Re: Hard Science

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Wayne Austin" <aaustin@utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
To: "Mick Drake" <M.Drake@uea.ac.uk>
Cc: "WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK" <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 07, 2000 5:41 AM
Subject: Re: Hard Science


> Mick,
>
> My post wasn't about the US criminal justice system. It was to illustrate
> a point related to the on-going thread, namely the presentation of
> ideology as science. It was a timely example.
>
> I suffer from no illusions about the United States' system of criminal
> justice, although I feel good when people have their death sentences
> overturned. How about you?
>


Yes, but isn't all "soft" science "ideological" and isn't hard science
"ideological" at the fringes.  In other words, we know very little about the
actual physical or social world - the "thing in itself, " as Kant tell us,
is and shall rmeain fundementally unknowable.  What we have, at best, are
approximations of that part of the  "world" we are interested in at a
particualr moment.  These approximations reflect and embody distinct
"weltanschauungen" (or what some might call "ideology") and are, at best
partial insights.  I think Mannheim does a decent jopb of discussing this,
at least in the case of the social sciences, in Ideology and Utopia.

Of course, one verification of our approximate knowledge is praxis but even
in this case, outcomes are themselves subject to interpretation. An outcome
which may verify "knoweldge" for one person or group may disprove it for
another person or group.

Carl Dassbach