[WPRESTO]

No. It was a perfectly reasonable logically consistent question -

-given the limitations of the kind of questions science can answer what do we do with all the other very real pressing questions of war and peace, justice, fairness, equity, economics, the destruction of the natural environment, class structure, politics etc that science cannot answer? These are very "real" questions and not just just abstract ideas in the head. How they are answered may or may not get you killed.

Yes, these are real questions whose answers have major consequences. But science should not be criticized for not providing answers because all of these questions are not amenable to the scientific method for determining truth. Science might tell you where, how and why the environment is being destroyed, even how to mitigate or reverse the trend, but who is going to do what? Has philosophy in it's several thousand years provided to these questions a set of answers that have resolved them to everyone's satisfaction? There's no use criticizing science for what it cannot do, nor philosophy because people will not heed what it says.

[mohb]

The spanner in the works for science and the truth must be Quantum where particles do things that science says are impossible - the strange world where big things obey one set of rules and the small obey a completely different set.

[normhead]

My best criticism of science would be the number of times it has had to do revisions to what is proven, and the dogmatic nature with which it clings to, until what is "proven", before it's proved false. They are just like religious fanatics. Recently my doctor tried to put me on anti-cholesterol drugs, I mean he absolutely pleads with me, to at least take a minimal dose. A week later a study comes out in Japan showing high cholesterol is linked with longer life, up to 7 years longer, the higher the cholesterol the more likely you are to live longer. And the study was very critical of the methods used by drug companies to get these drugs approved. The drug companies claim their science was good. Millions of men bought product from the drug companies who were just short of outright lying, misrepresentented the truth, and as a result millions of men are going to die earlier than needed deaths. Just so drug companies could make a profit.

The problem with science is not science itself, but the complete lack of integrity among those scientists willing to tailor their research to the needs of for profit corporations, and the total lack of publicly funded research in the public interest. Science has sold itself to the corporations. And those who have't sold their souls and have independent funding have so much faulty science to keep up with they are years behind.

Someday sugar will be seen in the same light as tobacco. What you see now, and it's been in play for over 40 years, is the scientists working for the sugar industry, many of them the same guys who worked for the tobacco industry, putting out slanted study after slanted study fending off the inevitable. Science is pure. Many scientists are absolutely despicable.

[wildman]

But science should not be criticized

I don't understand why you persist in interpreting an honest acceptance of science's limitations as, somehow, being a "criticism".
I repeat - what do we do with all those other, very "real", pressing questions that science cannot answer?

[ccc_]

i'm quite fond of these conversations
the problem with them is that some point you find that what folks want is an absolute

it seems quite unlikely to be found

"facts", "truth"...whatever
they are all fluid over time

if you live long enough you will meet interesting people
I know I have

one of the most fascinating was short-lived man
he was also the most utterly dangerous creature I've ever contemplated
he embraced some amalgam of Nietzsche and Chaos
he lived in a perfect binary universe
the components consisted of "me and you"
if you weren't him...well you weren't

he was fond of paraphrasing Nietzsche as a method of justifying the things he did

a few years before I lost track of him we were sitting around behaving badly
he said something I wish I had written down
so it's my turn to paraphrase

"you know that crap about gazing into the abyss?
I've looked into the damn thing.
I like to hook my toes over the edge and feel that cold rush
it's like a dark cold lake
I just want to jump in and splash around a little bit"

he eventually did

I ran across a few our common acquaintances much later and one of them made a cogent observation
"somebody else's truth must have killed him"

[ffking]

Say I just r one reason imagined a peaceful pastoral scene, that I haven' been able to find a location for, and went to my [hot library an found components from ten different images that expressed what I was feeling... what exactly would be wrong with that?

I don't remember saying there's anything wrong with it - just that it's digital art, not photography in my book - just as a montage of paper and scissor cut-outs from photographs isn't a photograph.

[RobA_Oz]

I don't remember saying there's anything wrong with it - just that it's digital art, not photography in my book - just as a montage of paper and scissor cut-outs from photographs isn't a photograph.

Surely you're not reviving the old argument about photography not being art? I guess that, in this post-truth, Mad Hatter world, the answer depends on how you want to define both things. In my book, photography is a process for creating images that reflects a part of the world as we see it. A photograph, taken from the etymology of the word, is something created by "drawing with light". Art is the deliberate construction of an artefact, whose intention is to reflect an experience. Even straight documentary or forensic photography can be construed as art.

[normhead]

Question one on every exam I ever posted, :What is the meaning of the word photography".

And the answer as defined it "to write or draw with light."
If light formed the images, it's photography. That's my take and I'm sticking to it, at least until someone changes the text books. For those of us who were involved in solarizing images, the Man Ray effect, and other darkroom techniques, the idea that it has to have some correlation in the real world is a little far fetched. For those of us who used to consciously do double exposures the idea of a photography as one exposure is also a little silly. I don't know where all this revisionist stuff comes from?

The image is created using elements of captured light, be it chemical or digital, it's photography. No other, criteria apply. One of my biggest criticisms of digital photography would be no one has come up with a decent way to pull off an in-camera double exposure, or to solarize an image with the kind of control I had in the darkroom.

[wildman]

photography is a process for creating images that reflects a part of the world as we see it.

For me I tend to think of the camera as rather like a copy machine when I'm actually on site capturing images - I concentrate on composition and as perfect a RAW exposure as possible. In other words on technical accuracy.

But once I get the file into Photoshop all bets are off. My attitude then is I tell the machine what the file means not the other way around. I don't think in terms of Art or not Art or photography or graphic art etc. Just what does this image mean to me at the time I'm doing the actual post processing and leave it at that. For whatever reason the final result is very rarely extreme enough to look unrealistic. I guess, when it comes to PP, I'm naturally conservative.

[lightbox]

Actually the word photography literally means recording of light, which implies a faithful transcription of light to some medium.

What we do as "photographers" (or artists) in many cases involves manipulation of the recorded light.

I guess technically it's still a faithful transcription when we add or manipulate the lighting in a scene prior to its recording, but not after. They are conceptually the same thing I suppose, but only the former can be called photography. Whether it's just a matter of terminology or different things is debatable.

All the metaphysical discussion, science vs. theology, etc., is not really pertinent here, IMO. Though very interesting.

[ffking]

Surely you're not reviving the old argument about photography not being art?

nope - of course good photography is art - but chopping up bits of photos and recombining them isn't photography - in my opinion - even when it's art.

The image is created using elements of captured light, be it chemical or digital, it's photography. No other, criteria apply

- to me there's a sleight of hand in this - the elements in a photo-montage are created using captured light, but the photomontage isn't - it's created using scissors and glue, or their digital equivalents - I've never said that that process is in any way illegitimate, just that if we don't have a few boundaries nobody will believe that a photograph is actually a record of a real instant in time - and this matters not justin journalism but in wildlife photography and travel photography and it matters a great deal to those who camp out in all weathers or go to dangerous places to record the world - if we allow everything to be just a photograph, then we risk taking away what makes photography unique - in my opinion

[arnold]

Images are defined by emotional impact. That's what's matters. Documenting reality....pfft. You can't document reality, any attempt to do so is dishonest reductionism.

There lies the root of different opinions. If you assume that every photo must have as its basis, an artistic value, you would be right. What then can be said of picking up an old photo taken as a snapshot of people, that suddenly displays the stark changes in the background environment since the picture was taken. "
Wow, look at that, they had telephone poles where now a road runs through, and look at that old oak tree and the old shack, both now gone - what an interesting photo. How glad I am that they never messed around with the negative, and have left us with such a fascinating record, a record that in itself has artistic merit."

[normhead]

Actually the word photography literally means recording of light, which implies a faithful transcription of light to some medium.

Ya, you're right all the text books are wrong. I see how this works.
All those people who learned "to write or draw with light" over the last hundred years are now wrong due to some unknown shift in the cosmos.

If you're going to change references that have defined a topic for a hundred years or more, you need something other than "because I say so."

What's the point of teaching concepts if people just change them whenever they want? Please, go with the consensus. You can't try and limit the concept by introducing your own personal limitations to the process.

There is a history to the terms used in the photographic process and a traditional method of employing them. The newbies don't get a say.

[wildman]

There is a history to the terms used in the photographic process and a traditional method of employing them. The newbies don't get a say.

Spoken like a true authoritarian conservative.

[clackers]

Actually the word photography literally means recording of light, which implies a faithful transcription of light to some medium..

AFAIK, the 'graph' part is simply from the Greek for writing.

I'm not sure that implies faithful and factual recording.

Affadavits are written, but so are poems and plays.