Let's put it another way: suppose you're making some argument and you have in mind a particular interpretation of the 60s that would support your claim; but instead of presenting that version, you present a scrupulously neutral presentation of the 60s at the point where your tendentious interpretation would hook into the larger argument you're making. The reader either gets what you're (not) getting at or they don't.
But what you've done is suppress your reason for referring to the 60s at all by moving to the scrupulously neutral version, and you've done this instead of just not reaching for the 60s in making your argument. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too, and violating Grice's maxims. It's not about whether the point you're making is persuasive or worth considering or 'legitimate' in some sense; it's the roundabout way of (not) making the point that is at issue.
Explaining human behaviour prompts us to reflect on the nature of objectivity, because it raises questions about the form objectivity takes once we go beyond the natural sciences. Consider the case of an anthropologist studying a rain dance. We can safely assume that rain dances could not actually cause it to rain, and that the lack of correlation between the dances and rainfall would be evident to any disinterested observer. Yet the dance is always performed at times of drought. What are we to make of this? Assume that there is evidence that, in times of drought, social strife and uncertainty about the nature of authority increases. Because the dance does not bring success in what the dancers consider to be its aim, we might argue that the reason for the dance should be given in functionalist terms: it secures social cohesion at a time when this is at risk. But there is also a sense in which this explanation is a wholly inappropriate: the dancers perform the rain dance only when they want it to rain, and their reason for performing it is clearly that they believe that it will increase the chance of rain. Are we sacrificing explanatory plausibility in proceeding with a functionalist explanation?
Suppose we are trying to explain the rain dance to someone who is completely unfamiliar with the phenomenon: could we be said to have offered something informative if it did not even mention the intention on the part of the dancers to make it rain?
Yet there is something unsatisfactory about denying any objectivity to the non-functionalist anthropologist’s localized account in this way. To highlight the issue, consider the case of a particularly crude functionalism, where it is simply a matter of imposing a universal grid on a broadly identified class of rituals, without any investigation of particular cases. Chemistry might be taken as a model here: if someone mixes hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide, we know the reaction will produce sodium chloride and water. There is nothing of an individual nature about the reagents, and we do not need to investigate the particular physical reaction to understand what is happening. So too the idea is that variations in rituals are superficial, and their core is always functional: social cohesion is paramount in any society, and rituals are one of the most effective ways of achieving this, especially in a primitive society.
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The claims of functionalism to objectivity rest very centrally on the analogies between the way in which it deals with its subject matter and the way in which the natural sciences deal with their subject matter.
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A second kind of response to the problems raised by functionalism is to abandon the claim that this is the only kind of account that can proceed objectively, and to insist that objectivity might actually require us to adopt the values of the participants. To return to the rain dance example, the argument is that the functionalist account fails to – indeed cannot but fail to – capture the thought that motivates the participants in the dance. One way in which this contrast is sometimes expressed is in terms of the distinction between reasons and causes: giving the reasons someone has for doing something (or interpreting the behaviour) and giving the causes of their behaviour are two different things. The difference is between appropriate interpretation of the behaviour and appropriate explanation of it. The former has to answer to how the actors themselves conceive of what they are doing, whereas the latter does not.
The idea that objectivity in modern science consists in the elimination of arbitrary judgements is a useful move beyond that of objectivity simply consisting in the elimination of prejudice or bias... The problem facing properly trained scientists is not usually a general one of bias or prejudice, but something specific to the kinds of investigations they carry out. [E.g. having to remove artefacts from an electron microscope scan, standardizing a model of the human skeleton to remove individual defects or evidence of aging/past injury, etc.]
seems like it stems from the common tendency to conflate "truth" and "objectivity." — Count Timothy von Icarus
I have no idea how you got that out of what I wrote or what you quoted. I was making very close to the opposite point, that you need to commit to an interpretative presentation for the history lesson to hook into a larger argument. Reciting only facts leaves out how those facts contribute to the argument and why what they contribute matters (unless that's clarified elsewhere, obviously). It turns reasons into non-sequiturs.
Simply stated, Husserl's central argument is that if
the origin of geometry is forgotten, then one forgets the historical nature of such disciplines. But why is that important? It is important because geometry expresses in its most pure form what Husserl calls "the theoretical attitude', which is the stance that the natural sciences take towards their objects.
Husserl's point is that to reactivate knowledge of the origin of geometry is to recall the way in which the theoretical attitude of the sciences belongs to a determinate social and historical context, what Husserl famously calls the "life-world" (Lebenswelt). Husserl's critical and polemical point is that the activity of science has, since Galileo, resulted in what he calls a "mathematization of nature," that overlooks the necessary dependence of science upon the everyday practices of the life- world. There is a gap between knowledge and wisdom, between science and everyday life.
This is the situation that Husserl calls "crisis," which occurs when the theoretical attitude of the sciences comes to define the way in which all entities are viewed. The task of philosophy, in Husserl's sense of the word (i.e. phenomenology), is to engage in a critical and historical reflection upon the origin of tradition that permits an active and reactivating experience of tradition against the pernicious naiveties of our present image of the past.
Matters are not so different in the early Heidegger's conception of Destruktion, the deconstruction of the history of ontology, which is precisely not a way of destroying the past, but rather of seeking the positive tendencies of the tradition and working against what Heidegger labels its "baleful prejudices."
Husserl's critical and polemical point is that the activity of science has, since Galileo, resulted in what he calls a "mathematization of nature," that overlooks the necessary dependence of science upon the everyday practices of the life- world. There is a gap between knowledge and wisdom, between science and everyday life.
This is the situation that Husserl calls "crisis," which occurs when the theoretical attitude of the sciences comes to define the way in which all entities are viewed.
Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other". — Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, 1983
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