Hi Yoshie,
>I do take the best & brightest of our enemies seriously, but taking them
>seriously doesn't necessarily lead one to revise one's convictions
>radically. The best & brightest of our enemies (from ancients to
>moderns), for me, have a virtue of clarifying what we are up
>against. They also give us a chance to force ourselves to recognize
>explicitly what it is exactly we are prepared to hold as truth, raising
>our inarticulate beliefs to the level of clearly articulated
>knowledge. So, I agree with you that serious engagement with our enemies
>has pedagogical values. ... Most importantly, the best & brightest of
>our enemies tend to allow us to see that our fundamental disagreements
>with them are over not so much empirical findings as premises (political &
>philosophical) from which we start our inquiries. To our enemies, we find
>ourselves saying, "you are asking wrong questions," "assumptions that
>govern your premises do not hold," etc.
I think this is right. In CAPITAL, Marx argued that the reactionary views
of the "vulgar economists" and even those of his more sophisticated
"scientific" opponents (such as David Ricardo) were a result of simply
looking at the surface of society, being sucked into the "fetishism of
commodities." They weren't _wrong_ as much as they presented extremely
incomplete visions (looking at the world from the point of view of the
individual businessperson, etc.) So we can learn something about the every
day workings of capitalism from non-Marxists (as Marx learned about finance
from the "banking school") while being cognizant of their ideology.
>While I find Kuhn's explanation of epistemological change unsatisfactory
>..., I do think he makes a good point in highlighting "the existence of
>this strong network of commitments -- conceptual, theoretical,
>instrumental, and methodological" (p. 42) in normal scientific inquiry.
I think that critical realism (Bashkar, etc.) allows us to transcend Kuhn.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
