"We see the regularity that we do, in fact, wherever we look, not so much because we “discovered” the regularities of nature. It is more because we rearranged the substances of our world into regular, governable, objects of a sort not found in nature. We have done this so well that it is hard to imagine not finding mechanical regularity all around us."
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/01/12/cannon-balls-plate-tectonics-and-invisible-elephants/
"Any science requires, and is shaped by, a tractable domain, and the progress of science is measured in the tractability we have found or engineered with our observation, theories, and instrumentation. Just what qualifies, and how we learn to see a tractable domain, is more a matter of art than logic."
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/01/12/cannon-balls-plate-tectonics-and-invisible-elephants/
At the end of the 19th century, Eduard Suess an Austrian paleontologist and geologist proposed that India, South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica had all been connected in the distant past, based on similarities in stratigraphy, and the occurrence of certain fossil plants from particular prehistoric times only on these continents... The part of India studied was called Gondwana, and Suess thus called the joined region Gondwanaland."
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/01/12/cannon-balls-plate-tectonics-and-invisible-elephants/
"As long as a proposed theory leaves one or more major disciplines skeptical, general science publications will tend to say the matter is controversial. It is generally only when the last discipline(s) are convinced that these publications say there is a scientific consensus."
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/01/12/cannon-balls-plate-tectonics-and-invisible-elephants/
If we replace "theory" with "policy" Hal's piece points to an approach to public policy. One that replaces stubborn adversarialism with shared investigation of policy effects.
(1/?)
We tend to think of political tendencies like liberalism, socialism and nationalism as being in a war of all against all. Attempting to completely replace each other, so that the progress of one is the defeat of all others. But what if we thought of them instead as the political equivalent of scientific disciplines, using different philosophies and methods to investigate different aspects of political reality?
What would an interdisciplinary politics look like? How can we create it?
(2/?)
Strypey