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When I called Mike, last week, on his use of the term "pseudoscience" (since something that is "not science" isn't necessarily "false science") he offered, as substitute, the word "parascience." I have been mulling over that intriguing alternative for a while, and as part of that process, just looked up the etymology of the prefix "para-." There are two: the first one, most commonly known, means "by the side of," "past or beyond." So a "parascience" (like literary study or history) might just exist "alongside" science, but it could also have come "before" science, or represent that which lies "beyond it," encompassing a larger sphere.

The second--and to me now even more intriguing--etymology comes from "parare: to prepare, defend from, shelter" (think "parapluie," which protects from the rain, or "parasol," which protects from the sun). I've had fun playing w/ this sense, in which the humanities might be said to "protect" science from itself (perhaps from its illusions that it exists w/out human investments, or outside of power relations....?) This is what much contemporary science studies does; I'm reading right now an intriguing book by Patti Lather called Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science, which asks "how research-based knowledge remains possible after so much questioning of the very ground of science." It's only possible (no surprise) if inquiry is acknowledged as a social practice; it's less the nature of science, than its effects, that are now seen to be @ stake.

Along these lines, and in preparation for a new course on emergent systems that Paul and I will be teaching this fall, I've also just finished a monolithic study, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which sets the challenge of developing "history as a science." In his conclusion, Diamond catalogues the difficulties facing scholars in the historical sciences (among which he includes not just students of human history, but astronomers, climatologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, geologists, and paleontologists): these difficulties include "the impossibility of performing replicated, controlled experimental interventions, the complexity arising from enormous numbers of variables, the resulting uniqueness of each system, the consequent impossibility of formulating universal laws, and the difficulties of predicting emergent properties and future behavior." In other words, in the language we've been using here, it's all about the impossibility of using formal systems.

I was raised in a rural area, by a farming family who ofttimes feels themselves @ the mercy of unpredictable weather systems. I'm quite sure, looking back, that a good part of what drew me to a bookish life was an escape from the unpredictable, the desire to have the kind of work where I could be more in control of outcomes (and, perhaps paradoxically, freer of the dictates of the material world, more able to go exploring imaginatively). Of course what I've learned over the past few decades is that teaching and learning is not predictable (and that it's all the more interesting, the more unpredictable it is!). But I do understand the strong draw of formal systems.

And now, given our recent complex conversations, I'm wondering how widespread this phenomenon is. I'm thinking, for example, of David Ross's account of his distressed realization, as an economist, that his work of "counting changes what is counted"; or of Wil Franklin's repeated queries about how, "in a sea of change," we might "find any ground upon which to base action?"  How many of us became (and continue to practice as) academics, in search of the (illusive?) security that formal systems offer? How many of us come to recognize it that search as illusory, and make adjustments....?