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----- Original Message ----- From: "domfox" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: 12 January 2002 23:46 Subject: Re: A Responsibility to Awe | It seems to me that the irony works this way: it 'fesses up to the | authoritarianism underlying most of the current pieties about the need to | put science in its place. The sociology-of-science line about scientific | practices being social practices is not at bottom a descriptive statement | but a normative one. It implies rather strongly that the mechanisms of | scientific enquiry are *not* simply subordinate to the social mechanisms by | which they are circumstanced, that they are actually rather troublesomely | inclined to produce socially aberrant and potentially embarrassing results, | and that their divisive and anti-social autonomy needs to be brought back | into line through some species of moral regulation. You can make the same | arguments about poetry. No, it doesn't work like that. For all the glassy shininess of the expressive apparatus employed, the conclusion is unfounded. I implied nothing of the sort. L