cyber pragma bot 🤖

Take the orbiting planets, which are the usual symbols of law rather than trend. In fact the solar system is a mere physical tendency. It endures because nothing disturbs it. (3/3)

— David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 20

Trends, of course, are merely contingent and superficial drifts rather than reliable necessities within phenomena. The answer is that this distinction is spurious. (2/3)

But still the objection must be met: doesn't the social world present us with mere trends and tendencies and not the genuine law-like regularity of the natural world? (1/3)

— David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 20

If a rush of troubled stories is the best way to tell about contaminated diversity, then it’s time to make that rush part of our knowledge practices. (6/6)

— Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 633

Without algorithms based on self-containment, scholars and policymakers might have to learn something about the cultural and natural histories at stake. That takes time, and too much time, perhaps, for those who dream of grasping the whole in an equation. But who put them in charge? (5/6)

Without self-contained units, it is impossible to compute costs and benefits, or functionality, to any “one” involved. No self-contained individuals or groups assure their self-interests oblivious to the encounter. (4/6)

Contaminated diversity is not only particular and historical, ever changing, but also relational. It has no self-contained units; its units are counter-based collaborations. (3/6)

One reason is that contaminated diversity is complicated, often ugly, and humbling. […]
Worse yet, contaminated diversity is recalcitrant to the kind of “summing up” that has become the hallmark of modern knowledge. (2/6)

Contaminated diversity is everywhere. If such stories are so widespread and so well known, the question becomes: Why don’t we use these stories in how we know the world? (1/6)

— Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 633

… What variation there is in the opposing opinions will merely reflect the varying fortunes of the social ideologies which underpin the accounts of knowledge concerned. (5/5)

— David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 80

Here the mind works on the level of what is intuitively self-evident to it — and this means depending on the taken-for-granted thought processes of some social group. (4/5)

When reflecting on first principles, our reason very soon reaches the point where it no longer raises further questions or requires further justifications. (3/5)

… If this claim is correct, then criticism and self-criticism in philosophy are simply affirmations of the values and perspectives of some social group. (2/5)

Unless we adopt a scientific approach to the nature of knowledge, then our grasp of that nature will be no more than a projection of our ideological concerns … Epistemology will be merely implicit propaganda. (1/5)

— David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 80

...the field of abstract universals, a field which properly belongs to the province of science. (7/7)

— Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 603

But since the day of Plato, it has been a characteristic of all mysticism that it transfers this feeling of the irrationality of the unique individual, and of our unique relations to individuals, to a different field, namely, to... (6/7)

...that they repeated exactly all the actions and experiences of all other men who belong to this class. It is the uniqueness of our experiences which, in this sense, makes our lives worth living, the unique experience of a landscape, of a sunset, of the expression of a human face. (5/7)

Most people would feel, for example, that what makes their lives worth living would largely be destroyed if they themselves, and their lives, were in no sense unique but in all and every respect typical of a class of people, so... (4/7)

But the unique individual and his unique actions and experiences and relations to other individuals can never be fully rationalized. And it appears to be just this irrational realm of unique individuality which makes human relations important. (3/7)

The universal, the typical, is not only the domain of reason, but it is also largely the product of reason, in so far as it is the product of scientific abstraction. (2/7)

Science can describe general types of landscape, for example, or of man, but it can never exhaust one single individual landscape, or one single individual man. (1/7)

— Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 603

...claim to a socially legible identity (3/3)

— Helen Hester, Xenofeminism, p. 23

...gendered and racialized characteristics are no more a basis of discrimination than the colour of one’s eyes, or whether or not one has freckles, or whether or not one can roll one’s tongue: that is, until they no longer operate as the basis of a... (2/3)

gender abolitionism is ‘shorthand for the ambition to construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power’.44 The struggle must continue until currently... (1/3)

— Helen Hester, Xenofeminism, p. 23

If we can live with moral relativism we can live with cognitive relativism. (3/3)

— David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 159

It does not need any ultimate metaphysical sanction to support it or make it possible.There need be no such thing as Truth, other than conjectural, relative truth, any more than there need be absolute moral standards rather than locally accepted ones. (2/3)

What constitutes the very existence of science is its status as an ongoing activity. It is ultimately a pattern of thought and behaviour, a style of going about things which has its characteristic norms and values. (1/3)

— David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 159

Theories, on the other hand, can only be understood as tentative solutions of problems, and in relation to problem situations. (4/4)

— Karl Popper, Unended Quest, p. 162

Thus there is only too often the problem of formulating the problem—and the problem whether this was really the problem to be formulated. Thus problems, even practical problems, are always theoretical. (3/4)

Problems are not easily identified or described, unless, indeed, some ready-made problem has been set us, as in an examination; but even then we may find that the examiner did not formulate his problem well, and that we can do better. (2/4)