Global Strategy - blog

Attending a talk last week about contingency in science (held as part of CPNSS project ‘Contingency and Dissent in Science) left me rather confused. As I found it, the concept of contingency, at least at the LSE, seems to be a name (or a subset-not in a strictly set-theoretical sense!) of the nowadays quite classical realism-antirealism debate. That is, I found no references to Rorty. Although quite understandable, it still seems odd to pass the ‘practical turn' of the 1980s in one sentence, just slightly overlooking some significant parts of more recent developments in philosophy. On the other hand, the bent is quite reasonable considering the institutional traditions.

Despite that I mostly agree with evolutionary biologists, especially when it comes to the societal implications of their evolutionary views (such as eradicating religion from the affairs of state); one thing has bothered me for a while now. That is the ontological framework-the world-of these popularly bent natural scientists.

On Monday, a workshop took place at the LSE CPNSS as a part of project called ‘Contingency and Dissent in Science'. The day was loaded with four speakers, all hovering around the topic matter. All the presenters provided interesting insights to the general matter; due to the limitations of this account, I am going to concentrate on one of them.