Theory and Practice, Man, Practice!

I'm continuing to develop a thread introduced here some time ago regarding the possibility of a theoretically informed moral imagination. I've written in earlier entries about Newtonian imagination, Darwinian imagination, and even hinted at thermodynamic imagination. I could add ecological imagination, climatological imagination, sociotechnical imagination, and any number of others.

The question is: How and to what extent can scientific theory shape ordinary lived experience? It's an interesting question for phenomenology, and I'm working on a paper along those lines, now. My interest is not just theoretical, however, but practical. What I want to know is how and to what extent scientific theory can influence what we attend to, what we value, what we expect, what we hope for, what we foresee, and ultimately what we do.

Life Without Newton

It's bad enough that most Americans don't believe in Darwinian evolution. Far worse is that many of us - at least in daily practice - seem not to believe in Newtonian mechanics. This thought occurred to me today as I watched yet another car pull out directly in front of yet another fast-moving bus.

The driver of the car seemed in that moment not really to believe the First Law of Motion, to wit:

Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

Newton's Third Law of Politics

I am currently reading Sprawl: A Compact History by Robert Bruegmann, and with each page I grow more annoyed. The very premise of the book is a logical fallacy for which there may not yet be a name. I would like to suggest one, but I can't decide between "The Fox News Fallacy" and "The Air America Fallacy."