Peirce is one of the greatest thinkers in American history, a true genius and polyglot. He was a philosopher, logician, mathematician, as well as a scientist. Apparently you are unwilling to understand one of his central ideas, which is fine, no one argues you must. But it puts you in poor stead to be able to judge the validity of his logic and scientific philosophy or the relevance of his ideas to the topic at hand.

Frankly I find the intellectual arrogance on display here by some who call deem to think of themselves as scientists or scientific thinkers quite astounding. The lack of respect shown for a seminal American thinker belies a striking ignorance into the history of American scientific thought.

Whose nose will you next rub into the dirt? Thomas S. Kuhn? Edgar A. Singer? Will that make you feel better about yourself?

Peirce would not have agreed with you. For him, it's all about how how we think. In fact he said "‘we think only in signs". Which is why scholars like Chomsky hold him in such high esteem. Peirce was a genius, and unless you're also a genius, you can't understand the depth, significance or relevance of his work by glancing at it for 5-10 minutes.

But in any case the point is that for Peirce ice or glaciers or anything else in the physical or non-physical world are understood only through the signs they create in our minds. For Peirce, a sign is not a simple entity, in the sense of being a thing set apart. Instead, it is a genuine triadic relation, one of whose elements is a further sign—a decidedly non-trivial conception. He defines a sign (which he also calls a representamen) as "something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity". Peirce famously wrote:

Peirce integrates into the sign the necessity of its interpretation. That is, for Peirce, it makes no sense to conceptualize the sign without including in that conceptualization its interpretation. The implications of this are non-trivial and I won't go into them here.

The key takeaway is that when you or anyone else thinks about a glacier, you can't help but include in your conceptualization of it your interpretation. And your interpretation of it is where culture and individual worldview comes into play.

Whereas you believe that it makes sense to distinguish between (1) studies of glaciers in and of themselves and (2) the study human/glacier interactions, I think that's naive, because for us as human beings with conscious minds, glaciers cannot exist in and of themselves. As soon as you study them you are by necessity studying human/glacier interactions, including your own. Whether you are using a feminist postcolonial framework or any other framework, the fact is, you're using one, whether you are aware or unaware of this fact or not. Let's give your one a name, the "steveha framework". Maybe if one day you better understood what scholars mean by a "feminist postcolonial framework", you might still strongly prefer the "steveha framework". And that would be fine. But chances are, if you did understand a "feminist postcolonial framework", you would better understand your own too.

Steveha, you admit you don't understand the paper as well as what you think you could do. I've argued that like a lot of academic writing it's badly written. I've also argued the history of science demonstrates that culture affects the way people do science, and what they get out of it. You appear to have a big problem with that general insight as it applies to a field of study you care about.

Even putting that argument to one side, the fact is you probably have no idea about the different ways population groups, such as women, are affected by glacier melt. I'm not about to summarize the paper for you.

As for the "ice is just ice" argument, anyone who believes that puts themselves in direct conflict with the theory of signs developed by the pragmatist CS Peirce, one of the most brilliant American scholars of any field in any generation: http://plato.stanford.edu/entr...

You're not convinced about what, exactly? The authors state their paper is a way of getting the academic conversation going, not a systematic review of all the relevant evidence. As a scholar, do you have a problem with that? Should they publish their work only when they have more answers to the questions they pose?

Presumably one thing that has got you bothered is that the authors are pushing the idea that the cultural lens through which we understand scientific knowledge means we don't understand things we really ought to know about glaciers as well as we could be. Personally I think it's valuable to understand how men and women and indeed any population group are differently affected by the melt of glaciers and just as crucially, what it means to these groups culturally. Do you have a problem with that?

Moreover, do you have a problem with the idea that culture can affect scientific understanding? Have you taken the time to understand the history of science and how it's been used for tremendous as as well as good in part because of the cultural assumptions scientists bring to their work, not to mention the power structures in which they do their work?

A problem you and I might share about the paper is that they write with words few understand, guaranteeing that only a tiny group in the big wide world of scholarship actually understand what it is they're trying to say. (FWIW I do understand it, because I've been trained to do so). And as many of us know, most scholars write for a tiny audience, regardless of the field they're in.

Few scholars have the happy gift of being able to write for a large audience and do great research no one else has done before. In fact scholars tend to be a contradictory bunch when it comes to writing to be understood. On the one hand scholars pretty much universally admire and even love awesome writers among their midst. On the other hand, many scholars fall into a hole of writing badly from which they never emerge. They end up writing for the people who primarily determine their careers -- people just like them.

Now it's true that communicating tricky ideas with clarity can be mighty difficult. But it can be done and it should be done! When scholars do that, their research becomes better, and when people outside the field can understand it, there is more of a fighting chance they might actually change their ways after having read the research. Despite how ridiculous we scholars can be, deep down I believe we try to do good more often than not.

I just spent 6 weeks in Iran. The censorship blocking / unblocking happens in pretty close to real time. When a site is censored you can click to request to have it un-censored. Personally I used to do this a lot, and sometimes they would be un-censored, particularly if the subject was something technological, like free software sites. They also seem to keep a close eye on what people browse. I remember visiting sites that were open one day, and then censored the next.

If anyone is remotely interested I have some photos from Iran here