From: schan@birch.srg.af.mil (Stephen Chan x4485)
Subject: Re: More ki/qi/chi & science
Organization: SRG, Arinc Research Corp., Annapolis, MD
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 92 17:54:34 GMT

In article <1h53slINN65m@usenet.pa.dec.com> stark@dwovax.enet.dec.com (Todd I. Stark) writes:
>
>Responding to this interesting exchange between Mikel and Stephen.
>
>Stephen seems to be arguing for an inherent bias and hypocrisy 
>he believes run rampant in Western science (and philosophy, perhaps).

	Actually, I believe that bias and hypocrisy run rampant everywhere :-)

>So Mikel is seemingly saying that researchers may reject aspects of
>human experience, and still come to meaningful general conclusions about
>some admittedly limited aspect of experience, and I agree.

	I also agree.

>Mikel further implies that imputations of 'truth' to an idea is
>a traditional problem in philosophy, rather than modern science,
>which is also true.

	My goal was to point out
	a) the difference between formal distinctions, and what happens in
everyday life amongst normal people
	b) the political/social aspects of science

>Stephen's reply seemingly claims that philosophers don't know what
>they're doing, making simplistic distinctions, and that therefore his 
>perspective on the bias of science should stand in spite of Mikel's well 
>reasoned argument.

	Nope. That's not what I meant. On the contrary, philosophers have
elevated making distinctions into an esoteric art form. My point is that the
more distinctions you make, you further you get away from the messy aggregate
of everyday experience. The more categories which you create, the easier it is
to say something authoritative, but the less meaningful it is in the "grand
scheme of things".

>  I don't deny that a conservative bias generally
>exists, though I argue that it is 'nothing special' nor inherently 
>a problem in the long run.   Progress happens in spite of human
>beings being human beings.  :-)

	I agree.

>So I suspect that this straw man philosopher would quickly burn if we discuss 
>specifics.   

	Probably. I may have overcommited on one of my arguments - I was trying
to discuss one of the problems with isolating philosophy from psychology,
sociology and politics. My argument was against excessive categorization and
specialization.

>The failure of Ki to be the dominant topic of
>interest in scientific journals in most fields is hardly a matter
>of ideological oversight.

	Actually, many of those fringy ideas are slowly creeping into the
realm of respectability - I saw a news piece on new funding for meditation,
yoga, hypnosis and related stuff by the NIH. But I would tend to suspect that
they will discard the qi paradigm for a more respectable western paradigm. Or
maybe (like in acupuncture) they will adopt the the techniques without a
satisfactory theoretical model to explain the phenomena.

>Logical positivism is not the dominant stance in the philosophy of science,
>either in philosophical circles or scientific ones.   Conservatism and
>Kuhnian 'normal science' notwithstanding, the very fact that
>there are now theoretical sciences of cognition is ample proof of this.

	This may be true, in which case I've been tilting at windmills :-)

>For the most part, theoreticians don't write about metaphysical existence, at 
>least not in their published results.  They mostly care about mathematical 
>descriptions and experimental results.  

	Have you relegated "qi" to the realm of metaphysics? And why is that?

>It would be, I think, misleading and false to argue that Ki is not discussed
>in most scientific journals because of a 'biased refusal to accept an
>alternate theory' or anything like that.  

	I'm arguing that scientific circles suffer from conservatism, and that
they are not as purely rational as the "scientific method" would indicate. I
don't think I took the position that science is dominated by ideologues (but I
*will* say that ideology is a factor in most institutions)


--
	Stephen Chan
	uunet!srg!schan or uunet!srg!schan@uunet.uu.net
Newsgroups: rec.martial-arts