>
> On Sep 2, 2009, at 1:37 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
>
>>
>> Of course the practice of science is a social activity, but collective
>> humanity confronts nature, which is outside of man, as a singular subject.
>>
>
> Why the dualism? What in "man," individually or collectively, is not also
> "nature?" And why should whatever human activity you choose to call
> "science" not be seen to be just as "natural" as activities like talking and
> killing?
>
> Shane Mage
I'm with Shane, mostly. James, you write as if RG Collingwood, Clarence Glacken, Keith Thomas, Raymond Williams and Neil Smith - not one of whom is a social constructivist - had never written a word on ideas of nature and as if the whole socialist feminist debate about standpoint epistemologies - almost all of which is deeply materialist in its constructivism - had never taken place.
Shane, I'm a little concerned that your approach utterly collapses humanity into nature, making both terms useless... I tried to make clear in earlier exchanges how I differentiate human beings from other, related, species without appealing to singular univeralist terms... but I DO think the distinction is important.
James, can you point to an aspect of nature that all of us humans confront, experience or understand in anything like the same way - esp. across space and through time? You say that "the empiricist-inductive" view "(against the usual characterisation) takes the collective social subject, mankind, for granted." Are you saying that the operationalization of "the collective social subject, mankind" that Scientists, and "science-based policy" folks, take for granted isn't flush with capitalist ideology? Don't liberal environmentalists and anti-environmental promethians make the same anti-class analysis claims about "humanity"? Haven't these kinds of claims about the universal collective social subject been at the heart of the ideologies and practices of the White Man's Burden, colonialism and developmentalism?
Now the polemic, materialist constructivism isn't solipsistic, its democractic rather than expert-driven and authoritarian - in science as in politics.