Sean, one could say that certainty (of a sort) is in dominant effect within the
practice of engineering. While I subscribe (as an engineer) to the rubric that
'technology fails', engineering is all about applying 'truths' to control the
external world (and avoid failure). Failures make the news*, but the truths
literally comprise and maintain the bulk of the entire human infrastructure
around the planet. One can question how physical 'laws' are applied, but
questioning their effect would seem suicidal.
* The one that instantly comes to mind is the widespread failure of houses and
other structures made of un-reinforced adobe in catastrophic earthquakes. (Of
course there are other social factors—poverty leading the way along with blind
faith in Allah and inadequate education—than simply the engineering, but the
physical truth is ... demonstrable.)
John
On 11/11/23 1:33 AM, Sean Cubitt via nettime-l wrote:
Where certainty does leak into techno-scientific policy and application (as it
so often does since economics became a cyborg science), there is a specific
danger that consensus is closed down and replaced by blind faith, and that faith
is imposed on the global South as the victory of the epistemology of the North.
Nuance is also a victim of misinformation campaigns and what they have done to
their opponents' ways of thinking
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