To give you an idea of some of the abstract ideas I am struggling with, I'll tell you a bit about one of the ideas I was trying to write about today. It is taken mainly from the two books I mentioned in the last post.I thought it was quite clear in my head until I started trying to write it down. Let's see if I can do a better job this time.
The basic idea is that people used to think that science was a way to ascertain objective truths about the way the universe works. It was thought that ratonal thinking, along with scientific methodology and objective reporting of results led to universal rules about nature. More recently, philosophers and other academics have started to think that there is no such thing as objective knowledge and that all knowledge is a product of the social surroundings of the people that construct it. Knowledge is constructed and what we choose to foreground and make important will be a consequence of the environment in which we work. In academia, the community decides what counts as valid knowledge and what doesn't.
Well, it wasn't as difficult this time, but I wasn't worrying about all those other things you have to think about when you are writing a piece of academic work such as how long the text is, what kind of language you are using and how what you are writing fits into the rest of the text. This theory, although extremely interesting, is the kind of things that can lead you round in circles thinking about its implications. It might also be the kind of thing to make you think "if there is no objective truth, what exactly is there? and why bother learning anything if it is only true in this context?". It can make your head spin.
