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Science and Technology Policy: IT and Social Change
Neha Khanna
Somebody once said to the philosopher Wittgenstein: What a bunch of no-knows we medieval Europeans must have been! Back in the days before Copernicus, to have looked up at the sky and thought that what we saw up there was the Sun going round the Earth, when, as everybody knows, the Earth goes round the Sun, and it doesn’t take too many brains to understand that! Wittgenstein replied: Yes, but I wonder what it would have looked like if the Sun had been going round the Earth. The point is that it would, of course, have looked exactly the same. What he was saying was that you see what you want to see. Consider also the medieval Londoner or an 18th-century American who, when asked ...
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