> Rudy says
>
> "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? "
>
> I am not sure what your question means. But there is no reason to think
> that our scientific understanding of nature should not deepen over time.
> Nature's own laws do not change by our knowledge of them.
>
APR: It was a question based on exactly what you wrote... the same passage Shane queried. But that aside, what bearing does your claim that science accumulates deeper knowledge over time - a progressivist notion long ago rejected by philosophers and sociologists of science - have on the issue of whether or not a singular humanity is opposed by a singular nature? And what makes you think that a progressive discovery of (possibly) deeper knowledge of the essence of nature generates a condition where humanity in general experiences nature in toto similarly?
> I like Collingwood and Keith Thomas (but the feminist standpoint theory is
> tedious - as is the misrepresentation of scientific as colonialism: at least
> the anti-colonist revolt understood that the point was to confiscate the
> colonists' machinery and plant). The idea of nature changes, but nature does
> not.
>
APR: First of all, I didn't equate science and colonialism, I argued that the same utilitarian and ethnocentric theory of progressive modernization undergirds scientism and colonialism. Proof of this is that many anti-colonialist revolts did not see the combination of colonial forces and relations of production as progress and destroyed them... or set them to very different purposes by using them in very different ways. If you read Collingwood and Thomas you know that their arguments engage in a form of dialectical analysis intended to illuminate the changing relationship between material phenomena defined as nature and the practice of its exploration and representation. While a fundamentally unknowable Nature - which is what I think you mean - may not change by dint of our changing conception of it, that which we treat, explore and represent as natural, and therefore then material natures and scientific laws of nature we generate do in fact change.
>
> Of course scientists are not exempt from ideological pressures. But their
> misrepresentations cannot undo real advances in understanding, which
> persist. You might not believe that there is one humanity, or that there is
> a global division of labour. But that is characteristic of the solipsistic
> constructivist outlook.
>
> APR: Look, I'd appreciate it if you were more fair and focused in your
responses. I never said that science doesn't generate more knowledge about
more stuff over time - though as everyone knows that "progress" has largely
been defined in terms of knowing more and more about less and less, the flip
side of which is that we are (or ought to be) also aware of how much more
ignorant we are as a result. I also never said that there isn't one
humanity, I said there isn't anything like one human experience of nature -
something very material, very historical and something you refuse to
address.
> Shane says
>
> '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?'
>
> By labour, man abstracts himself from nature, making it his object. Science
> takes nature as its object, but is not natural.
>
APR: The trope you presented only borrows from half the passage, the other half from Marx indicates that man remains part of nature in the process... thoroughness is important.
>
> I said
>
> > But when we use the word ideological, we plainly appeal to an objective
> > truth beyond ideology, or the definition has no meaning.
>
> And Matthias replied
>
> "How do we plainly so appeal?"
>
> By using the word 'ideological', which has no meaning except in contrast to
> the concept of objective truth.
>
APR: Actually, no. There is absolutely no need to claim to possess absolute, transcendent, universal or objective truth in order to generate the kind of ideology critique behind using the word ideological to represent the work of another or others. Why did Marx keep revising volume I? If you take the position that science historcally progresses towards deeper truth then how can you claim that anyone along the way could know objective, unsituated truth? Again, philosophers, historians and sociologists of science - many of them Marxists, and feminists - have been over this ground quite thoroughly... without being the constructivists and relativists you find so tedious.
>
> Matthias further asked
>
> "Does the fact that a sentence can be written in a great number of
> languages imply that it can be written languagelessly?"
>
> No.
>
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