Jim Swanson writes,
 
> The basic tenet of the scientific "belief system" is
>that hypotheses are put to the test. This is smug?
 
The smugness I see comes in the ways these hypotheses are put to the test,
the belief that only through visualism, empiricism and causal logic can
hypotheses pass the test. But these systems of "verification" are not
univeral truths, they are historically and culturally specific truths
(though ones I am thoroughly interpellated by). As Fox Keller & Sandra
Harding have noted, the cultural specificity of the facticity of science
has carried with it strangely gendered notions of both nature and its
"interrogation."
 
Science *is* progressive, and can act as a vehicle above nationalistic and
religious furor. But it can be its own as well when it forgets the
"situated" nature of its own claims, and when people forget the history (of
gender, race, class, colonialism) that accompanies that situation.
 
--Sincerely
 
Matthew Weinstein
 
2122 Rusk St
Madison, WI 53704
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