A Science of the People, By the People and for the People
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20964014 |
|---|---|
| Authors | William Marias Malisoff (Essex County College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1946 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 166-169 |
| Publication date | 1946-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Philosophy of Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-8248 • E-ISSN: 1539-767X |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1086/286892 |
| OpenAlex | W2038538341 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
Scientists are people. They are not “people, but...”. They have not escaped and cannot escape the “democentric” predicament. They are members of a society, no matter how hard they strain to be individualistic or exclusively clannish. If they succeed in being members of a small clan or a club they can be credited possibly with having more or less shrunk only the apparent size of their society, without escaping in any significant manner the social field implied in being “people”. If they attempt a greater shrinkage than that, they court complete frustration. To verify that, try, if you will, to imagine a thoroughly solitary scientist on a desert isle. Is he not alone and at last an illustration of the ungrammatical and even logically fictitious singular of the word “people”? No, he is definitely and hopelessly not alone, unless he first forgets even as habit everything he has learned from people. And, if he does that, he is no longer a scientist or even the rudiments of one. Indeed he must be reduced at least to the status of an animal, and an extremely unsocial one at that, because by the terms of our imaginary experiment, he must not join any other society, even if it were of but “animal-people”, e.g. a wolf-pack or an ant-hill culture, where he might learn something from others. Such strictness in argument is introduced only to drive home the fact that what constitutes “people” is derived from the dimmest animal past, where language is still unspoken and is constituted of simple actions taken together, literally concepts. The “con” in “concept” tends to be forgotten. We underscore it
Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Clan · Club · Epistemology · Individualism · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Imaginary · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,14 |
| Citation span | 2005 - 2021 (17) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |