What is the link between knowledge, science and right-wing politics?

Define 'before' without reference to the human concept of ' linear time' !

In connection with that you might like to consider that if 'time started with the Big Bang', does the phrase 'before the Big Bang' mean anything ? Some scientists think it does !

But the key issue that you are missing is that there are no independent facts. All 'discovery' is enmeshed within a web of human social needs, resources and values. Unless you understand that perception is active and motivated, not passive or neutral, you will have nothing to contribute to this thread.

Yes, the idea of 'before' the big bang is troublesome. It is one of the indicators of the limits of our knowledge and perceptions..


I don't think a contribution consists of being right or even that someone is playing the same game..!

I perceive contributing as asking questions, making comments, stimulating conversation. 'Right' or 'wrong', these things all serve to contribute to a subject as it gets people thinking, conversing, new questions arise and clarifications made..


Functionalism much? Fan of Foucault? Chomsky didn't agree, but great debates!

There is a lot less education going on in school now but at a much more advanced level.
Candlelight8

Quote fresco:

So you somehow have it figured that Homo Sapiens evolved 195,000 years ago, the Moon started circling the Earth and the Earth started circling the Sun simultaneously?

You still don't get the point. Without humans there can be no concepts like 'moon' or 'circling' or 'climate change'. It is irrelevant to this thread that we now can imagine scenarios prior to our current existence, or in the future, except where those scenarios bring us into social conflict (e.g. Galileo vs Pope or 'global warming').

Quote:

It doesn't matter if we can imagine a time prior to our existence, since the Moon would still be going around the Earth, and the Earth would still be going around the Sun even before our species came into existence. For if the Moon did not revolve around the Earth before human existence and the Earth did not revolve around the Sun prior to human existence, there would be no human existence in the first place. Which wouldn't affect the Moon, Sun and Earth revolving-wise.

Sorry, I think I meant Structuralism, not Functionalism.

Read my point about the status of the concept of 'causality'. You are basically stuck with a circular argument in which that concept, plus 'existence' per se is taken as 'given'. In the history of Philosophy, such a mechanistic view was countered by the 'idealism' movement in which, following Kant, no access to noumena (things-in-themselves....independent realities) was the starting point. All 'things' were considered to be 'phenomena' or 'mental experiences' embedded in social communicative networks. Such networks (paradigms) 'shift' as what we call 'knowledge' progresses(Kuhn), and it is within the realm of such shifting that the political angle has its place.
I don't intend to re-iterate the point further. Reference to the copious literature on 'the sociology of knowledge' should alone be sufficient to underscore the point irrespective of philosophical objections to the simplistic 'realism' of 'physics' that you are clinging to.

Its my understanding that Hume was the first to flesh this out..He took Locke's starting point to its logical conclusion stating that all things and causality were unknown, causality being but habit. Things go into us, but once they have gone in, what happens is unknown not unreal, just not known- hence the Skeptic. I haven't read Kant yet, but I assume he continued Hume's ideas, adding ethics into the mix and perhaps some other ideas? Perhaps Das Ding An Sich was more associated with Kant, but Hume came before..

Also, are you on the spectrum of the Structuralists?

Not a structuralist.. a constructivist of which Piaget was a good example.
Others are cited here.
http://www.oikos.org/vonobserv.htm