Φυλλο

Φυλλο

Τετάρτη 1 Ιουνίου 2016

What is an institution in ΑΙΜΕ?

In AIME it is difficult to comprehend what an institution is called to be. My problem is that we are given many examples of  (old-style) institutions that betray their values but not much in the positive side of institutions that are faithful to their values.

I gather some comments from the AIME site:

"We will say of an institution that it is well established when it knows how to present the value proper to each mode without at the same time being obliged to devalue other values."

"The institution would define its values differently if, instead of basing them on transcendence, it agreed to establish them based on the reprise of a trajectory - the narrow path of mini-transcendence.

"How different science would be were it to recognize its fragility and say, “Be tolerant with me because I know how fragile the maintenance of my sort of truth is"; other institutions, might perhaps, by this token, be made more tolerant in turn..."

I wander: what kind of "animals" are these new "Institutions"? Since we are to recognise their presence in each mode, it must belong to the terminology of [PRE] (not [ORG] ). But I have no "good example" to think about.

Then I read in the MOE book:
pg 90
"The following argument ought to be advanced with more diplomacy than we are capable of for the moment, but the category mistake would be to believe that the world before the invention of knowledge was already made of “objective knowledge.” This does not keep us from saying (on the contrary, it is what allows us to say) that after chains of reference have been set up and gradually charged with reality, yes, undeniably, there is objective reality and there are scientist subjects
capable of thinking it."

This leads me to some thoughts that help me:

1. The "institution" of "natural science documentaries" produces and distributes a kind of "democratic" objectivity: "Objectivity for all", as a product to be distributed. 

2.It helps me think of Eucharist to understand the contrast between what Latour says and what happens in the documentaries. In the case of [REF] we could have something like the Eucharist of Objectivity.

3.The case of the usual documentaries is like people going to the Eucharist and "doing the moves". Something is distributed to them, they gain some satisfaction and that's it. In the case of what Latour proposed, what comes to my mind is participating to the mystery of objectivity, in a similar way that we participate to the mystery of Eucharist.

4. Perhaps this is generalizable. Each institution that is going to house a value has a similar dimension of mystery (I use the term in the religioys sense not in the detective stories sense). We are called to participate in the articulation of the value (which again and again in the book is presented as if it is a paradox), not to develop a consumer relation with it.

5. So these institutions bring to my mind also what I have heard ( I know next to nothing about) about the concept of Li (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_(Confucianism)) in Confucianism, and they are fragile.




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