User:Girly Brains

I have expertise and many years' experience in boats, boating and within the industry in which I was also apprentice trained and college educated. Attending Lowestoft College, UK, for four years where I gained distinction in the subject: (Yacht & Boatbuilding, Ship Joinery Craft Studies). [City & Guilds of London Institute].

I have interest in many areas within this field, but by no means all. I continue to read and write much in the subject-area.

I enjoy writing and I have been a regular contributor to Yahoo! Answers for a number of years. Chiefly in my main field.

I also gained a BSc in Politics and Modern Social Theory, from Portsmouth Polytechnic, UK, where my main interest was in epistemology and other applied philosophy.

I chose this particular course because, apart from the great curriculum on offer, the degree was heavily oriented towards the sciences.

And it was at an amazing time - when the wonders of quantum mechanics were throwing up fundamental challenges, both in physics and, by implication, in the basis-thinking of knowledge itself: Epistemology.

The Theory of Knowledge.

Great thinkers like Louis Althusser, Gaston Bachelard and Dominique Lecourt et al, were breaking free of the 'war of tendencies' between idealism and materialism in ontology that had waged, since the time of Descartes and were actually beginning the realization that the whole point: in epistemology: in applied philosophy: in 'the sciences' - is to get on with the business of doing science!

Scientific Rationalism.

Making, possibly for the first time ever, the subject of epistemology a deeply-applied branch of philosophy. While, hitherto it had been a bit academic, shall we say.

No longer the 'ivory tower': where 'philosophers' dictate, dogmatically, from outside of the sciences (from within "philosophy") on this-or-that supposed criteria for knowledge and 'impose' these upon the sciences like gate-wardens! (Or, as the dogma had it: 'Science' - with a capital 'S'! - Much in the manner of Karl Popper and others).

Such outdated ideas had had a deeply negative impact on the methodological thinking in the sciences for a very long time and all was not well subsequently at the methodological level.

For the first time it seemed, we had come to realise that knowledges exist in a variety of different forms (mysticism, religion, 'common-sense', science, etc.) And that these different forms had become 'dominant' in different, historical epochs. And that, in our own epoch, the sciences where - are - the dominant form of knowledge.

And ... that the one-and-only criterion (so it would seem - if we are to escape the tedious clutches of those dogmas of the various empiricism(s) and idealism(s) of the past, for this, 'scientificity') is ...

... openness!

Which is why I love Wikipedia, too!

Open source, open debate, open books, open investigation!

... I am a qualified teacher / lecturer for the UK Further Education sector. Having gained a PGCE at the University of Greenwich, London, UK.