> Alan,
>
> Your post is most helpful, even on first listening. (I temporarily gave up
> on attempting to read it and ha ZoomText read it to me.)
>
Thanks.
>
> And a bit later you write: "non-experts in pretty much any field can become
> well-versed in the science itself whenever driven to self-educate,
> particularly if they are collectively self-educating."
>
> The key words here (my emphasis) are, "experts in pretty much any field CAN
> become well-versed in the science." I don't think you had to confine this
> claim to "experts," but could extend it to the general public.
Agree. I wrote "non-experts" to specifically point to the general public, you included the "non-" in the quote but it must have gotten lost subsequently.
> What are the preconditons for making
> such an effort, whether by a litereature ph.d or a high-school graduate?
It takes a modicum of education/schooling but certainly a GED's generally what many of the folks who become experts via resistance have.
> My essential claim is that the precondition is accepting on faith the
> Authority
> of Sceince. And that fundamental Faith has to be proof against repeated
> discoveries that this or that scientific "truth" was no longer truth.
Well, kinda. My sense of the non-experts who become somewhere between scientifically proficient and experts themselves is that they often start with the assumption that the science can be done better than the experts have done it or done right since the experts have done it wrong. At the same time, it is equally my sense that many of the once-non-experts come to doubt the objectivity of science, qua Science (with a capital C), when they come to see the politics of scientific thresholds and the many gaps and silences within the practices of expert scientific reductionism.
> In some ways that Faith is harder to maintain than much religious faith. I
> became a "Marxist" before I had read any arguments for Marxism whatever. I
> had (through varius processes) reached the conclusion that there was
> something fundamentally wrong about the relations of the U.S. to the rest
> of
> the world (Vietnam, Dominican Rpublic), and as far as I knew it was mostly
> Marxists who had been opposing that wrongness for half a century or so. I
> began my reading of Marxist or semi-Marxist wrtings one the assumption that
> that was where Truth was to be foundd. (Northrop Frye observes in the
> Anatomy of Criticism that the only people who are ever convinced by
> "Defenses of Poetry" are those who are already well inside the defensive
> perimieter - i.e. a defense of poetry will convince yu even if you agree
> with it in advance of eer reading it.)
>
I, on the other hand, knew the world was screwed up but didn't expect to find in Marx/ism all that I've found.
>
> I'll keep studying your post and return to it.
>
> Carrol
>
> Alan