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From: dcs2e@darwin.clas.virginia.edu (David Swanson)
Subject: Re: Is "Social Text" showing good faith? (was: Sokal's Hoax)
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Date: Tue, 4 Jun 1996 04:25:23 GMT
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In article <4ovuss$g6j@mtinsc01-mgt.ops.worldnet.att.net>
"Michael R. Rhum" <mrrhum@worldnet.att.net> writes:

> PMJI, but a couple of comments on this exchange:
> 
> 1. When doing fieldwork in Thailand I met an Oxford-educated astronomer 
> who teaches at the country's leading university.  He told me that he does 
> work in astrology and I asked him if this wasn't a contradiction with his 
> education in astronomy.  "Maybe to your western mind," he answered.
> 
> 2. Astrology may be a descriptive failure from astronomy's point of view, 
> but it is not from its own.  It is doing something entirely different 
> which does not include giving empirical descriptions of the planets as 
> part of its project.  Astronomy and astrology are, if you'll pardon the 
> expression, incommensurable.  Note that this does not preclude the 
> possibility that one or both of them are factually false from the 
> viewpoint of the gods, only that it isn't easy to use one as a stick to 
> beat the other.

I agree.  But when one has shown the planets to be hunks of matter
obeying the same sorts of laws as do little rocks here on our planet,
assigning magical powers to them seems, at the least, arbitrary.  One
could just as well assign them to coffee grounds or something - as, of
course, people do.


David

"Resistance to the proposition that the essence of truth is freedom is
based on preconceptions, the most obstinate of which is that freedom is
a property of man."  Martin Heidegger, "On the Essence of Truth," [Vom
Wesen der Wahrheit] translated by John Sallis, in "Basic Writings,"
(old version, 1977) p.126.
