Slothrop

Tight but Polite
The French Resistance, say. Or partisans in the Warsaw ghetto.
Not entirely responding to your point, but it seems worth mentioning that both of those groups were fundamentally pragmatic / empiricist. If you'd put the question to either of them, they'd have responded that a) what they want is for the Nazis to go aways and stop fucking over their nation / race and for things to be run roughly as they were prior to the Nazis taking over or roughly as they are somewhere that the nazis haven't taken over yet and that b) they believe that this situation would be better because they were in that situation five or ten years ago and it was better or because people in that somewhere seem to be doing better.

This seems to me to be practically quite different from the position of the communist revolutionary who says that a) what they want is for capitalism to go away and be replaced by something else (which they may or may not be willing to describe) and that b) they believe this situation will be better because they've proved it (fsvo proved).
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Science pretty much embodies the notion that there is a more rational way of thinking about reality than "common sense".

No, it doesn't. It embodies a method of data interpretation that has little to do with "thinking", as little to do with it as is humanly possible.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Systematic interpretation of data is not thinking? I think you have a somewhat narrow conception of what "thinking" is. In the sense you seem to mean, I don't believe mathematical reasoning is "thinking" either.
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
The polemic against common sense, the sense of the common, in favor of a superior meta-language, is elitist.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Something that I think is being elided too freely in this discussion is the difference between being broadly or even powerfully convinced that Badiou has certain things right, and thinking of oneself (or wishing to think of oneself) as a "militant of a truth" in the sense he establishes. There has been no Badiou-event; Badiou's philosophy is not a truth procedure. Whatever else it is to be a "Badiouvian" (and I am unconvinced that the organisers of the Birkbeck conference were anything of the sort), it is not incorporation into the body of a truth.

You keep saying "truth" as if simply uttering this is the final word on any political subject, and if people only had more "truths" they'd be more politically viable.

People already have their petty little opinions and "truths", and there are thousands and millions of organizations and institutions and political militias and so forth that believe in their "truths" enough to do really stupid, selfish, pig-minded shit in order to either get what they want or make a spectacle trying.

The problem is the world is a complicated place. It's often the case that even the most ABSOLUTIST truths have little bearing on what's actually at hand.

Scientists, when they're wrong, and the data proves it, move on. Dogmatists don't. That's the difference, and that's why scientists keep making things and dogmatists keep making genocide and societies that collapse within 50 years.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Systematic interpretation of data is not thinking? I think you have a somewhat narrow conception of what "thinking" is. In the sense you seem to mean, I don't believe mathematical reasoning is "thinking" either.

I don't believe in "thinking" as an abstract entity, nope.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Talk about your ridiculous "common sense" ideas...

Thinking is not some kind of ghost that flies around getting things done in the ether between peoples' heads, even though that's what most people who've not learned anything about neurology or cognitive science believe.
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
You really should have been a vicar Dominic, one of those quiet, liberal English-village types, talking earnestly about Jesus and resurrection to old ladies, rather than Events and Truths on an internet message board.

If anyone needs me, I'll be in the world-cum-event.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Talk about your ridiculous "common sense" ideas...

Thinking is not some kind of ghost that flies around getting things done in the ether between peoples' heads, even though that's what most people who've not learned anything about neurology or cognitive science believe.

Well, people's commonsense notions about things can be pretty...wrong.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Sometimes I just don't know what to think...

I think there is thinking involved in science, often quite nominally, sometimes very rigorously, but that were it not for the scientific method which corrects and reins in thinking, science wouldn't work or be what it is.

The problem is, what humans generally "perceive" to be true about the world isn't at all. What the world actually is is counter-intuitive to creatures with repitilian deep brain structures that are barely mediated by temporal and frontal lobes that overvalue things like human faces, language, music, etc. It is very, very difficult to correct for human "thinking". Science is very hard because of the limited brains we have to work with.
 

swears

preppy-kei
Poetix: when you've talked about "common sense" on this thread do you mean received wisdom? The hegemonic common sense imposed by ruling interests, the kind Gramsci was on about? Just wanted to clear that up.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The problem is, what humans generally "perceive" to be true about the world isn't at all. What the world actually is is counter-intuitive to creatures with repitilian deep brain structures that are barely mediated by temporal and frontal lobes that overvalue things like human faces, language, music, etc. It is very, very difficult to correct for human "thinking". Science is very hard because of the limited brains we have to work with.

Well yeeees, but I don't think that implies "science involves as little thinking as possible".

I put it to you that Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, Einstein and Feynman were all at least averagely good at "thinking", for any remotely reasonable definition of the word.
 
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