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A challenge not only to getting it "right" but getting it "less wrong" as well

Paul Grobstein's picture

See The Empirical Non-Foundationalist and the Phenomonologue: Getting It Less Wrong?  A continuing dialogue, between ... science and humanities?  A taste of the issues:

  • "this less-wrong place will undoubtably present us with unthought of problems, thus clearing new space and pushing us along in our perpetual creative play. yes yes. but what of the movement to more-wrong? given the unforeseeable nature of our development of and movement through different problems, whence the hierarchical LESS-wrong/MORE-wrong? ... if every movement from our place now is creative, and creative first of all of new problems to be encountered  ... there seems to be no more- or less-wrong, but only different and new problems, new wrongs and ways of being wrong"
  • "so what then of the potential for the movement from here into a more-wrong place, or, what amounts to the same thing, the potential for a repetitive movement, to be more generative than we could imagine? ... coming from philosophy, i surely experience this in Heidegger reading the Greeks, Deleuze reading Leibniz, or Derrida reading pretty much anything. there is great potential in encountering wrong ideas that persisted stagnantly as wrong for centuries"
  • "i worry that, without embracing a certain repetition that itself embraces difference, you preclude the generativity and excitement of an encounter with history, or messages from history (it seems this includes literature, poetry and the other arts) ... it would seem that science's encounter with history is an encounter only to forget this history, this very encounter, in order to move past it. a repetition that is not a careful inhabitation, but a violent refusal... that's a frightening idea for me, and a sad one"