Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:
A more rational
> position than either Laplacean scientism or credal theism is
> methodological reflective agnosticism -- Husserl's "bracketing of
> experience" -- with the aim of elucidating the structures of experience,
> and not just the structures of objects in experience.

Hmmm..I haven't read Husserl, but isn't this a substitution of realism
about the structures of experience for the realism about the objects of
experience you're critiquing? And how does one capture these structures?

The problem is, can we get away from a realist idiom in speech if we
want to be comprehensible? I don't think so. The way we categorize and
describe reality is by definition a social process. Science is about
making order out of the chaos. But rejecting natural realism isn't
possible (or at least doesn't seem to have been done so far) without
positing some other kind of realism. Even the statement "there is no
natural reality" posits the reality of that statement; ditto for "we
don't know if there's a reality".

Annemarie notes that she can't drive the wrong way on the highway. But
if everyone on the highway decided to drive in the opposite direction,
she could. This depends on the coordination of social action, which can
be changed--a perfect example for social constructivists actually.

One of the things I've been wondering about is whether one of the main
reasons that scientists and a lot of other people have trouble with
social constructivist arguments is because of the hyperbole the latter
tend to employ. In Foucauldian medical sociology one finds statements
like "bodies are created by medical discourse." This seems to me to be
an ontological overstatement. 'Stuff out there' that we call bodies is
*framed* by and *understood through* medical discourse, medical
discourse is one of several ways we access that stuff, we can only talk
about the stuff and cannot appropriate its reality as such...but the
stuff acts in ways that medical discourse would disallow (drugs that
'should' work don't sometimes, etc.), our sensations of our bodies are
irreducible to our descriptions of those experiences, etc. (how does one
adequately capture orgasm or stubbing one's toe discursively?). The
chaos resists our descriptions of it. That's why science's work will
never be done.

If we said "bodies can only be talked about by human beings through
discourse," would scientists have a problem with that? I suspect not,
but it's an obvious statement that doesn't sound so audacious and
original. Still, what most of us actually *do* after we say "the body is
a creation of medical discourse" is to *describe* the ways medical
experts talk about bodies, show how those ways have changed
historically, etc., not go on to 'prove' (what would that mean, anyway?)
that bodies only exist because doctors talk about them. Perhaps if we
were less hyperbolic in our claims, and more focussed on description
rather than theoretically grand statements, there wouldn't be any
science wars? The descriptions seem to be the original and interesting
bits, at least to me.

cheers,
Emma
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Emma Whelan <[log in to unmask]>
Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University