leah's right. eff that philosophy bullhonk, i'm doing my thesis on aliens.
background information: i spent all of last semester researching the arguments and evidence at play in the debate over whether or not extraterrestrial races have ever, or are currently, visiting this planet. it's a personal interest of mine and has been my entire life (call me crazy, i dare you), but i got really into it this past spring. what fascinated me the most was the way in which each side of the debate supports its position. there are appeals to theoretical physics, archaeology, political philosophy, and a whole range of other "established disciplinary perspectives" in the process, with each side claiming a given field and its experts for itself. then there's the "evidence," everything from photographs, video, artifacts, and what's especially interesting to me, testimony from military/government/intelligence officials as to the truth of what the believers say is really happening.
the "evidence," then, appears less-than-incontrovertible to most, at the same time that it completely convinces others. why?! how?! i think it's because the whole situation seems to put certain things we think we know (for instance: the speed of light as an upper limit on space travel makes it unlikely, if not impossible, that ETs could reach us) up against other things we think we know (documented and corroborated evidence that spacecraft which defy our current knowledge of physics actually exist), and both seem to be true. i think this causes people to reason differently about the matter, which challenges the notion we typically have of reason, which is that it is universally available in common form to the human mind.
this is the basic problem i want to investigate. i want this paper to be an exercise in fleshing out rationality and argumentation, as well as a survey of the role of different academic disciplines in contributing to the popular conception of UFO "enthusiasts" as entirely without basis for the arguments they advance. pop culture, media, disinformation, little green men...it's goin' down, y'all.
Thursday, September 6, 2007
mulligan!
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2 comments:
doug - i really like that idea! good to flesh out something you are passionate about with something that will push you to do more scholarly research. not that it hasn't been scholarly so far...(how are you going to address the issue of 'the typical critiques' like the ones i was leveling a few weeks ago? i'd like to see evidence rather than discounting them based on their frequency of use...) hooray!
Doug seriously think about asking my dad the pilot about his encounters he would probably be open to it if its for the quest for truth. ha but really three stars converging into one. that's whats up ya know
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