do you believe in reality

7/29/2019 Do You Believe in Reality

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facts and the artifacts with their beautiful roots, their delicate articulations,

their many tendrils, and their fragile networks remain, for the most part, to be

investigated and described. I try my best, in the pages that follow, to untangle

a few of them. Far from the rumblings of the science wars in which neither

you nor I want to fight (well, maybe I won't mind firing a few shots!), factsand artifacts can be part of many other conversations, much less bellicose,

much more productive, and, yes, much friendlier.

I have to admit I am being disingenuous again. In opening the black box

of scientific facts, we knew we would be opening Pandora's box. There was

no way to avoid it. It was tightly sealed as long as it remained in the two-

culture no-man's-land, buried among the cabbages and the turnips, blissfully

ignored by the humanists trying to avoid all the dangers of objectification andby the epistemologists trying to fend off all the ills carried by the unruly mob.

Now that it has been opened, with plagues and curses, "sins and ills whirling

around, there is only one thing to do, and that is to go even deeper, all the

way down into the almost-empty box, in order to retrieve what, according to

the venerable legend, has been left at the bottomyes, hope. It is much too

deep for me on my own; are you willing to help me reach it? May I give you a

hand?

do you believe in reality

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