Re: Social Science, Science, and Empirical Study

[Luke:]  Here’s the clincher of where I see a problem in your argument.  You say “scientists are still the empirically-focused materialists we always were when we are doing science.”  What does this really mean? … I understand the ‘when we are doing science’ part.  What I don’t understand is the term “empirically-focused materialists.”  That expression is very problematic.  By way of an example, I looked up the definitions of dialectic and historical materialism on Louis Proyect’s Marxism Mailing List site.  As far as I can tell, there’s really nothing in those definitions that could pose an irreconcilable difference with Chaos, Complexity, Relativity theory, or Quantum Mechanics.  Nothing whatsoever.  {Even I, with my own philosophical commitments to Western Classical thought, literary models for the sake of expressing certain important principles in human experience and the natural world, plus my great interest in the above theories of C,C,R, and QM – but also Buckminster Fuller’s Synergetics and Whole Systems Theory, even I could legitimately be a historical or dialectical ‘materialist’ and still keep my commitments to all these other models as well.}  There’s really nothing in the definitions given that could exclude or contradict the basic premises of any of these other fields.  (At least that’s my own personal opinion, no more and no less.)

 

[Mike:]  I also see nothing irreconcilable about materialist viewpoints and C, C, R, and QM.

 

[Luke:]  Yet, if we look at the use of the term ‘materialist’ as it’s used in public (which is a model that posits a universe of objective, static-state matter {set against another view of the cosmos as being one of fluid-dynamism with layer upon layer of matter-force-energy relationships within itself}) there’s a level of meaning that’s not in the definitions; a level of meaning having more to do with what I call normalism, manifest objects, ‘what you see is what you get’, and the idea that matter is “just stuff” (as I’ve explained in earlier posts here on WSN). 

 

[Mike:]  I don't see how materialism makes any claim about the motion of matter (e.g. static).  I used it in the sense that materialist don't invoke supernatural or relgious explanations.  A scientists may be very devoutly religious, but he will refrain from incorporating religious doctrine into his scientific theories.  If he doesn't not, he ceases to be a scientist, as for example practitioners of  "creation science".

 

I still am not following what you mean by matter-force-energy relationships, and fluid-dynamism.  Can you give some explicit examples?

 

[Luke:] The ‘materialism’ of the “Material Girl” (Madonna) is a very different materialism from the ‘materialism’ [and thus the empirically-focused materialism] of scientists. 

 

[Mike:]  I did not mean to use the word in this sense.

 

 

[Luke:]  ...the field one’s in, very much so, determines/(picks & chooses) the manner of empiric orientation and the kinds of data scientist utilizes in his or her own field).

 

[Mike:]  Well of course.  You did not address my point that empirical demonstration is a key element of science.  Scientists need to be convinced that an idea "works" before they will buy it.

 

[Luke:]   But Science is still about the episteme of trying to understand the nature, processes, and phenomena of the universe primarily.  Only secondarily is it about how we use it to improve peoples lot in life.  And, this is true for both the Natural/Physical Sciences and the Social Sciences]

 

[Mike:]  Here you are talking about the different goals between science and technology, which I discussed before.  I don't see how the basic activities or approaches of the two are different.  Both science and engineering use a type of knowledge aquisition  based on observation, reasoning, and repeatability.  Their approach is quite different from that of the religious mystic, the artist, the lawyer or the philosopher.