Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!strath-cs!glasgow!gilbert From: gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng Subject: Re: Non-science not non-sense? Message-ID: <1597@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> Date: 31 Aug 88 17:39:24 GMT References: <536@buengc.BU.EDU> <573@white.gcm> Reply-To: gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) Distribution: all Organization: Comp Sci, Glasgow Univ, Scotland Lines: 59 In article <573@white.gcm> dc@white.UUCP (Dave Caswell) writes: > >Your stating something like that as the economy becomes more service-oriented >that we will add other things (mysticism etc.) besides science as a basis >for truth. No I'm not. What I'm saying is that classical scientific method is less productive for the sort of problems which face a service as opposed to a production dominated economy. Science remains of paramount importance for production. As for "adding", this is not the case. Nothing needs to be added because all the alternative forms of knowing which I mentioned already exist. I have invented nothing. What will change is the balance between science and other forms of knowing in terms of which is the right approach for certain classes of problem. I was not predicting the victory of religion or mysticism, only an increased awareness that classical scientific method isn't the only answer to our ignorance. I presume all your dealers in Greenwich Capital Markets are scientists and that management assess all staff by scientific criteria? >1) How can mysticism, occult, religion provide any basis for truth. Ask a mystic, occultist or religious person, not me. I just recognise that these are valuable ways of knowing for some people, but that science gets all the money for state religion these days :-) >2) Why is a service oriented economy any more likely to settle for > invalid means of asserting truth. It won't. It will just have to change it's ideas about validity (*it* being those portions of society with the power to advance one way of knowing over another). In the 1960s science was advanced over the humanities, now in medicine and management, the "case-studies" tradition of the humanities is becoming dominant again. The issues here are over research policy, as most people are not full-time scientists in their day to day interaction. >Science may not be the "only proper source of truth", but what in the world >does intuition have to do with it? Come on, have a guess :-) >Why does religion have less value (your word) in material production and >more in a service dominated economy. Did I say this? I only thing I hinted at was the relationship between science and religion in economies driven by material production. Religion hasn't been very good at many things which science has had a hand in, maybe? I'm happier with arguments for the historical trend than I am for any hypothesis on its cause. Historically, there has been a tendency to deny the validity of religious knowledge for an understanding of nature since Bacon's time. As to why, the simplest explanation is one of power. Religion has lost its secular authority and science has replaced it in many areas. But the loss of secular authority by religion (in the West at least) has had as much (if not more) to do with changes in political ideology as it has with the rise of science (secularism preceded the Great Instauration). Oh, and don't put words into my mouth, it's full anyway :-) -- Gilbert Cockton, Department of Computing Science, The University, Glasgow gilbert@uk.ac.glasgow.cs !ukc!glasgow!gilbert