A Peer Reviewed Blog
Mother Teresa has been in the news again — she’s a saint now. And amid reporting on the process used by the Roman Catholic Church to determine whether that status was warranted, I heard a story that identified the doctor used to help determine if any of the things attributed to her counted as miracles. Continue reading “It’s a Miracle”
“From this point of view, science…is rhetoric, a series of efforts to 
persuade relevant social actors that one’s manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power.”
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (2013)
This is part of a collection of posts of quotations from The Sociologist and the Historian, (first published in French in 2010 and in English in 2015), a short collection of transcripts from a series of late 1987/early 1988 radio interviews between Roger Chartier and the late social theorist, Pierre Bourdieu.
If these false sociological problems, false scientific problems, persist, this is because they are often based on real social problems or on real social interests. For example, as you suggested, I believe that the majority of these oppositions between macro and micro, objective and subjective, and today, among historians, between economic analysis and political analysis, and so on, are false oppositions that do not resist three seconds of theoretical analysis, but that they are extremely important because they fulfill social functions for those who use them….
The interest in false problems is that they are eternal. Besides, from the point of view of science, these false problems are often rooted in real political problems: that’s the case, for example, with the opposition between individuals and society, individualism and socialism, individualism and holism, all those ‘ism’ words that I see as absurd, without any sense. These oppositions can always be reactivated because they have something to do with the opposition between collectivism or socialism on the one hand and liberalism on the other. And by way of these underground affiliations, political struggles can be brought into the scientific field. Now, the autonomy of the scientific field depends on the establishment of frontiers against these false problems…. (37-9)
Listen to the original radio broadcast, in French, here.
Another semester is drawing to an end and, as a result, I’ve been having some meetings with students who wish to go over the course material so that they can better prepare for the final. Not long ago a student came by and, as the meeting was starting, I asked a question that I often pose to students who stop by to talk, those who might be having some difficulties in the course.
So I say:
What did you think of the course?
Debates over religion and science have long bothered me and the problems could not be any better illustrated than this recent Tweet. Continue reading “Green Means Go?”
Not long ago I posted about a paired example (one scholar in India and one in North America), each debunking what they both called other people’s superstitions. Apart from being curious as to why one of those critics met a tragic fate (the topic of my earlier post), I also find interesting the way in which the side they both share — what shall we call them: Modernists? Rationalists? Empiricists? Scientists? Secularists? — portrays those on the other; for “they,” as indicated just above, are superstitious people who rely on archaic beliefs in black magic, hocus pocus, faith (in fact, it is often called blind faith) whereas “we” boldly rely on our own cool-headed rationality and cold hard facts.
But is it as simple as that? Continue reading “Blind Confidence”