I don't think James is talking about how things are experienced and interpreted by us, but rather how things are in themselves. e = mc2 no matter how you experience and interpret the world, and the expression e = mc2 x 2 is wrong no matter how you experience and interpret the world.
Two caveats: I can think of many things that are probably experienced in roughly the same way, not only by all human beings, but by living things in general, across space and time, such as space and time themselves. Second, being pretty much a Kantian at heart, I think finding what things are like in themselves is impossible anyway and isn't what science is about at all. Science is about objects of experience.
Also, being democratic and nonauthoritarian does not make something nonsolipsistic. IMO science, or rather Ravi's favorite bugaboo scientism, is solipsistic and/or idealistic to the core, because it confuses how things appear to us with the totality of everything -- a logically incoherent position if you do not have solipsistic or idealist premises. It's logical end point is in fact subjective or absolute idealism. As Barkeley showed a long time ago. ;)
--- On Wed, 9/2/09, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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.
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