Re: <nettime> Fwd: Re: Forms of decisionism

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

The type of theory being discussed here operates precisely at the point 
where the best attempts to understand and quantify what happened in the 
past shade over into an exhortative rhetoric that tries to help shape 
the still-open range of possible futures. You are right, Morlock, that 
this characteristic is often elided by people presenting such theories. 
Yet it is inevitable and by no means discounts the theorizing. As 
"objective" as it may strive to be, the prediction of future social 
development is part of the development it tries to predict. There's no 
way around that particular paradox.

A science like geology, which is constitutive to the technology of 
mining and all that it entails, is now recognizing human activity as 
fundamental to the very baseline of objectivity, namely, what used to be 
called nature. Scientific theory is one of the causes of the "new 
nature" that we experience in the Anthropocene. That too can no longer 
be denied. So the epistemological distinction between theory and 
ideology is necessarily changing.... The simplistic distinction between 
the two is way out of date. For at least half a century, circular 
causality has brought the deepest insights into the human predicament.

best, Brian

On 07/20/2016 12:12 AM, Morlock Elloi wrote:

> Maybe I'm making mistake assuming that "theory" here means
> normative/scientific theory, something that strives to provide
> predictions in sustainable and repeatable fashion. Theories that predict
> past are useless, and what someone feels the future should be and steps
> to achieve that is, in my mind, ideology and not a theory.
>
> There is a big difference: a theory can be wrong, ideology cannot. The
> prevailing slippery allusions to the scientific meaning of theory seem
> intentional.

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