A big ass mess...

If there is one thing that I can honestly say I fully understood coming out of this class that changed me, it is that, as Jim said today, "the world is crazy." There is nothing clean about how things work. Much as we may try, purifying or depurifying, everything is a mess of knots of inter connectivity with so many other issues in major and minor ways. We may try as best as we can to obtain pure data by removing outside influence from say the environment, but the human element is always there. The is always a human bias simply because we are the one looking for the ideas and we are the ones creating them and using them.

Most, or at least most who spoke, seemed to find this mess of inter connectivity that depurifies everything bothersome. I will honestly say that I disagree. While it may be true that I certainly know more, about what I know and how it may have come to be what it is, or where it came from, this does not fundamentally change the way the world works. Have some foundations changed? Hell yes, some shifted left or right, up or down, and some were removed altogether. But society has not changed fundamentally and I can continue to live as I did before, except I know have a level of clarity, or blur as it may be, about what I am seeing and what the natural human interpretations of what I am seeing may be. Perhaps this discontent simply comes from the fact that none of us can think exactly as we did before, hence the shifting foundations. But we all should have seen this going in unless we became a wall to the information presented to us. When paradigms shifts, so do the foundations upon which they are built. I will be more thoughtful about what I learn as a result of this class, but it does not fundamentally change anything except which neurons might fire in my head (hello Pinkerton) or how my past experiences influence my train of thought (hello Lewontin), as it may be. The basis of knowledge that we "know" does not change all that dramatically. Liquid helium was discovered in a scientific race, and so was the composition of the moon. Obviously there were certain motivations to most, if not all, scientific discoveries in our Cartesian system of knowledge, but that just make them all the more interesting if I may say so myself, it gives them a humanity if you will. Facts still emerge and these facts can still be used, we just have a new, dirtier looking glass that presents a fuller picture of what we are seeing. As long as we remember how the knowledge was created, we can better interpret its meaning to the fullest, and I think this is exactly what the "we have forgotten so much" idea is getting at. I am very excited at the prospect of a muddled and messy scientific humanitarian world in which each of our realities is created upon, and how these realities coalesce into a conscious base of knowledge is all the better for it, given we can understand that not all realities are created equal, given the weight that the humanities, or the idea that human knowledge is created by and for humans, does indeed carry in the field of science, and how this plays into this interaction between the two and between these realities.

...now I understand why Latour had such difficulty giving words to this idea...

Awesome class Robin and Ben!