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.

How Astrology Works

I was having a conversation with an astrologer of my acquaintance when I began to formulate a hypothesis about how astrology works. That is to say, I began to sense how astrologers and their clients could come to believe firmly that the relative positions of stars and planets on particular dates can serve a predictive and explanatory function, shedding real light on character and motivation, in spite of the fact that the whole idea is (demonstrably) errant nonsense in the universe of Galileo and Hubble.

Pretend!

A passing observation, a propos of nothing much:

Watching my two daughters playing together, I'm struck by the way they use the verb 'to pretend' in the imperative. It's not something you hear very often among adults.

"Pretend you're a kitten who's lost in the woods," one will command the other. "Okay, now. Pretend I'm a princess who has been invited to a ball! . . . "

Perhaps even more striking is the way in which the other child always takes this in stride, switching from lost kitten to robot to wizard to pastry chef without question or protest, and without missing a beat.

Tragedy Revisited

My recent research into the notions of moral imagination and moral luck has led me to revise (slightly) my previous view of the use and misuse of the term "tragedy."