a point ...
(Accidently typed "a pint" there, for those into Freudian style slips.)
The point of the Roman bridges is this ...
If you were going to design a structure that was going to stand for 2000 years the primary force with which you would be concerned is stress.
Roman science had no such force in its ontological committments.
Obviously the Romans had accounted for it, or the bridges would have fallen down (all the way, and probably quickly).
And the moral of that is ...
The physical theory of that people can not account for the success of one of their primary feats, Roman Architecture.
And the question becomes ...
What, then, is doing the work? In what manner did the engineers understand and convey to future generations the embedded knowledge of stress.
Well ... somehow. Fine for the Romans.
But what about us?
Do we have any reason to believe that our best physical theories are "doing the work" when it comes to our finest accomplishments (say, space endevours)?
Newton and his Principia seem to me to be the best argument that maybe our physical theory is different. But more on that later.
Kant's position, some generations after Newton, when it was really beginning to look like a special kind of revolution ... Kant was in an intellectual and historical position to spell out, or at least point the way, to what was going on.
Hypothesis ... if Kant talking about Newton does not give us a mechanism for believing that our physical theory really does do some work, then it is unlikely that other investigations will yield a better result. That is, on the surface, this is our best shot.
The point of the Roman bridges is this ...
If you were going to design a structure that was going to stand for 2000 years the primary force with which you would be concerned is stress.
Roman science had no such force in its ontological committments.
Obviously the Romans had accounted for it, or the bridges would have fallen down (all the way, and probably quickly).
And the moral of that is ...
The physical theory of that people can not account for the success of one of their primary feats, Roman Architecture.
And the question becomes ...
What, then, is doing the work? In what manner did the engineers understand and convey to future generations the embedded knowledge of stress.
Well ... somehow. Fine for the Romans.
But what about us?
Do we have any reason to believe that our best physical theories are "doing the work" when it comes to our finest accomplishments (say, space endevours)?
Newton and his Principia seem to me to be the best argument that maybe our physical theory is different. But more on that later.
Kant's position, some generations after Newton, when it was really beginning to look like a special kind of revolution ... Kant was in an intellectual and historical position to spell out, or at least point the way, to what was going on.
Hypothesis ... if Kant talking about Newton does not give us a mechanism for believing that our physical theory really does do some work, then it is unlikely that other investigations will yield a better result. That is, on the surface, this is our best shot.
posted by Thomas F. Schminke at 10:11 AM
1 Comments:
A side-note/partial answering of earlier question:
The question of "what is doing the work" is essential.
One of the things Foucault shows us about power is that political leaders or political parties do not effect change. It is a set of forces that run concurrently and they are more like ideology than governmental power. But it is not Marxist ideology per se...but discourse. It is politics, for Foucault. The article you gave me the other day was very interesting -- Foucault didn't interest himself in mainstream political discussions because he saw the type of politics that were "doing the work" to be discursive rather than politically obvious. I think this is where he differed with Noam Chomsky, too.
But, to answer your earlier question in a different way...
I see politics to be doing the work in the same sense as Foucault.
I'm examining the inevitability of the individual inscribed by the will of the collective through discourse. What falls outside of discourse seems to be where you and I differ.
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