The ArgumentTwo research traditions in immunology, supposedly centered on the same issue of immune identification, have followed different theoretical goals and originated form competing phillosophical foundations. these may be labelled modernist and postmodernist, respectively, thereby applying cultural and philosophical categories to immunology in order to articulate potential scientific resonances with the broader culture. To accept that exercise and important caveat is imposed, namely, this translation is most appropriately discussed at the level of metaphor. In other words, I will structure my (...) treatment of these issues as expressed in the metaphorical language of the disipline, and thus the bulk of this discussion will focus on how the language and modeling of the science draws from the culture-at-large. Scientists seek images from their eveir everyday lives to describe phenomena that may be poorly articulated in their technical discourse; such is the utility and importance of metaphors generally, and thus it is not surprising that we might discern echoes of a postmodernist sentiment in the metaphors borrowed from post–World War II culture. I Will also discuss, to a more limited extent, how postmodernists have sought support for their own ideological arguments in immunology. This last topic server only to illustrate the bidirectionality of scientific discourse with the society in which it is embedded. (shrink)

In his defence of the identity theory, Professor Smart has attempted to show that reports of mental states are strictly topic-neutral. If this were the case then it would follow that there is nothing logically wrong with the claim that the mind is the brain or that mental states are really nothing but brain states. Some phillosophers have argued that a fundamental objection to any form of materialism is that the latter makes an obvious logical blunder in identifying the (...) mental with the physical. This is the view that dualism is enshrined in our language. If this is true then of course statements such as ‘the mind is actually nothing but the brain’ and ‘mental states are really nothing but physical processes’ would be quite unacceptable on strictly logical grounds. Smart's claim that talk about mental states is topic-neutral, however, appears to exempt materialism from such objections. The question is, does it? That is to say, are sensation reports and the like topic-neutral in the required sense? Are they analogous in principle to statements of the form ‘someone is in the room’? Smart's point is that expressions such as ‘someone phoned: it was the doctor’ are logically similar to those of the form ‘I am having a red after-image: it is a brain process.’ ‘Someone’ is not logically equivalent to ‘the doctor’ , but it may, of course, be true that the doctor is the someone who phoned. Does this analogy hold and is it correct to say that sensation reports and mentalistic expressions in general are topic-neutral, that they refer only to experienced ‘somethings’? Smart's claim runs as follows: When a person says, ‘I see a yellowish-orange after-image’, he is saying something like this: ‘ There is something going on which is like what is going on when I have my eyes open, am awake, and there is an orange illuminated in good light in front of me, that is, when I really see an orange’. Notice that the italicised words, namely ‘there is something going on which is like what is going on when’, are all quasi logical or topic neutral words. This explains why the ancient Greek peasant's reports about his sensations can be neutral between dualistic metaphysics and my materialistic metaphysics. It explains how sensations can be brain processes and yet how a man who reports them need know nothing about brain processes. For he reports them only very abstractly as ‘something going on which is like what is going on when…’ Similarly, a person may say ‘someone is in the room’, thus reporting truly that the doctor is in the room, even though he has never heard of doctors. (shrink)