Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

[altariel]

Pushing around the phrases 'faith-based community' and 'reality-based community', and sent back to Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox by this post from fictualities, I find:

The quarrel between these rival types of knowledge - that which results from methodical inquiry, and the more impalpable kind that consists in the 'sense of reality', in 'wisdom' - is very old. And the claims of both have generally been recognised to have some validity: the bitterest clashes have been concerned with the precise line which marks the frontier between their territories.

The sociologist Thomas Gieryn calls these clashes and struggles 'boundary work'; the attempts to define the scope and limits of disciplinary authority. They often crash together, like tectonic plates.

Comments

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I haven't read that particular book, but I'm very suspicious of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. I know at least one very good scientist who isn't, though.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Any all-encompassing vision of human nature is too inherently subjective to call it science.

I feel that while I'm not qualified to judge whether or not it's good biology, I think it really sucks as a study of society. Lacks reflexivity, just to begin with.


Or perhaps I am saying that only because my own hedgehog theory of human nature is that context is everything - and that is something that evolutionary psychologists tend to ignore.

I'm also of the 'context is everything' school.