Agonism in CFC, or "Gorbechev, (don't) Tear Down This Post"

[brennan]

In scientific procedure, hypotheses are supposed to be tested to destruction. The more tests that are passed, the more a hypothesis will be looked at as 'probably true'. But it only requires one successful falsification for an idea to be relegated to the great dustbin of history.

It takes a lot of testing before scientists go around saying 'x is true', take Bell Test experiments as an example. People have been subjecting Bell's Inequalities to experiment to see if they can be violated for decades. Every test has been passed, but the scientific community is still wary of saying that non-determinism is therefore true, partly because until last year the falsification criteria had not been fully met (there were always alternative scenarios ('loopholes') that meant the attempt to falsify had not been sufficiently rigorous.)

Rather than everyone agreeing that quantum mechanics is 'true' and therefore non-determinism is likewise 'true' there is still a huge range of disagreement within the community actively studying the matter.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Hah!
I very much like that.
Because I myself have been extremely sceptically of the supposed uncertainty / randomness. And in deed - that perfectly predictable phenomena are supposed to rest on in the end random occurrences does seems contradictory. It seems much more likely that the efforts to measure those supposedly random phenomena are simply inaccurate.

But on the other hand - there is of course also a bias at play. Law rules our picture of the universe. A deviation of that pattern ultimately questions everything.

 

[Gori the Grey]

TBH I don't get why it's not just called antagonism. Agonism would mean to be promoting something. But we're working with this thesis for now.

Any peasant knows the term 'antagonism', and an academician should try to use rarer terms, and this often leads to a dumb use as in this case. :hipsteracademic:

As I understand it, the difference in terms is meaningful and is not just the author showing off, or using a needlessly fancy word. Both words have the same root, agon = contest. Antagonism adds the preposition anti = against. At the etymological level, that wouldn't seem a terribly significant difference: what else do you do in a contest except compete against somebody?

But words don't work just by their etymologies alone; they take on their meaning through usage. In English, antagonistic has come to designate an attitude or tendency in behavior. It shades in the direction of synonyms like rude, confrontational, hostile.

I'm sure the author dislikes rude behavior as much as any of us do, but I think she's trying to reserve agonistic to describe a whole structure-of-truth-seeking in academic disciplines. Our academic disciplines imagine (needlessly, she thinks) that there must be winners and losers, right and wrong, falsehoods and takedowns. Agon shades in the direction of competition, struggle, shoot-out. She's wondering if we could conceive of the entire enterprise of truth-seeking using a non-agonistic, non-only-one-of-us-must-be-right model. (If we could, it might also cut down on antagonism, but that would just be an indirect by product.)

For me, there's a significant difference between the two. Moreover, that's why it seems important to me that the physical sciences have emerged as our first discipline of consideration: because there might be no other way of modeling the falsification that is involved in those disciplines progressing in their search for truth. Even if we conclude that is the case, we might walk back and ask whether the social sciences might be figured non-agonistically, whether the humanities might.