@CS in AZ @CS in AZ @CS in AZ An article today in NY times

The Pandemic Comes for the President Donald Trump has the coronavirus. Let’s learn from that.

The divide in our country is enormous. From the article

But reality is reality. Truth is truth. Science is science, and it alerted all of us — including the president — to the danger of the coronavirus, how it spreads and what we can and should do to protect ourselves and others. There’s no getting around those facts.

Look at the major problem facing humanity. Why doesn't reality, the truth and scientific facts win the debate and launch politics into the quest to deal with climate change?

This comment is about science. There is a small discipline STS, Science Technology Studies that has shown how science constructs facts with intuitions, devices, people, funding etc. One of the founders of STS in a 1999 book begins with someone asking him "do you believe in reality?"

“I have a question for you,” he said, taking out of his pocket a crumpled
piece of paper on which he had scribbled a few key words. He took in his breath:
“Do you believe in reality?”—“But of course!” I laughed, “what a question! Is
reality something we have to believe in?” He had asked me for a private
discussion in a place I found as bizarre as the question: by the lake near the
chalet, in this strange imitation of a Swiss resort placed in the tropical mountains
of Teresopolis, in Brazil. “Has reality really become something people have to
believe in,” I thought to myself, “the answer to a serious question raised in a
hushed and embarassed tone? Is reality something like God, the topic for a
confession reached after a long and intimate discussion? Are there people on
earth who don’t believe in reality?”

When I noticed he was relieved by my quick and laughing answer, I was
even more baffled, since his relief proved clearly enough that he had anticipated
a negative reply, something like: “Of course not, do you believe me to be so
naive?”. Then this was not a joke; he really was concerned and his query had
been put in earnest. .....

later

I could not get over the strangeness of the question posed by this man I
considered as a colleague, yes, a colleague, and who has since become a good
friend. If science studies have collectively achieved something, I thought, it must
be that they have added reality to science, surely not withdrawn any from it.
Instead of the stuffed scientists hanging on the walls of the armchair philosophers
of science of the past, we have portrayed lively characters, immersed in their
laboratories, full of passion, loaded with instruments, steeped in know-how,
connected through many vessels to a larger and more vibrant milieu. Instead of
the pale and bloodless objectivity of science, we have all shown, it seemed to me,
that the many non-humans mixed into our collective life through laboratory
practice have a history, flexibility, culture, blood, in short, all the characteristics
that were denied to them by the humanists, on the other side of campus. Indeed,
I naively thought, if scientists have a faithful ally, it is us, the “science students”
who have managed over the years to interest scores of literary folks in science
and technology, readers who were convinced, until science studies came along,
that........ “

he points out how totally strange it is to ask the question about belief in reality

There is no natural situation on earth in which someone could be asked this
strangest of all questions: “Do you believe in reality?” One has to become so
distant from reality that the threat of entirely losing it becomes plausible, and this
fear itself has an intellectual history that should at least be sketched. Without this
detour we will never be able to fathom the extent of the misunderstanding
between me and my colleague, or to measure up the extraordinary form of
radical realism that science studies has been unearthing.

Surprise: this question has been around since 1600's

I remembered that my friend’s question was not so new. My compatriot
Descartes had raised it against himself when asking how could an isolated mind
be absolutely and not relatively sure of anything about the outside world. Of
course, his question was framed in such a way that it was already impossible to
answer it with the only reasonable answer which we, in science studies, have
slowly rediscovered three centuries later: that we are relatively sure of many of
the things with which we are daily engaged through the practice of our
laboratories. By Descartes’ time, this sturdy relativism*1, based on the number of
relations established with the world, was already something of the past, a once viable embranchment now lost in a thicket of brambles. He was asking for
absolute certainty from a brain-in-a-vat that was not needed when the brain (or
the mind) was firmly attached to its body and the body solidly entangled in its
normal ecology

.

and then in the 1700's with Kant

**
This is part of the larger legacy of The Enlightenment which shapes our world. Ecology language is in the same frame as the now dominant player, Nature 2, the economy. To deal intellectually with the issues facing humanity and the earth, one has to go beyond the settlement of the Benightment which did OK as long as colonization worked and resources extracted and the Earth was silent. Now the earth has become the major political agent.

Here is the reference for the quotations above from Bruno Latour

“Do you believe in reality?” —news from the trenches of the Science Wars Bruno Latour Foreword of Pandora’s Hope

There has been 20 years work beyond this book.

"The search for truth is predatory. It is a literal hunt, a conquest. There is that exemplary instant in Book IV of The Republic, when Socrates and his companions in discourse corner an abstract truth. They halloo, like hunters who have unearthed and run down their quarry.... [even if enjoined from the scientific quest,] somewhere at some moment, a man alone, a group of men addicted to the drug of absolute thought, will be seeking to create organic tissue, to determine the nature of heredity, to produce the cloudchamber full of
quarks. Not for renown, not for the benefit of the human species, not in the name of social justice or profit, but because of a drive stronger than love, stronger than even hatred, which is to be interested in something. For its own enigmatic sake. Because it is there."

- George Steiner, 1978 "From Creation to Chaos" (B. Dixon, Ed) Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1989

@fire with fire maybe Socrates? Heh. I am definitely not into Sisyphus. You can see my shadow in that post about organizational psychologists (waves hi to Carl Jung). I've had enough psychotherapy to last forever and another day, thanks. Sartre for the win! But don't tell the youth, they still need to push boulders and get rolled over or what? I don't know.

I totally get all your TV references, right on. The Sopranos was a good one, I saw the reruns after it finished. whew
This used to resonate more, still makes me laugh a little:

The Philosophy of BOJACK HORSEMAN – Wisecrack Edition
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rORIDYHOFTQ width:500]

Cheers

Freudian? Jungian? Skinnerian? Existentialist? Timothy Leary Inspired?

Thank you for a very fascinating post. Of course, I had never heard of an Industrial Psychologist before now. But I had seen examples of the role ridiculed in countless movies and TV shows, most memorable being a day-player part for Don Knotts in No Time For Sergeants.

I also remember Bob Newhart, in his first TV series as a psychologist, getting professional burnout as an independent therapist and takes a job working as the Company Psychologist for an insurance company. (Company motto: "We gotta insure these guys.")

He seeks advice from Keenan Wynn, who played his college professor and mentor. Unfortunately Wynn had his own crisis of confidence in psychology. "It's all a crock."

The scriptwriters take Keenan's side.