It may be that some of what people mean, when they talk about other ways of knowing and how different they are from science, is that there is a whole range of subjects that are interesting to talk about and think about that are inherently fuzzy – that are not yes or no issues – that are not purely factual – that are not helped or enhanced by experiment or testing (though data may be relevant); and that all that matters because it’s where we live. Stories (or ‘literature’) are about that stuff: they perform, illustrate, enact the iffy quality, the uncertainties, the ambiguities, the negative capability.

None of that is really knowledge – but it rests on a vast … Read the rest

Oh dear god, oh jeezis, oh hell.

She told me she had given birth in a country convent at Roscrea in County Tipperary on 5 July 1952. She was 18 when she met a young man who bought her a toffee apple on a warm autumn evening at the county fair. “I had just left convent school,” she said with an air of wistful regret. “I went in there when my mother died, when I was six and a half, and I left at 18 not knowing a thing about the facts of life. I didn’t know where babies came from … ” When her pregnancy became obvious, her family had Philomena “put away” with the nuns.

But after … Read the rest

There are a lot of interesting comments on Other ways of evaluating truth claims; be sure to check them out. Josh Rosenau replied a couple of times, and many interesting things came up. In particular, Richard Wein gave us a passage from a statement by the University of New Mexico history department published at the NCSE site:

Science is one way of knowing the world ; it is not the only way of knowing, and it is certainly not the only way of knowing everything. Indeed, in the grand scheme of human thought and action, the domain of science is modest — the realm of natural phenomena. Science, as it has developed historically, will not and can never tell