Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ James D. Wallace, Norms and Practices

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
I would not norammly link to a work on ethics, because I normally have very little time for the field (it bearing as it does for me a striking resemblance to fiction). This work stands as an exception, offering as it does an approach to ethics strikingly similar to my own understanding of the nature of science and forms of knowledge in general. "the view Wallace wants to develop and defend, and which I will call the "social artifact thesis" (SAT), is that ethical norms are nothing more than social artifacts and, indeed, he calls such norms "psychosocial in character" -- ethical norms are constituted by people's dispositions, beliefs, and tendencies." Now this needs a lot of cashing out, of course, but the main point, for me, is that the body of linguistic artifacts that we take to be ethics (or science, or knowledge) - rules, principles, propositions, statements - are misrepresentations of actual knowledge, actual practice.

Today: 0 Total: 1100 [Direct link] [Share]

Image from the website


Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

Copyright 2024
Last Updated: Apr 20, 2024 09:50 a.m.

Canadian Flag Creative Commons License.

Force:yes