechanisms of the military-academic complex? Aren't the
>> ethics and oversight committees of college and government all outgrowths of
>> the sociology of knowledge? (
>
>
>When people deny that it is a fact that the Holocaust was wrong, they do not
>mean to disavow their disapproval of the Holocaust. Rather, they deny that
>their disapproval of the Holocaust describes the noumenal Holocaust as such,
>as opposed to their own mental (and hopefully practical) attitude towards
>it.
>
>People engage in approval and disapproval, and actions based on the same,
>all the time without averring an objective basis to it. I prefer vanilla ice
>cream to chocolate, so given a choice, I order the latter. My feelings about
>genocide are much stronger: while I lack access to the counterfactual
>knowledge to say so, the idea that I would risk my life to hide Jews in the
>attic or whatever comforts me, and I am full of admiration for those who
>did. Psychology suggests that the motivational influence of ethical beliefs
>looms disappointingly small, but I'm unaware of any evidence of the
>influence of metaethical beliefs whatsoever.
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