Contemporary rationality does not allow various rationalities to exist or treats them as madness or abnormal. Ethnic values look substandard from the western corporate oriented prism.
Truth should not be treated as a ‘cognitive notion’ at all…which it has come to be. It is rather an experiential notion. It is not propositions purporting to describe the world of which truth is predicated, it is only our moral experience, which is capable of being true. The political and technological developments which led to the oft described ‘Enlightenment’ — (read European ENLIGHTENMENT) Arise Inevitably from the very conception of reasons it is understood in the scientific terms. So understood, sometime in the 17th century, with the rise of scientific methods in Europe, all predispositions to modern government and technology came into place .All that was needed for those predispositions to be triggered in our sustained efforts to organize and control our physical and social environment, was for enlightenment to articulate the idea of reason as it affects social life and polity. Only if truth so conceived can science become the paradigmatic pursuit of our culture and without it the scientific outlook lacks its deepest theoretical source.
What I mean by truth, as a cognitive notion is that it is a property of sentences or propositions that describe the world. Thus when we have reason to think that the sentences (equations) to which we give assent exhibit this property, then we have knowledge of the world- a knowledge that can then be progressively accumulated and put to use through continuing enquiry building on past knowledge. Reality then becomes not the reality of moral experience. It becomes something alien to that experience, wholly external and objectified. It is no surprise then that we look upon reality as something to be conquered and mastered, an attitude that leads directly to the technological frame of mind that governs modern societies, and which in turn takes us away from our communal localities where moral experience and our practical relations to the world flourish. It takes us towards increasingly abstract places and structures as nations and eventually global economies.
In such places and such forms of life, there is no scope for exemplary action to take hold, and no basis for a moral vision in which value is not linked to ‘imperative’ and ‘principle’; and then inevitably, to the attitudes of criticism and the entire moral psychology which ultimately underlies violence in our social relations.
In such a world all we are left to do is to communicate via articles over email and live subjectively the life we should…for outside subjectivity rules are in place.
Philosophy ….in academia helps us serve the same purpose. Criticisms can continue.