Subject: Re: Reason & Metanarratives
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 1997 23:57:30 PST


Hi again

Next time, I'll read all of my messages before getting keystroke-happy 
:)

Mark wrote:

>I have found this exchange extrememly informative; many thanks.

Couldn't agree more.

>>The problem though isn't in rewrites but in the insistence that 
science
>>alone holds "the truth"--that its findings--its way of describing the
>>world--is more "factual" or better than other ways of explaining the
>>world.  Science insists on this by way of its methodology--the 
prejudice
>>that accords greater value to a method which seems to be rigorous--the
>>prejudice that associates rigour with greater truth value. . . . . . . 

Or, for another perspective, science as a particular view of the world 
is profoundly based in the modernist epistemology, and is built into the 
power/knowledge structures in our societies.

>Does not the abandonment of subjectivity leave us
>with nothing but science; and vice versa, he abandonment of >science 
leave
>us with nothing but subjectivity?

What you bring up here is, to me, one of the classic differend's of 
modernity: we are fronted up with this dualism, and feel obliged to 
choose between - subjective or objective (and, of course, it's brothers 
and sisters, fact v fiction, body v soul, etc.)

I think that we need to reject the vocabulary we have inherited here 
from the history of philosophy, and look for new ways of dividing up the 
world.  As Wittgenstein says, philosophy should be about getting around 
the problems inherent in our ways of describing the world.

>>Derrida responded by asking how can one even
>>begin by presuming this existence of "good will"?

Sounds like good philosophy to me (from Derrida??!!)

Thanks again for the great discussion.  This is honestly my last post 
for the day!

Jon Roffe
-----
"If I contradict myself, I contradict myself
I am large, and contain multitudes"
(Walt Whitman)
-----


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