… no, really, you can stop blowing raspberries now, I AM a philosophy grad (well, 3rd class hons drama & philosophy to be precise, which I believe qualifies me to talk loudly in restaraunts and not much else)…

… Can I just say how badly these guys misrepresent post-modernism as well as science? I can hear several folks I deeply respect from the philosophy world muttering “that’s so wrong, I can’t even dignify it with the word wrong. ‘wrong’ would imply that they had made a few errors that you could correct. This is beyond wrong”.

I’m reminded of a friends opinion on “The Tao of Physics”: “This would be a great book if the author understood anything about quantum physics. Or Daoism.”

It’s amazing that a movement that started partly as a reaction against irrational “priveliged narratives” has become a tool to privelige any narrative, so long as it’s irrational.

science always progresses according to the evidence…. the key word there being progresses… the rest is flim flam wearing a mask

Berube, M. 2006 “The Sokal Hoax for Beginners.” Pp. 15-34 in _Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities_ UNC Press.

Re “postmodern:”

Anderson, Perry. 1998. _The origins of postmodernity_ Verso.

Quick oversimplification: “postmodern” arises in the 70s as a label for a set of artistic styles, and as the banner under which Lyotard attacks “grands recits” (referenced in my last post). Lyotard seems to be the basis for what Anderson terms the “street-level relativism” that a lot of people associate with postmodernity, as evident in the thread above.

Lyotard’s book fits the pattern of using poorly-understood snippets about quantum physics, nonlinearities, complex systems etc. to claim that reality is impossibly weird and systematic knowledge impossible. Scientists are right to mock this as well as opportunistic uses of Kuhn and Lakatos. Lyotard later admitted (there’s a fn in Anderson) that this was a bit of a con.

What’s less thoroughly understood by the scientists I talk to is that Lyotard’s position was not, nor has it become, the hegemonic position of humanities and social sciences or even any large chunk of them. Instead Lyotard was, in this and subsequent writings, attacking the “grands recits” of Marxism, Sartrean humanism, Habermas’ communicative ideal, Freudianism, Structuralism, and whatnot.

As developed by Fredric Jameson, “postmodernism” has been used *against* poststructuralism (whose most prominent representative is Foucault), which includes a great deal of work on race, gender, and sexuality.

So:

1. When I hear people using the term “postmodern” to include what postmodernism attacks, I know they don’t know what they’re talking about.

2. All the scientists of my acquaintance have run into the “street-level relativism” Anderson refers to, whether from the ill-trained humanities grads or in silly articles like the one cited at the top of this thread. But some of them then conflate *any* critique of knowledge or the institutions in which knowledge is made with the stupidest critiques.

The idea that science advances on the basis of evidence (rather than, say, on the whim of funding agencies/journal editors/big pharma/US political interests), however, is a lovely thought which I will cling to for yuletide comfort.

There *is* a minor tradition in French intellectual life of saying stupid things about science, most prominently Lyotard’s irresponsible 1979 _La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir_. But the broad, indiscriminate comments above about an entity called “postmodernism” are also silly in their own way. Bruno Latour, mentioned briefly above, is not an idiot. Foucault, who took science very seriously, was a lot smarter than most people who write “Foucauldian.”

There is no other way but to have a poke at the world and watch how it reacts.

Having said that, what has to be done is to poke part of the world in a certain precise way and watch for a reaction to that poke.

How you tell if the poke is what’s caused the effect is by having another part of the world, which is simillar in all other ways, remain unpoked.

And, to ensure the scientist in question does not bring personal bias into it, you get somebody else to do the poking so the scientist just watches for the reaction to the poke or non poke.

Oh hang on… that looks like a blinded control trial to me…. who’d have thought it?

If any postmodernists wish to explain another method for advancing science then please let me know…. i’ll even give my real name and address if they want to publish this as serious scientific comment.

Oh and while i’m avoiding work on here… Evidence according to my big book of words can also be said as Proof, Confirmation, Facts, Data, Substantiation, Verification, Support & Indication.

The way scientists use it is the last two. Support & Indication i.e. Evidence supports the theory or evidence indicates the theory is correct (or incorrect of course)

As for Normalising evidence (think that was the one they criticised… should have taken notes with the length of those articals) That is just about taking lots and lots of pokes at the world and finding the average (or normal) response.

More to the point, why not publish the response as a comment, surely the fairest and most appropriate choice. I mean, it’s really a bit unfair to carry out your side of the argument in a forum where most of the participants are excluded from when there is a level-playing field available where everybody can have their say.

“But can it honestly be appropriate to publish selected blog comments in a ’scholarly’ article,,,,”

It depends what they’re being used for. If they are being quoted in the same way as one would with a literature review or selection of a theoretical position on which to based interpretation of results, then it’d be potentially both inappropriate and dangerous. The nature of the weblogg beast is too unstable and often uninformed. But. If they’re being quoted as a sample of information (results) – a la interview transcripts, diaries, etc – which are going to be analysed, and if they are used carefully, then there’s nothing wrong with using them in academic research per say. If the research is about what people think/perceive of something.

Oh I agree that this is an abuse of post modern and deconstructionist approaches – which, for what it’s worth, have allowed so much potential for picking apart the shams of the powerful. (Where I have issues, personally, is where people try to go on and deny the reality of a material world beyond ourselves – which is a supremely arrogant and anthropocentric mistake). This is an inappropriate use of such approaches. I just happen to think it’s better to deal with it in public, when the very charge is that there is deliberate stifling of debate. But then, as columns on this weblogg have shown, time and again, the public and media are easily bamboozled and carried away.

That book sounds grande – I’ll have to take a peek.

Quite so, Andrew. This was implicit in Alan Sokal’s opposition to po-mo which led him to dream up the “Social Text” hoax/parody – see:

www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/afterword_v1a/afterword_v1a_singlefile.html

Francis Wheen also covers this in “Mumbo-Jumbo” – for instance, if all views are equally valid, what does po-mo say about the Holocaust and other documented examples of genocide and mass extermination? They were “texts”? And the deniers, whether of the Holocaust or apologists for Stalin or Mao? Do they have an equally valid “narrative”? A better example of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of po-mo would be hard to find.

If telling right from wrong is itself bad-and-wrong, how can you dismiss fascists as evil bastards?

Andrew.

I read a wonderful piss take of that sort of thing by Harry Frankfurt, called On Bullshit, published by Princeton University Press, of which the only bit my sleep deprived brain remembers right now is “And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit” which I think is at the end. The first chapter is available here. Great stocking filler. If you’re into that sort of thing.

But can it honestly be appropriate to publish selected blog comments in a ‘scholarly’ article,,,,

Not if they want to discount the thesis of the article, it isn’t. After all, here’s a journal that’s part of the so-called ‘fascist’ community allowing the very charges to be made in public – then carefully examining them in public. It’s a pretty good way of nullifying the claims, if that’s what you’re after.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itool=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstractplus&list_uids=9662120

– and there are more like this. You couldn’t make it up…

I have to share my absolute favourite paper of all time:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=15325026&query_hl=8&itool=pubmed_docsum
“Is there an association between the use of heeled footwear and schizophrenia?”

Which I’ve always assumed was an amusing spoof, but then that was how I felt about the Holmes article until relatively recently.

you are just too obviously trying to get quoted in their next academic article.