10 ms·

On Post-Modernist Philosophy of Science (2000)

69 points by iamjeff 10y ago

hyperpape 10y ago
I'll go ahead and confess that I haven't read the whole article, but I think it will still be valuable to relay that as a former philosophy grad student (though not a philosopher of science), my first response was "who the fuck is Andrew Pickering?" Don't think that the initial quote is the norm in philosophy.
- iamjeff 10y ago
  Strangely, Pickering's Wikipedia photo instantly reminded me of Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Here is the latter drinking a bottle of pepper sauce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIfAk-guplA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIfAk-guplA.
_delirium 10y ago
I was about to say that this guy is about 15-20 years late to the party with the polemic, but noticed from the footer that this essay is in fact 16 years old. Maybe someone could add a (2000) to the title? For more background on the period this essay came out of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars
- iamjeff 10y ago
  Yes, I had updated it to reflect the dates, but must have made a mistake in submission. I could rectify that in short order. *edit: silly me, looks like I can't edit it. Perhaps someone with more karma/mod privileges could help out.
- vlehto 10y ago
  The weird thing here is that if everything is social construct, then science as social construct is just as true as it would be as objective reality. Then you can just pick science as your favorite construct and call it a day. But for some reason "social constructionist" seem to be often incredibly biased. Some things are "false" because they are constructs, but some things are "true" because they are constructs. And some things are just objectively horrible, while others are constructed as horrible. Examples: rape culture is social construct, but mental distress from rape is suddenly not. Nationalism is "false" social construct, but Marxism is "true" social construct.
  - _delirium 10y ago
    I think you're conflating quite a few different people there. I mean, there probably are some people who simultaneously hold all those views, but most don't. For example many people doing social studies of science do find science interesting, which is partly why they spend so much time studying people who follow that methodology— they just don't think it's a methodology that is independent of the human culture that it arose from, and are particularly interested in how its social practices developed (even if the scientists themselves don't like to see what they do as "social practices"). Bruno Latour goes in this category, as something of a 'science-o-philic' social constructionist (although he's also a "soft" constructionist, because he views both humans and non-human entities, like lab apparatus and materials, as jointly doing the construction, vs. it being a purely cultural phenomenon). And generally (most) social constructionists and (most) Marxists don't see eye-to-eye, precisely because most Marxists do think there is a scientific, objective method (historical materialism) for analyzing social relations, history, economies, etc., and orthodox Marxists even tend to believe objective factors ultimately determine culture rather than the reverse.
    - vlehto 10y ago
      The spesific dude/dudette who invented the "nationalism is modern social construct and pretty false" is in my understanding quite left leaning. People who say this stuff out loud in real life (all three of them) are very left leaning. Being completely opposed to nationalism makes sense in very few instances, and comitern sympathies are one.
thanatropism 10y ago
Counterpoint: http://retractionwatch.com/ http://retractionwatch.com/ (Edit: now -- this, from the very bottom of the article, is disturbing: "If you don't understand why science has a valid claim to objective knowledge, and why undermining the belief in objective reality is dangerous not just to science but to society at large, don't disturb those of us who do.")
- whorleater 10y ago
  Retractions aren't an counterpoint against the article inasmuch as a result of the scientific process. Science is bound to get things wrong, and in a larger, grander scheme of scientific processes judging science by its retractions is akin to judging someone for their childhood actions. Science develops, learns, and moves forwards, and while that doesn't render it impervious to criticism, it should be impervious to those who aren't involved in it to a significant degree. Framed in that manner, I don't think the end of the article is disturbing.
  - thanatropism 10y ago
    I will agree that retractions are a mark of honesty on some of the actors involved in "Science". What they are not is the "sign of contradiction" of catholic faith. Honesty is not enough to claim a priesthood of the fashion he wants. This becomes even more complicated as we leave the holy sciences of physics, chemistry and biology. We are told that the popperian method of posing falsifiable hypotheses is the only way "forward" and we attempt to apply it to the poorly defined questions of areas such as cognitive psychology -- and then become startled or blame p-values when we find ourselves in the middle of a replicability crisis where any given paper may as well be false. Because physics has such a hug on its unyielding realities, we assume homogeneous "Science" is able to claim an "objective", extra-social -- and ironically unverifiable, as we can't arrive at right answers from wrong questions -- command of "knowledge". But that's not a true view of the real world, unyielding as it is to our space-age dreams.
    - whorleater 10y ago
      You're completely right on that the generalization of science as an objective process onto itself is unfounded at best and dangerous as worst, but isn't that a sign of growing pains in science? As science progresses, both in the easily quantifiable and more abstract fields, we should expect an eventual progression towards a further, better measures for fields such as cognitive psychology. It took physics hundreds of years to be verifiable on a large degree, and we shouldn't hold relatively newer fields to the same standard, and scientist have to start somewhere. Unto that goal, isn't it more dangerous to stifle and stall newer fields because they're experiencing growing pains?
gaur 10y ago
Jacques Derrida is the Picasso of bullshit artistry.
- thanatropism 10y ago
  Could be -- I know some so-called "post-modern" philosophers to be meaningful, but I know very little about Derrida. Still, where professor Dutch starts sounding like a crackpot is when he strawmans Latour and Derrida into a crusade against the purity of Scientific Objectivity. No deconstructionist I know of has ever picketed a chemical lab; "green activists" have done that -- and to throw christian young-earth creationism and Velikovsky on the lap of mr. Derrida, well, that just sounds like asking someone whether they have stopped beating their wife already. I do wonder if the rise of this scientistic reactionaryism (not the self-satisfied belief in science, but the need to go out and write lengthy rants on subjects they know nothing about) has to do with the stagnation of fundamental physics since the 1970s. I mean -- professor Dutch sounds like he was promises a priesthood and then denied access to God.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- orthoganol 10y ago
  He makes sense within a certain discourse. Whether you think that whole discourse is bullshit, I think is what's at hand.
nxzero 10y ago
From Wikipedia on the Science Wars: >> "dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives."
bitwize 10y ago
People assume that postmodernism is an attempt by the left to weaponize rhetoric for their own ends. But the right has already weaponized rhetoric. Postmodernism is more like "defense against the dark arts". Yes, much of the work of e.g. Derrida sounds like long-form trolling, because it is. It's a form of culture jamming to disrupt the cognitive processes by which we accept things as "truth" or "reality".
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >Postmodernism is more like "defense against the dark arts". Yes, much of the work of e.g. Derrida sounds like long-form trolling, because it is. It's a form of culture jamming to disrupt the cognitive processes by which we accept things as "truth" or "reality". You mean: it's a cheap and riskless replacement for actually struggling against capitalism via a materialist analysis of the conditions of the working class.
- thescribe 10y ago
  That's a postmodern way to say 'wrong', right?
- ohnomrbill 10y ago
  It's a form of culture jamming to disrupt the cognitive processes by which we accept things as "truth" or "reality". Can you express this a bit more clearly? "Culture jamming" is not a broadly understood term. It's not clear why the words "truth" and "reality" are quoted. Additionally, it seems odd to combine a specific term like "cognitive processes" with a ultra-broad term like "things". If there is an argument for postmodernism being something more than word salad, your comment does not make it well.
  - wpietri 10y ago
    You can read more here about culture jamming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming As an example of the problem he's addressing, look closely at your constructions like "is not a broadly understood term", "it's not clear", "it seems odd", and "your comment does not make it well". These are all your personal opinions, and yet you've cast them in the language of objective fact, of truth. You assert without evidence that your view is identical with reality. Others reading you could take on those fact-shaped opinions as actual fact, especially if you have high social standing. So by talking about "truth" or "reality", I believe he refers to the jointly held, socially constructed opinions that people mistake for fact. An obvious political example of that is the way the various US state declarations of secession during the civil war assert that black people are naturally inferior, fit only to be slaves. To them it was experienced as truth. There are also plenty of examples in the sciences; look at any major paradigm shift and you can see "truth" diverging from truth, "reality" diverging from reality. This is why Planck wrote, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
aub3bhat 10y ago
Having met with some of the "Science and Technology Studies" students and floored by the ignorance of basic technical facts by some of the people they quoted to be correct, I believe this postmodernist trend arose out of post-cold war technological superiority. With Science and Technology no longer needed to fight against a powerful enemy, it was easy to devalue it. However times are changing. A society can only ignore science and facts in favor of meaningless word salad as long as their security does not depends on it.
hcs 10y ago
The discussion near the end of Philip Scranton was the most interesting and coherent part of the article for me, while earlier Dutch is mostly just incredulous about the words used by Latour and Derrida. I think he makes a good point about a mutual misunderstanding: > The history of science as presented in science texts, especially older ones, is rightly unsatisfactory to sociologists. In the interests of providing students with a heuristic framework (frequently a historical approach is the best way to explain a complex concept) and a sense of historical orientation, the accounts were streamlined to the point where they presented a highly linear view of science devoid of false starts, blind alleys, and personality clashes. The reason textbooks do it perhaps a tad better than they used to, by the way, is partly due to the insights of sociologists. > Sociologists, on the other hand, need to realize that the way they present the history of science can seem just as distorted. However honorable their intent, their language seems at times to deny the existence of objective knowledge.
- thisrod 10y ago
  The language used in sociology does deny the existence of objective knowledge, for excellent reasons that sociologists are happy to explain. It's a way to manage a massive problem. https://web.archive.org/web/20160529025038/http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/contactsandpeople/harrycollins/sociology-of-science.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160529025038/http://www.cardif... We might know objectively that matter is made of atoms, and sociologists know that too; but Dalton, Boyle and Lavoisier didn't know it. It's easy to tell a story about what they did and why they did it, and the story will end with everyone finding out that matter is made of atoms. But, in order for the beginning of that story to be an objective explanation of what people did, it has to make sense whether or not matter turns out to be made of atoms. Causality runs forwards in time. Therefore, atoms were discovered as a result of the actions of people who didn't know about atoms, and atoms did not directly affect the actions that led to their discovery. If atoms caused the discovery of atoms, it would have happened ten billion years ago, not two hundred.
  - schoen 10y ago
    Thanks for the link to the Collins article; I found it very interesting. I have some questions about your argument that the atoms didn't cause their discovery, but I don't think I have time to formulate them clearly right now, so I'll just stop with thanking you for the link. :-)
fizixer 10y ago
Article with such a title doesn't have a mention of transhumanism. I'm sorry I don't have time for this.
leoc 10y ago
Well, this is old newspaper. The Science Wars were a product of the post-'60s worldview, in which good-natives-versus-wicked-colonisers was more or less the overarching theme and rationality was suspect; they quickly died the death in the revised, post-9/11 master narrative of Enlightenment-versus-superstitious-darkness, which wasn't fertile ground for even modest and non-radical skepticism about The Science. A classic document of this is the "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?" paper, in which Bruno Latour scrambles to get with the just-modified program: note the 2003/4 date. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-INQUIRY-GB.pdf http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-I... Of course we'll have to see how things develop in future, now that the post-2001 frame of reference is already fading in people's minds.
ittekimasu 10y ago
Also see, Dawkins review of Alan Sokal's book, http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html
thefastlane 10y ago
maybe it's a formatting issue in my browser, but it was less than clear when it was the author talking, versus when he was quoting something. i had to bail. am i not giving the paper a fair shake?
pjscott 10y ago
> She: I've heard that the main thing is to avoid relativism. But I'm a physicist, and that presents a real difficulty. Without relativity there'd be no possibility of making measurements and we'd each be prisoners, to all eternity, in some single point of view. In my discipline, we need the relativity of frames of reference in order even to begin work. I have a special need for relativity because I work on events close to the Big Bang. You don't need relativity, too? I think it's safe to say that, with this paragraph, Bruno Latour failed the Ideological Turing Test: this conflation of philosophical relativism with the physical theory of relativity is not something that would ever be uttered by someone who knew what the latter is. It gets worse from there. Please, anyone who's tempted to write a dialogue with a fictional person holding an opposing viewpoint: talk to one first! Find out what their arguments really are! And, if possible, learn their views well enough that your summary would seem accurate to one of them.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  > Please, anyone who's tempted to write a dialogue with a fictional person holding an opposing viewpoint: talk to one first! Find out what their arguments really are! And, if possible, learn their views well enough that your summary would seem accurate to one of them. Amen. It might also prevent the deliberately insulting language that Latour adopted. Clearly, he holds the scientific camp in contempt. An actual dialog might have demonstrated to him that there was more there than ignorance and mistaken ideas.
coldtea 10y ago
>In a century that produced Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and Slobo Milosevic we still see philosophers and sociologists seeking the roots of evil in externals like family violence, poverty, television, even circumcision and lack of breast-feeding (and no, I am not making those up!). Whereas the correct answer is what? Some disturbed individuals like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot etc are the cause? Or was it "philosophy" that perverted them -- because Hitler sure as hell didn't read much philosophy. And what about the millions of victims of atrocities from the "civilized" colonial powers not mentioned in this list, because they're third world so nobody cares, and b) they kill the nice argument about "pure evil" leaders motivated by philosophy. Those crimes were motivated by the almighty buck. >Calling twentieth-century philosophy superficial gives it too much dignity; vacuous is the closest term. Yeah, man, you dismissed it in a sentence. How intellectual. And coincidentally, how anglo-saxon, the very culture that never understood continental philosophy to begin with, and deals mainly in scientism and crude empiricist platitudes.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  > Or was it "philosophy" that perverted them -- because Hitler sure as hell didn't read much philosophy. Unfortunately, he read enough Nietzche to become dangerous. (Or perhaps he was dangerous anyway, and read enough Nietzche to provide a smoke screen...)

69 points by iamjeff 10y ago

I'll go ahead and confess that I haven't read the whole article, but I think it will still be valuable to relay that as a former philosophy grad student (though not a philosopher of science), my first response was "who the fuck is Andrew Pickering?" Don't think that the initial quote is the norm in philosophy.

iamjeff 10y ago
Strangely, Pickering's Wikipedia photo instantly reminded me of Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Here is the latter drinking a bottle of pepper sauce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIfAk-guplA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIfAk-guplA.

_delirium 10y ago

I was about to say that this guy is about 15-20 years late to the party with the polemic, but noticed from the footer that this essay is in fact 16 years old. Maybe someone could add a (2000) to the title? For more background on the period this essay came out of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars

iamjeff 10y ago
Yes, I had updated it to reflect the dates, but must have made a mistake in submission. I could rectify that in short order. *edit: silly me, looks like I can't edit it. Perhaps someone with more karma/mod privileges could help out.
vlehto 10y ago
The weird thing here is that if everything is social construct, then science as social construct is just as true as it would be as objective reality. Then you can just pick science as your favorite construct and call it a day. But for some reason "social constructionist" seem to be often incredibly biased. Some things are "false" because they are constructs, but some things are "true" because they are constructs. And some things are just objectively horrible, while others are constructed as horrible. Examples: rape culture is social construct, but mental distress from rape is suddenly not. Nationalism is "false" social construct, but Marxism is "true" social construct.
- _delirium 10y ago
  I think you're conflating quite a few different people there. I mean, there probably are some people who simultaneously hold all those views, but most don't. For example many people doing social studies of science do find science interesting, which is partly why they spend so much time studying people who follow that methodology— they just don't think it's a methodology that is independent of the human culture that it arose from, and are particularly interested in how its social practices developed (even if the scientists themselves don't like to see what they do as "social practices"). Bruno Latour goes in this category, as something of a 'science-o-philic' social constructionist (although he's also a "soft" constructionist, because he views both humans and non-human entities, like lab apparatus and materials, as jointly doing the construction, vs. it being a purely cultural phenomenon). And generally (most) social constructionists and (most) Marxists don't see eye-to-eye, precisely because most Marxists do think there is a scientific, objective method (historical materialism) for analyzing social relations, history, economies, etc., and orthodox Marxists even tend to believe objective factors ultimately determine culture rather than the reverse.
  - vlehto 10y ago
    The spesific dude/dudette who invented the "nationalism is modern social construct and pretty false" is in my understanding quite left leaning. People who say this stuff out loud in real life (all three of them) are very left leaning. Being completely opposed to nationalism makes sense in very few instances, and comitern sympathies are one.

thanatropism 10y ago

Counterpoint: http://retractionwatch.com/ http://retractionwatch.com/ (Edit: now -- this, from the very bottom of the article, is disturbing: "If you don't understand why science has a valid claim to objective knowledge, and why undermining the belief in objective reality is dangerous not just to science but to society at large, don't disturb those of us who do.")

whorleater 10y ago
Retractions aren't an counterpoint against the article inasmuch as a result of the scientific process. Science is bound to get things wrong, and in a larger, grander scheme of scientific processes judging science by its retractions is akin to judging someone for their childhood actions. Science develops, learns, and moves forwards, and while that doesn't render it impervious to criticism, it should be impervious to those who aren't involved in it to a significant degree. Framed in that manner, I don't think the end of the article is disturbing.
- thanatropism 10y ago
  I will agree that retractions are a mark of honesty on some of the actors involved in "Science". What they are not is the "sign of contradiction" of catholic faith. Honesty is not enough to claim a priesthood of the fashion he wants. This becomes even more complicated as we leave the holy sciences of physics, chemistry and biology. We are told that the popperian method of posing falsifiable hypotheses is the only way "forward" and we attempt to apply it to the poorly defined questions of areas such as cognitive psychology -- and then become startled or blame p-values when we find ourselves in the middle of a replicability crisis where any given paper may as well be false. Because physics has such a hug on its unyielding realities, we assume homogeneous "Science" is able to claim an "objective", extra-social -- and ironically unverifiable, as we can't arrive at right answers from wrong questions -- command of "knowledge". But that's not a true view of the real world, unyielding as it is to our space-age dreams.
  - whorleater 10y ago
    You're completely right on that the generalization of science as an objective process onto itself is unfounded at best and dangerous as worst, but isn't that a sign of growing pains in science? As science progresses, both in the easily quantifiable and more abstract fields, we should expect an eventual progression towards a further, better measures for fields such as cognitive psychology. It took physics hundreds of years to be verifiable on a large degree, and we shouldn't hold relatively newer fields to the same standard, and scientist have to start somewhere. Unto that goal, isn't it more dangerous to stifle and stall newer fields because they're experiencing growing pains?

gaur 10y ago

Jacques Derrida is the Picasso of bullshit artistry.

thanatropism 10y ago
Could be -- I know some so-called "post-modern" philosophers to be meaningful, but I know very little about Derrida. Still, where professor Dutch starts sounding like a crackpot is when he strawmans Latour and Derrida into a crusade against the purity of Scientific Objectivity. No deconstructionist I know of has ever picketed a chemical lab; "green activists" have done that -- and to throw christian young-earth creationism and Velikovsky on the lap of mr. Derrida, well, that just sounds like asking someone whether they have stopped beating their wife already. I do wonder if the rise of this scientistic reactionaryism (not the self-satisfied belief in science, but the need to go out and write lengthy rants on subjects they know nothing about) has to do with the stagnation of fundamental physics since the 1970s. I mean -- professor Dutch sounds like he was promises a priesthood and then denied access to God.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
orthoganol 10y ago
He makes sense within a certain discourse. Whether you think that whole discourse is bullshit, I think is what's at hand.

nxzero 10y ago

From Wikipedia on the Science Wars: >> "dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives."

bitwize 10y ago

People assume that postmodernism is an attempt by the left to weaponize rhetoric for their own ends. But the right has already weaponized rhetoric. Postmodernism is more like "defense against the dark arts". Yes, much of the work of e.g. Derrida sounds like long-form trolling, because it is. It's a form of culture jamming to disrupt the cognitive processes by which we accept things as "truth" or "reality".

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>Postmodernism is more like "defense against the dark arts". Yes, much of the work of e.g. Derrida sounds like long-form trolling, because it is. It's a form of culture jamming to disrupt the cognitive processes by which we accept things as "truth" or "reality". You mean: it's a cheap and riskless replacement for actually struggling against capitalism via a materialist analysis of the conditions of the working class.
thescribe 10y ago
That's a postmodern way to say 'wrong', right?
ohnomrbill 10y ago
It's a form of culture jamming to disrupt the cognitive processes by which we accept things as "truth" or "reality". Can you express this a bit more clearly? "Culture jamming" is not a broadly understood term. It's not clear why the words "truth" and "reality" are quoted. Additionally, it seems odd to combine a specific term like "cognitive processes" with a ultra-broad term like "things". If there is an argument for postmodernism being something more than word salad, your comment does not make it well.
- wpietri 10y ago
  You can read more here about culture jamming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming As an example of the problem he's addressing, look closely at your constructions like "is not a broadly understood term", "it's not clear", "it seems odd", and "your comment does not make it well". These are all your personal opinions, and yet you've cast them in the language of objective fact, of truth. You assert without evidence that your view is identical with reality. Others reading you could take on those fact-shaped opinions as actual fact, especially if you have high social standing. So by talking about "truth" or "reality", I believe he refers to the jointly held, socially constructed opinions that people mistake for fact. An obvious political example of that is the way the various US state declarations of secession during the civil war assert that black people are naturally inferior, fit only to be slaves. To them it was experienced as truth. There are also plenty of examples in the sciences; look at any major paradigm shift and you can see "truth" diverging from truth, "reality" diverging from reality. This is why Planck wrote, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

aub3bhat 10y ago

Having met with some of the "Science and Technology Studies" students and floored by the ignorance of basic technical facts by some of the people they quoted to be correct, I believe this postmodernist trend arose out of post-cold war technological superiority. With Science and Technology no longer needed to fight against a powerful enemy, it was easy to devalue it. However times are changing. A society can only ignore science and facts in favor of meaningless word salad as long as their security does not depends on it.

hcs 10y ago

The discussion near the end of Philip Scranton was the most interesting and coherent part of the article for me, while earlier Dutch is mostly just incredulous about the words used by Latour and Derrida. I think he makes a good point about a mutual misunderstanding: > The history of science as presented in science texts, especially older ones, is rightly unsatisfactory to sociologists. In the interests of providing students with a heuristic framework (frequently a historical approach is the best way to explain a complex concept) and a sense of historical orientation, the accounts were streamlined to the point where they presented a highly linear view of science devoid of false starts, blind alleys, and personality clashes. The reason textbooks do it perhaps a tad better than they used to, by the way, is partly due to the insights of sociologists. > Sociologists, on the other hand, need to realize that the way they present the history of science can seem just as distorted. However honorable their intent, their language seems at times to deny the existence of objective knowledge.

thisrod 10y ago
The language used in sociology does deny the existence of objective knowledge, for excellent reasons that sociologists are happy to explain. It's a way to manage a massive problem. https://web.archive.org/web/20160529025038/http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/contactsandpeople/harrycollins/sociology-of-science.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160529025038/http://www.cardif... We might know objectively that matter is made of atoms, and sociologists know that too; but Dalton, Boyle and Lavoisier didn't know it. It's easy to tell a story about what they did and why they did it, and the story will end with everyone finding out that matter is made of atoms. But, in order for the beginning of that story to be an objective explanation of what people did, it has to make sense whether or not matter turns out to be made of atoms. Causality runs forwards in time. Therefore, atoms were discovered as a result of the actions of people who didn't know about atoms, and atoms did not directly affect the actions that led to their discovery. If atoms caused the discovery of atoms, it would have happened ten billion years ago, not two hundred.
- schoen 10y ago
  Thanks for the link to the Collins article; I found it very interesting. I have some questions about your argument that the atoms didn't cause their discovery, but I don't think I have time to formulate them clearly right now, so I'll just stop with thanking you for the link. :-)

fizixer 10y ago

Article with such a title doesn't have a mention of transhumanism. I'm sorry I don't have time for this.

leoc 10y ago

Well, this is old newspaper. The Science Wars were a product of the post-'60s worldview, in which good-natives-versus-wicked-colonisers was more or less the overarching theme and rationality was suspect; they quickly died the death in the revised, post-9/11 master narrative of Enlightenment-versus-superstitious-darkness, which wasn't fertile ground for even modest and non-radical skepticism about The Science. A classic document of this is the "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?" paper, in which Bruno Latour scrambles to get with the just-modified program: note the 2003/4 date. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-INQUIRY-GB.pdf http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-I... Of course we'll have to see how things develop in future, now that the post-2001 frame of reference is already fading in people's minds.

ittekimasu 10y ago

Also see, Dawkins review of Alan Sokal's book, http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html

thefastlane 10y ago

maybe it's a formatting issue in my browser, but it was less than clear when it was the author talking, versus when he was quoting something. i had to bail. am i not giving the paper a fair shake?

pjscott 10y ago

> She: I've heard that the main thing is to avoid relativism. But I'm a physicist, and that presents a real difficulty. Without relativity there'd be no possibility of making measurements and we'd each be prisoners, to all eternity, in some single point of view. In my discipline, we need the relativity of frames of reference in order even to begin work. I have a special need for relativity because I work on events close to the Big Bang. You don't need relativity, too? I think it's safe to say that, with this paragraph, Bruno Latour failed the Ideological Turing Test: this conflation of philosophical relativism with the physical theory of relativity is not something that would ever be uttered by someone who knew what the latter is. It gets worse from there. Please, anyone who's tempted to write a dialogue with a fictional person holding an opposing viewpoint: talk to one first! Find out what their arguments really are! And, if possible, learn their views well enough that your summary would seem accurate to one of them.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
> Please, anyone who's tempted to write a dialogue with a fictional person holding an opposing viewpoint: talk to one first! Find out what their arguments really are! And, if possible, learn their views well enough that your summary would seem accurate to one of them. Amen. It might also prevent the deliberately insulting language that Latour adopted. Clearly, he holds the scientific camp in contempt. An actual dialog might have demonstrated to him that there was more there than ignorance and mistaken ideas.

coldtea 10y ago

>In a century that produced Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and Slobo Milosevic we still see philosophers and sociologists seeking the roots of evil in externals like family violence, poverty, television, even circumcision and lack of breast-feeding (and no, I am not making those up!). Whereas the correct answer is what? Some disturbed individuals like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot etc are the cause? Or was it "philosophy" that perverted them -- because Hitler sure as hell didn't read much philosophy. And what about the millions of victims of atrocities from the "civilized" colonial powers not mentioned in this list, because they're third world so nobody cares, and b) they kill the nice argument about "pure evil" leaders motivated by philosophy. Those crimes were motivated by the almighty buck. >Calling twentieth-century philosophy superficial gives it too much dignity; vacuous is the closest term. Yeah, man, you dismissed it in a sentence. How intellectual. And coincidentally, how anglo-saxon, the very culture that never understood continental philosophy to begin with, and deals mainly in scientism and crude empiricist platitudes.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
> Or was it "philosophy" that perverted them -- because Hitler sure as hell didn't read much philosophy. Unfortunately, he read enough Nietzche to become dangerous. (Or perhaps he was dangerous anyway, and read enough Nietzche to provide a smoke screen...)