fragments, 10/29/02
Oct. 31st, 2002 12:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
novapsyche3:48 p.m.
All human truths are merely hypotheses. The problem with religious systems is, in their attempts to describe their cosmology, cosmogeny, eschatology, and creeds, they state truths as immutable and unchanging. But that violates the purity of the scientific method. What we should do, in my opinion, is to state that one works from a list of hypothetical givens. If the hypothesis is later invalidated by due process of the progression of insight and discovery, then the hypothesis should be improved, revised, thrown out, or superceded, accordingly.
5:32 p.m.
The United States is abnormal because it is a nation where society is primary and culture is secondary. In this grand experiment, society grinds on like gears in the machine, but we are already in the throes of culture-death. Society in America is like a cold, wet rock, and culture the moss that grows on its clammy surface.
As a sociologist, I know I cannot understand my own society until I compare it to others, current and past. Only by understanding the moral, philosophical, and technological intervals of other societies can I appreciate my own. But American society does not encourage sociological thinking. Because it uses probability and deviation; because it cannot produce a snapshot of reality but can only paint a picture; because it depends on statistics, people distrust sociology.
Sociology is merely a method, not a truth in itself. It is by method that we come nearer to truth. But the method is not the truth itself.
All human truths are merely hypotheses. The problem with religious systems is, in their attempts to describe their cosmology, cosmogeny, eschatology, and creeds, they state truths as immutable and unchanging. But that violates the purity of the scientific method. What we should do, in my opinion, is to state that one works from a list of hypothetical givens. If the hypothesis is later invalidated by due process of the progression of insight and discovery, then the hypothesis should be improved, revised, thrown out, or superceded, accordingly.
5:32 p.m.
The United States is abnormal because it is a nation where society is primary and culture is secondary. In this grand experiment, society grinds on like gears in the machine, but we are already in the throes of culture-death. Society in America is like a cold, wet rock, and culture the moss that grows on its clammy surface.
As a sociologist, I know I cannot understand my own society until I compare it to others, current and past. Only by understanding the moral, philosophical, and technological intervals of other societies can I appreciate my own. But American society does not encourage sociological thinking. Because it uses probability and deviation; because it cannot produce a snapshot of reality but can only paint a picture; because it depends on statistics, people distrust sociology.
Sociology is merely a method, not a truth in itself. It is by method that we come nearer to truth. But the method is not the truth itself.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2002-10-31 02:48 pm (UTC)What do the throes look like?