sdv wrote:
>
> Brad, Dewey
> I do not agree that there is a necessarily a problem here. At this moment we
> exist in societies which have the highest level of knowledge about science and
> the best scientifically educated population ever.

In my use of the English language, I deploy the word: "best", to mean:
"least worst among all the candidates that happened to show up
or can be impressed (conscripted to participate...) at the moment".

A *big* question is about the nature of "science".  Is genuine
science an engrossment with puzzle-solving about
*objects* of experience, but that
almost entirely overlooks or misunderstands the role of
experience in the constitution of the object domains and the careers of
their study (hermeneutics)?

A vast
puzzle-solving complex is what we have today, for the most part.
We need puzzle-solving, but far more important is the
wisdom to know what puzzles are worth solving....

The *full* object our understanding is not "the universe" but our
praxis in which the universe has *a* role, but is encompassed
in experience even when part of the experiencing is to believe
that the experiencing is encompassed in the universe.  Galileo
made great progress in understanding falling bodies.  Kant
made great progress in understanding the process of understanding
falling bodies.  Newton and Einstein et al. extended Galileo's
project.  Husserl et [far fewer...] al. have extended Kant's.
But students of the exact sciences are still not required to
understand transcendental philosophy (at least we are beginning
to teach engineering students *engineering ethics*!).

> The issue is perhaps that the
> best science like the best contemporary philosophy radically displaces human
> beings from the centre of things. This displacement is deeply discomforting and
> has a similar effect to the questioning of identity that psychoanalysis is
> centred on. The issue is not scientific education but the questioning of
> identity....

I can't remember who it was who observed that,
in the ancient cosmology, man may have been at the center of
the universe, but he was at the bottom of the ontological heap:
the sublunary sphere was the realm of corruption and decay, and
sinful man was right at the center of it all in the exposure of his
soul to God's eternal judgment and likely damnation.

The displacement of man "from the center" has only been an
*empirical* displacement of his body.  But his knowing mind
("transcendental [inter]subjectivity") has *risen* to be [recognized as]
the necessary condition for there to be any world at all (granted
that, conversely, his mind cannot exist without some kind
of "grist" to "mill").  Of course I am wrong to
say this: Everybody learns that our bodies have been displaced, but
few learn the "majestic" role of our minds.

To paraphrase Sandor Ferenczi's lovely
statement to a little nephew who kept trying to beat him
up:

    "I am your superior in force and I will prevent you
    from hitting me with your fists; but we are equals in
    imagination, and you have the right to feel about me as
    you see fit."

Galileo, when shown the instruments
of torture, disavowed the struggle for social enlightenment.
Galileo did not bravely declare:

    "I have the right to speak freely,
    including mocking the Pope, if, as I did in my book
    about the 3 world systems, I in fact did.
    What reasons can you adduce to try
    to convince reasonable persons otherwise?"

--or instead of even, like Plato, leave the
country and issue a public statement
once he was safely away, that he was protecting
the Pope from committing the crime of torturing him
for speaking the truth as he saw it.

I think we are still living with the "chilling" effects
of Galileo's intimidation and capitulation ("science
is about facts, not about values", etc.).

In _Cosmopolis: The hidden
agenda of modernity_, Stephen Toulmin speculates about
a different kind of modernity which didn't happen,
but might have -- a
modernity shaped not primarily by Galileo, Descartes and Darwin,
but by Erasmus and Rabelais -- a modernity in which
social relations would be the primary focus of
"modernization", rather than the instrumental mastery
of the non-human domain in the largely
unanalyzed service of primarily
unmodernized social institutions (such as, e.g., schools
in which students are objects of instructional
technology, instead of
compeers in the elaboration and preservation of the
space of study).

Albrecht Wellmer has an aptly titled book: _The
Unfinished Project of Modernity_ (compare Latour's:
_We Have Never Yet Really Been Modern_...).

+\brad mccormick

>
> sdv
>
> "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." wrote:
>
> > "Dewey Dykstra, Jr." wrote:
> > >
> > > Students' (and society's) problem with evolution theory might also have to
> > > do with the way science is taught to even the youngest as if we are
> > > indoctrinating possible future professional scientists with the Truth.
> > >
> > > Do this for long enough and you convince most they are not smart enough and
> > > most never change their understanding of the phenomena.  Gee! That's the
> > > outcome of Science "Education" now!  Go figure!
> > [snip]
> >
> > I think another Dewey (John...) would have concurred with this.
> >
> > Lawrence Kohlberg spoke of "the hidden curriculum": what
> > the school teaches by example, as opposed to what it says
> > it is doing "on the surface" (albeit, taken seriously,
> > even some of the propaganda is not appealing: "Come
> > here and work hard!" "No thank you.").
> >
> > We will not *inspire* students to love science
> > (or anything else, for that matter -- except perhaps
> > "being left alone"...), by continually making them
> > objects of measurement (aka "tests", etc.),
> > instead of inducting them into the noble order of
> > *measurers*.
> >
> > Man is the subject of the world, but everywhere he is
> > an object. (sound familiar?)
> >
> > +\brad mccormick
> >
> > --
> >   Let your light so shine before men,
> >               that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
> >
> >   Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
> >
> > <![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [log in to unmask]
> >   914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------
> >   Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/


--
  Let your light so shine before men,
              that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)

  Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)

<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [log in to unmask]
  914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
-----------------------------------------------------------------
  Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/