The Power of Opinions

Percival Everett’s “Body” intervenes in the kind of disciplinary tensions that Joe Moran outlines in “Science, Space, and Nature.” More specifically, the poems may be understood as arguing, criticizing, and/ or questioning the ways of Science. Science is one of those things that people shouldn’t really argue with, or debate with anyone. This goes for Politics and Religion as well. This is due to everyone has different opinions on things and everyone see’s things a much different way than you do. The way that science works is that people formulate a hypothesis, something to test, something to do multiple experiments with until that hypothesis is proven. There are multiple tests that can, and might be conducted to prove that hypothesis. There are also multiple steps that must be conducted. Those steps are: identify and define the problem, review texts that are relevant to this problem, formulate a hypothesis, something that can test this problem, construct an experimental design (a plan), conduct the experiment, compile raw date and condense it down to a usable form, and finally, present findings and conclusions from those experiments. If the hypothesis can’t be proven, they become falsified, according to Moran. “At the same time, Popper does not completely abandon science to relativism, because he suggests that, if theories are disprovable, they can be tentatively accepted until they are falsified.” (Moran, 153)

Another point of view of this, is in Percival Everett’s book, “re: f (gesture)”. In this book of 3 sections, Zulus, Body, and Logic. The part that connects with Moran’s chapter, is the Body section of this book. One thing that I found interesting was the poem about “Tongue”. It states “The fibers of muscle run in assorted directions, divided, as it always divides: extrinsic, intrinsic. Halved symmetrically, it tells another story on the other side of the fibrous septum. The extrinsic muscles originate externally, only the terminal fibers contained in the organ. The threads of either half find the interruptions, full of interposed fat, supplied by the nerves.” (Everett, 47) This poem I feel talks about the both sides of the view of how way things should be treated, the Humane way, and the Scientific way. Basically, humanities and the sciences. Each of the parties has different view points on things, just like how everyone has different view points on things. It’s just like how there are different parties in Politics and just like how there are different religions. Everyone has a different view point on things. There are multiple sides to things, specially in science according to Moran. “Kuhn’s scientific constructivism can be interpreted in two, competing ways. On the one hand, it can be seen as a radical awareness of science as the product of institutional politics and cultural contexts, in which ‘there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community.’ In this formulation, theories produced within discrete paradigms, such as Newtonian and Einsteinian physics are completely incommensurable because they are each engaged in affirming the truth-value of their own paradigm, and ‘cannot be made logically or even probabilistically compelling for those who refuse to step into the circle.”’ (Moran, 154) Newton and Einstein were trying to figure out the same things, so their arguments basically counteract eachother, because…. they had different viewpoints on things, on two things that they were trying to prove.

 It’s just like if you were in the sky, in an airplane, looking down on the earth from a different perspective, you see a huge square, well, what looks like a square to you from the sky. But in reality, it’s a cube from the people on the ground’s perspective. You could argue with some about how that’s a square, but the person on the ground will tell you, “No, it’s a cube, I will even send you a photo of it.” But the person in the plane wouldn’t agree and stick to their argument even though there are proven facts that it is indeed, a cube. I’ve heard the statement that, “If I wasn’t there, it didn’t happen.” Well, that’s not entirely true. The world just doesn’t stop time just for you so you can see whatever is going on.

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