New Ways of Knowing

In this volume, physicists and social scientists challenge the bedrock of scientific thinking whose applications can prove destructive to existing social systems, and shift the debate to the need for a radical change of direction that would replace traditional "value-free" inquiry and research with a knowledge model that incorporates social responsibility, democratic principles, and comprehensive ethical standards. Presented in this book is a form of inquiry--reconstructive knowledge--concerned with the assumptions and practices of modern science and the politics of scientific discipline. Essays included are: (1) "Reconstruction and Its Knowledge Method" (Marcus Raskin); (2) "Idols of Modern Science and the Reconstruction of Knowledge" (Herbert Bernstein); (3) "Toward a Reconstructive Political Science" (Raskin, Bernstein); (4) "Exchanges on Reconstructive Knowledge" (Noam Chomsky, Raskin); (5) "Ending the Faustian Bargain (Raskin); (6) "The Human Meaning of the Information Revolution" (Michael Goldhaber); (7) "The Selling of Market Economics" (Edward Herman); (8) "Semiotic Boundaries and the Politics of Meaning: Modernity on Tour--A Village in Transition" (Susan Buck-Morss); (9) "Seizing Power/Grasping Truth" (Joseph Turner); and (10) "Conclusion: A Manifesto of Reconstructive Knowledge" (Raskin). The themes of the social construction of reality, the social sciences' ability to determine fates and fortunes, the linkage between the realms of knowledge generation and of political direction, and that economics as a discipline is a rule of human organization (not nature), are included. (KR)