User talk:EntmootsOfTrolls/WikiProject Body, Cognition and Senses
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Irritating browser problem: rewrote first two sections, could someone restore and add these:
[edit] Scope:
This WikiProject aims to organize all articles on the human Body, Cognition and Senses so that they reference each other in a rational way, and do not make sloppy claims that cannot be justified by rational analysis. This has often noted as an issue in scientific, medical and some forms of social discourse, and about English speaking culture, which tends to assume a top-down and trustworthy authority which can be said to define truth with regard to disposition of bodies and trust in the senses. See the considerable literature on subject-object problem.
[edit] Mechanistic assumptions
A simple way of stating the problem is that science and mathematics are treated as mystical authorities, despite the distributed, collective and error-prone nature of both activities. Work on the quasi-empiricism in mathematics, and on integrity as it applies to the philosophy of science, has improved the situation somewhat. But, it is fair to say that certain things are just not stated in a neutral way in most English language discourse:
- science is a very disciplined and collective form of cognition, but it has no powers that individual cognition does not have, and there are many weak links in the chain that combines cognition - the writing of papers, peer review, etc. - scientific method deals with these only in a quite abstract and general way - in reality each science has its own method, and its own constraints, and its own peers, terminology, apparatus and measurements, and claims made in one are simply not equivalent or necessarily comparable to those that are made in the others
- mathematics is a wonderful way to manipulate measurements once they are made, but the standardization of *how* they are made, from what bodies via what senses standing where, is part of foundations of measurement which is not normally considered a part of philosophy of mathematics, oddly.
- engineering combines results from multiple sciences, which always requires the trial and error process and some risk, but quite often, this too is represented as having certainty - the result is things like the Titanic, Chernobyl, Bhopal, Challenger, Columbia etc.
- medicine, and the almost mystical role of the doctor, is assumed to have powers to see into bodies, to fix them, extend life, etc., but very often, statements of cause and effect, strategies for diagnosis and treatment, are very inexact and usually also part of the testing and training of doctors, drugs, and etc. - this is really an investigative process but it is often portrayed as being as authoritative as diagnosing a machine's faults with a manual, ordering parts, and effecting repairs.
- the separate authoritative, investigative and definitive modes of doubt and truth are not separated, leading to confusion and over-reliance on conceptual metaphor to make the point.
Eugene Wigner pointed out that the nearly mystical coordination between say mathematics and physics, did not work for any reason anyone could say. It still works, and still for reasons no one can say. It's time to stop saying we do know, and rewrite a lot of articles.
Michel Foucault pointed out that this assignment of the "wise and noble man" role to the doctor was eventually forgotten, and they used the language and terminology of science instead to gain the respect and obedience of patients. The language by which they did so is now in our vernacular, and should not be reflected in a general purpose work taking neutral positions on medical methods.
In some cultures, notably in the US and UK, which have a history of top-down control of other cultures, and of scholastic Platonism, many point of view issues and subject-object problems creep into language, reflecting many odd assumptions inherited from traditional professions and academic departments that created most of the knowledge, without really knowing how it would all fit together - on Wikipedia...
[edit] Systemic bias
The mechanistic paradigm (which this project aims to eliminate as a bias) assumes among other things that:
- hominoids are "human" and have such attributes as speech and human rights, while other hominid are fundamentally different beings and that there is no need to differentiate between (challenged by such concepts as Great Ape personhood, ape genocide, ape language studies and discoveries about hominid genetics, motherhood and culture)
- the body is a machine, can be diagnosed, fixed (articles on medicine may take this view but general science articles should avoid it), and is an object rather than a subject (see subject-object problem and philosophy of action), generated only by genes, say, and not by some epigenetic interaction of genes with environment (see morphogenetic field (Rupert Sheldrake) for one such alternative view)
- cognition is a passive process involving sensing what is objectively "there" (and is something that each body does individually with no direct help from any other body or social structure, e.g. there "cannot be" any such sense as "being stared at", etc.)
- the senses only detect, and what more, they detect what is objectively "there", like frequencies of light and sound (which are investigated in physics but whose characteristics as reported via human cognition alone are often quite different, e.g. naive physics).
These dogmas add nothing to Wikipedia, and reflect a 19th century view that is generally not part of modern science and defies the philosophy of science, as presently understood. Assumptions like this are even being challenged in medicine, engineering, economics, law, as well as emerging fields like cognitive psychology, anthropological linguistics and cognitive science of mathematics. Since the beginning of the textbook project, the pressure to act as a medical or engineering textbook has been reduced, and we should take this opportunity to rewrite this stuff.
Who is all this by? Is this NPOV? -- Tarquin 09:13, 25 Sep 2003 (UTC)
This is by a anonymous but well-known user who
- has a policy of not registering a user name
- has a personal philosophical agenda which is pretty well stated here
- which is a mixture of mainstream progressive ideas and really quite curious idiosyncratic stuff
- and often tends to write new articles that express these opinions as generally accepted, which is rather POV to say the least
-- The Anome 09:57, 25 Sep 2003 (UTC)
It appears as if this entire article is one man's unusual and POV belief system. Why is an article? Since it is not a Wikipedia project, then should not all this be moved to this person's personal page? JeMa 20:18, 24 Nov 2003
What? This is a valuable page, and one which I would like to see expanded. This is an important area of philosophy which is just beginning to blossom. We can re-write it as NPOV, but no need to take it out of the loop, so to speak. ChrisAnderson
- I think we'd be better off to just start a new WikiProject cognition
