if JLN was alluding to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, it's worth noting that physicists themselves are divided into many camps over what it all "means."
the excellent answers.com article on quantum mechanics has this to say:
The time evolution of wave functions is
deterministic in the sense that, given a wavefunction at an initial time, it makes a definite prediction of what the wavefunction will be at any later time. During a
measurement, the change of the wavefunction into another one is not deterministic, but rather unpredictable, i.e.
random.
so unpredictability only occurs due to measurement, if the above statement is correct.
Source
To all,
It is unusual to have a thread with such convergence of repondents. Perhaps the focal issue of "the body" being at the intersection of "self" and "the world" involves greater willingness to dip toes in the philosophical water.
Whatever the case, the exchange is certainly encouraging.
I've read Foucault's Archeology of Knowledge but I didn't find it easy to follow apart from the stuff about private language being used to gain power.
Anybody here capable of a brief explanatory note on it?
I would think Foucault would have given an emphatic "Yes!" to the question posed here.Am I right about him leaving aside whether he was right or not.
Cardiology has a firmer basis in reality than psychiatry. Just because you can provide medicine to stop somebody thinking or behaving a certain way, doesn't mean that you neccessarily should.
or that the person necessarily has an illness.
I am studying speech pathology which is, admittedly, considerably more subjective than medicine . However, the further we study, the more it becomes indoctrination and the less education. They are forcing us to adopt a set of attitudes and if we can't regurgitate them sufficiently, we'd fail. You have to be firmly steeped in the doctrine to contribute to the field . In fact, although most of it's meant to be based on research, a lot of the research is methologically flawed and pointless ( or, at least, unable to see the bigger picture) . In order to make it to the top of the field, you have to do an incredible amount of arse-kissing and adopt most of the theories and opinions of the other people at the top of the field as being valid. Otherwise they'd not listen to you. I expect that medicine is a lot of the same old-boy/girl's networks.
Spendius, i haven't read Foucault, but in my field, "private language" is certainly used to establish power. ONe of the factors of success in the field is being able to regurgitate all teh shitty specialist vocabulary. Often the categories we place people in is flawed ( especially when talking about conditions with "soft neurological damage" ) and makes it easy to ignore the diversity of interpretation and how inaccurate the categories often are. Being able to give people labels ( through the virtue of being qualified to administer standardised tests , which none of my peers or professors consider critically, although they have a lot of major inaccuracies) , makes lay people think that we know what we are talking about, and have more authority than they do, even though if they had our background information they could reasonably cme to a different interpretation of the material. Specialists, who haven't evaluated the situation appropriately, are given absolutely authority.
I too have not read Foucault, a confession that, as a social scientist, I hesitate to make. I suspect that his "archaeology" of knowledge is similar to (and perhaps derivative of) Nietzsche's method of historical investigation. The latter's "genealogy" of morals, for example, attempts to demystify morality (to remove it from its supernatural rationale in preparation for the develolpment of a naturalistic morality) by seeking out the conditions of its origination. He sometimes attributed this orientation to his training as a philologist. Foucault "digs" into the historical development of institutions just as Nietzsche goes back to the origins of ideas (qua linguistic phenomena) for their illumination.
Just a guess.
