Re: JP Barlow, Ph.D, Social Engineering

Kathryn Aegis (aegis@igc.apc.org)
Thu, 26 Sep 1996 22:49:33 +0000


>Kathryn, unless I (and others) have misunderstood what you've been saying,
>for quite some time now now you've been arguing in favour of using in
>social studies, methods less formal than science advocates, while STILL
>wishing to call the studies sciences --- in other words, you've been trying
>to soften the strict foundations of science, or at least to muddy the
>waters in such a way that a non-science can appear as a science.

I apologize to this list for this discussion involving me getting so
far. My original intention was to listen, then I responded to
something Eugene wrote without realizing that I was replying to this
list. And now, I can only interpret this post by Rich as a continuing
attack on the social sciences that began on the transhumanist list
and has migrated to this list.

My use of Bart Kosko's quote was to supplement my own spontaneous
poetics on the nature of knowledge, which I now realize was a mistake
to have posted to this list.

I don't make any apologies for being a student of the social
sciences, and I fail to understand how my own estimation of the
methodologies of the social sciences undermines the methodologies of
the "hard" sciences. My own contention has always been that
different types of knowledge require different tools of measurement
and analysis.

Having said that, I now exit this discussion.

Sin,

Kathryn Aegis