Oh! Another area I think is worth examining is the common perception that disciplines such as scientific research, unnatural philosophy, and critical theory must obviously reside in and be products of hegemonic established institutions, such as academia.
I encounter a lot of classism, both latent and blatant, indicating that philosophy and critical theory are purely academic. This has been used to dismiss me countless times as a white-tower bourgeois, despite me explaining that I have no formal education and have often been doing this literally “on the street”. Many liberals especially refuse this and explain that dealing (even as poorly as I do) with the concepts I do makes me at least a white middle-class trust baby, because it is supposedly the privilege of those kinds of people to be concerned with these kinds of ideas.
There does not seem to be much framework in the supposedly egalitarian left for understanding and engaging with those who are not aligned with existing institutions. One might suppose that with the increasing complaints of political disenfranchisement and elitism over the past twenty years that more people might get clued into this.
In philosophical debates about epistemology I often get confused about who is talking about “ideal science” and who is talking about “real science”.
Did Popper claim that actual science proceeds according to strict falsificationism? Or did he say that the closer scientists manage to adhere to these methods, the more we can trust the results?
Did Kuhn just point out that scientists tend to disregard results that contradict the dominant “paradigm” until the evidence starts piling up, or did he defend that as a good way to get better models of reality?
Trying to read up on Kuhn’s work via Wikipedia also led me to a lot of stuff about shifting paradigms and the claim of different paradigms being “incommensurable” - for which there is no example given. Now the claim that there is such a thing as incommensurability is a pretty strong statement about what kind of scientific knowledge is possible, as opposed to just a statement about how most scientists are human beings.
So, what are these philosophers really talking about? Are they talking about how knowledge about the real world can be achieved, or are they talking about what the people whose job it is to accumulate knowledge about the real world are actually doing?
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I’ve caught many self-proclaimed fans of postmodernism (who probably didn’t really know that much about postmodernist philosophy) equivocating between “ideal” epistemology and the real-world processes of science. Apparently, the reasoning goes, “scientists are humans and will not apply any ‘scientific method’ perfectly”, therefore “reality is at the same time inherently unknowable and just a societal construct”.
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Has the idea of moving from the binary view of hypotheses that are falsified by the evidence or not to the Bayesian view of priors that can be updated according to the evidence become popular among the philosophers of science yet?
Bayesian theory plays a major role in the Philosophy of Science, yes.
As I mentioned in the OP, one of Popper’s failings was that he imagined all of science to be similar to physics. It isn’t.
Over in the biological sciences, we’ve always been playing with probabilities rather than proof. Innately variable systems do not lend themselves neatly to Popper’s system of critical experiments.
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BTW, since I’ve linked a couple of philosophy papers in this post, I may as well do some more.
Alan Chalmers, What Is This Thing Called Science?. A fantastic short book that provides a thorough introduction to the Demarcation Problem and a bunch of other Phil O’Sci playthings. Includes a chapter on Bayesian probability. Very readable, worth a look.
Sokal & Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. An amusing catalogue of some of the more spectacular daftness to be produced in the name of postmodernism, along with detailed explanations as to exactly why they’re daft. Includes an annotated copy of the infamous Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.
Yes, that’s what I took it as, and that generated a big [citation needed] sign in my head. I cannot come up with a single example of the facts changing along with the theory. Facts being changed by changes in the theory runs very much counter to my definition of the word “fact”. My conclusion therefore is that either this statement is another piece of fashionable nonsense, or I need some example to understand what is really meant.
When phlogiston theory was still current, it was thought that fire was caused by a substance (phlogiston) inside combustible materials, and that the phlogiston was consumed during combustion.
However, careful measurement of the products of combustion revealed that burning something actually made it gain mass. So, the scientists of the time “observed” that phlogiston had negative mass. It was an established “fact” that during combustion, wood gained mass due to the removal of negative-mass phlogiston.
(what’s actually happening is that phlogiston doesn’t exist, combustion = rapid oxidation, and the gain in mass comes from the oxygen bonding to the combustion material)
For a slightly more modern example: you look at a thermometer, and the mercury is level with a marking that says 25°C. Based upon this, you claim to observe that the temperature is twenty-five degrees centigrade.
However, there is a fuckton of theory underlying that statement. Theory that states that the expansion and contraction of mercury is proportional to temperature; theory that states that a liquid contained within a measured volume within a gravity field will provide consistent visual evidence as to the extent of expansion and contraction; theory that states that temperature is the sort of thing that is meaningful to understand as a rational number. Etc etc etc.
Change any of that theory, and you change the observation. You’ll still see the same thermometer, but the meaning of the observation will change.
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But, you’ve got a point: the extent to which observation is theory-laden is still an area of lively debate.
The Hacking paper is largely about this. For a good quick outline, see here. For a classic historical example, see here.
I think I’ll leave it to those with a few more clues to carry the thread; I don’t have anywhere near as much a grasp of it as some. I just liked what the author of the articles I linked was saying, and tried to distill it to a few lines.
On another note, @mewse was on the money regarding the lack of detail regarding the difference and transition between systemic and fluid, although that may well be symptomatic of the problem the author was trying to draw attention to, ie, hardly anyone is thinking about stuff in these terms.
Haha! When I saw this thread I was all like, here we go again, how do I distill the problem, and there it is. People spend a lot of time complaining about postmodernism but they’re really straw-manning hard. Lots of people do the same thing with Freud and Lacan, they go on and on about dicks and latent content without realizing that these guys spent the better part of their careers refuting misunderstandings propagated by their opponents. So people tend to run with those misunderstandings or cherry-pick one of their more advanced concepts, don’t understand it right away because they don’t have a basis in the field, and immediately dismiss it as incomprehensible bullshit. When someone fails to understand something, or doesn’t find it interesting, dismissing its value is a vapid, empty gesture. When they understand it and disagree with it, that usually yields the most interesting and productive contact points.
I come from the humanities and there’s no shortage of bad papers out there for sure. But it’s not like postmodern thinking invented stupid. It’s just that with older writings whole generations of scholars have already filtered out a lot of the bullshit for us, so if we take a superficial glance at the history of thought it’s tempting to conclude that postmodernism is stupid par excellence. But readily available heaps of stupid just comes with being contemporary.
Looking at thinkers like Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Zizek, Lefebvre, Lacan, and so forth, I’ve yet to encounter anyone who has a beef with them who can actually have a conversation about their work, with the exception of Baudrillard because people love to hate the shit out of his writing style and Lacan because feminist psychoanalysis. Yes there are debates out there, there are some truly epic and hilarious exchanges between the above thinkers and also with others like Judith Butler (she and Zizek do great impressions of one another), but generally when people just start hating on postmodernism they’re not doing a lot of deep thinking on the subject.
I remember my first theory class. It irritated me to no end. I thought it was ridiculous. But as I studied it and came to understand what I was reading on the third and fourth readings, I came around. Unfortunately I just think that most people never get that far, or they get the pop culture version, which is an intellectual dead-end.
I’m no fan of cultural relativism by a very long shot but I dont think its reasonable to blame pomo for the fact that some large chunks of the world dont view the UDHR as universal at all.
There were only 1500 Steller’s sea cows at the time of their discovery by Europeans, and these were localized to one colony. Indigenous hunters depleted the population first, both directly and by hunting the sea cows’ main food supply (sea otters).
So I think you forgot to fill that out a bit. Seller’s sea cows ate kelp. There’s a theory that hunting significantly reduced the sea otter population. Without the otters the population of sea urchins increased, so eventually the larger population of sea urchins reduced the kelp beds eliminating the Seller’s sea cow’s food source.
Also while the ‘1741 in Science’ article speaks of Science discovering the Steller’s sea cow, it was known to the aboriginals of the North Pacific coast, much as the Steller’s jay was known to people before Europeans Science discovered it. This actually does say something about the main topic of postmodernism and the History of Science.
In my experience, the Philosophy of Science and History of Science guys covered it, but were very skeptical; the Sociology of Science crew, OTOH, were full-on Strong Programme types [1].
However, the humanities side of my uni did appear to be heavily (albeit not universally) populated with PoMo fans. Less so in the “traditional” disciplines (ancient history etc), more so in the political fields. Casual and uncritical references to Derrida et al were common amongst the BA folks.
[1] I had one Sociology course where by the end of semester it had pretty much devolved to the entire class repeatedly asking “do you really expect us to take this crap seriously?”.
Yeah, “humanities” is a big umbrella (as with PoMo, which is more of a general label for a collection than a single clearly defined ideology), so while there are some disciplines that are more in the PoMo realm, it’s something to be judged on a case-by-case basis.
In general fields that are more politically driven/oriented tend towards PoMo cultural critiques, and for me that’s a concern since their “method” is rather like the Hegelian dialectic. It yielded results some people so wanted to see that they weren’t concerned that the same “method” in different hands could “prove” the exact opposite. A method that can prove everything proves nothing. You can actually find the same principle of PoMo cultural relativism in the Confederacy’s justification of slavery as “our unique way of life,” and now cultural conservatives sometimes glom onto it to justify their racism, theocracy, etc. as cultural values that are under attack while having equal validity. Still that’s not exactly rooted in PoMo theorists, so much as a kind of relativism that’s been around for millennia.
It’s collection of Sokal essays, written in the aftermath of the hoax.
The Sokal Hoax: The Sham that Shook the Academy is also worth a look. That’s a collection of essays by other authors, from a variety of disciplines, responding to the hoax. Can’t find a free pdf of that one, though.
