Timeline for How does Desire create the Real?
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| Jan 17, 2014 at 23:58 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | Thus desire and whose-behalf concerns are--if the science has been done correctly, which at times it is not (but scientists do know how to spot weaknesses)--to be asked of funding sources and about choice of topic, instead. Indeed, I believe one of the central jobs of the philosophy of science is to explain how, in the face of subjective lenses highlighted by Nietzsche, Deleuze, and various others, can science nonetheless repeatedly return reliable results that resist the most determined efforts of culture to overturn them. (Homeopathy doesn't work, no matter how much some want it to.) | |
| Jan 17, 2014 at 23:56 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @JosephWeissman - I do not argue that the thinker naturally wants truth, but I very strenuously object to the idea that the good will of the thinker is enough! It is most assuredly not, and this is why we have years of training, peer review, and the philosophy of science. However, all these things act in concert to render questions about "whose behalf", "active process of creating problems", and so on, largely moot at the level of the correctness of individual results. That's the point, and the evidence is great that proper methodology and training can protect from distortions. | |
| Jan 17, 2014 at 22:51 | comment | added | Joseph Weissman♦ | The problem to my mind here is the idea that the thinker naturally wants truth, that one assumes the good will of the thinker is sufficient to discover truth -- in short, we have an image of thought in which thinking is conceived as natural activity, rather than as an active process of creating problems. (Again cf. the early Deleuze; Empiricism and Subjectivity seems particularly appropriate...) | |
| Jan 17, 2014 at 22:50 | comment | added | Joseph Weissman♦ | +1, the point that Deleuze/Holland are not 'philosophers of science' per se is well-taken; but I do think the question about collective investments of desire in science is at least valid. In passing, I might suggest thinking about Nietzsche's question (what is the meaning of science, i.e., on whose behalf does the scientist attempt to nullify their desires and become a pure lens for truth to pass through?) and, again just in passing, the early Deleuze on the structure of sense and the nature of the desire for truth seems possibly relevant here... | |
| Jan 17, 2014 at 21:59 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @Cameron - The desirous components are inessential components. Maybe you'll be motivated by salvation. Maybe you just like that science works. Doesn't really matter which; the important part is that you do science. Everyone uses ATP for metabolism, but I don't make much of "ATPousness" when talking about the philosophy of science (or any other philosophy). | |
| Jan 17, 2014 at 21:56 | comment | added | Cameron | But surely the Enlightenment culture of rationalism invests the scientific method as a sort of salvation over the forces of theological false knowledge? This can't be said to lack desirous components. | |
| Jan 17, 2014 at 21:42 | history | edited | Rex Kerr | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 17, 2014 at 21:35 | history | answered | Rex Kerr | CC BY-SA 3.0 |