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> You can't reason with postmodernists since they eschew science and evidence-based reason as tools of oppression. Which postmodern authors eschew science and

> You can't reason with postmodernists since they eschew science and evidence-based reason as tools of oppression. Which postmodern authors eschew science and evidence-based reasoning?

_rpd 9y ago
> Sara Giordano argues that "traditional science" relies on "a colonial and racialized form of power," and must be replaced with an "anti-science, antiracist, feminist approach to knowledge production.” https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10021 https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10021
- oconnore 9y ago
  This website is ridiculous, featured article: "Trump Jr. says universities teach students to hate America"
  - Zee2 9y ago
    The professor's words still stand independent from whatever website decided to feature them.
    - danharaj 9y ago
      Paper: http://catalystjournal.org/ojs/index.php/catalyst/article/view/122/pdf_3 http://catalystjournal.org/ojs/index.php/catalyst/article/vi... Abstract: In this paper, I argue that those of us who have left the Sciences proper and moved to feminist studies spaces have continued to do science through our teaching. In a moment when the impulse to do real science is palpitating in our feminist hearts, I suggest that we critically examine the political stakes of our affective attachments and detachments from s/Science(s). I consider what it means to be attached to a Science that earned its epistemic authority through its co-constitution with colonization and slavery. I argue that passion for science may act to strengthen the relationship between Science and Truth and conversely, willful refusal and failure may be used to break the bond. I offer critical science literacy as a practice that can directly challenge the epistemic authority of Science and be read as "doing science" or more broadly as "rewriting knowledge." Honestly, sounds nothing like the original link which is a poorly written polemic that is obviously done in bad faith (at least to me). I think the abstract is interesting enough that I'll read the paper myself and come to my own conclusions once I have spare time.
      - AstralStorm 9y ago
        What a bad thesis. Does she mean western science which is older than 15th century and a reaction against religious enslavement of ideas? Or Chinese science from BC? Out perhaps just industrial revolution, which is just a tiny chunk of whole science? I suspect this is some form of argument from ignorance or cherry picking. The argument "comes from slavery" can be applied to everything. If it is about science fuelling colonialism, perhaps, but the same thing can be said about both capitalism, feudalism and more. People have often used gains of all kinds to further selfish agenda at the cost of others.
WalterSear 9y ago
The postmodern ones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism "...postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony or rejection toward grand narratives, ideologies and various tenets of universalism, including objective notions of reason, human nature, social progress, moral universalism, absolute truth, and objective reality. Instead, it asserts to varying degrees that claims to knowledge and truth are products of social, historical or political discourses or interpretations, and are therefore contextual or socially constructed."
- danharaj 9y ago
  Science doesn't need a conception of objective reality or absolute truth to work. Evidence is still evidence even without absolute truth or objective reality. In fact, the scientific method is crucially reliant on the intersubjectivity of scientists, not direct access to a supposed external truth/reality. It's also a fact that this reliance on subjectivity indicates the ways science can fail. Science is not a platonic ideal, it is a human process. Human processes can fail due to human factors. These failures can have horrendous implications for society: atrocities are committed in the name of science. When Richard Feynman talks about cargo cult science [1], everyone agrees that he has made a deep point about the process by which science is done and is clearly in favor of science. All the same, it is possible to criticize science as a contextual, social construct in order to find the ways it can fail while still being in favor of science. A great deal of postmodern philosophy falls into this camp, but you won't learn that by cherry-picking summaries from wikipedia that say less than you think they say. Aside below In mathematics, the fact that there is no absolute truth is merely a technical fact. Tarski's undefinability theorem [2] says that arithmetic truth cannot be defined in arithmetic. This is easy to see: Arithmetic makes use of arbitrarily nested quantifiers. If arithmetic truth were an arithmetic statement, then it would necessarily have some finite number of alternating quantifiers (forall A. exists B. forall C. ...), but the truth of a formula with a greater number of alternations can't be defined by such a truth formula of lesser complexity. Like all results of this sort, they are just an application of the diagonalization argument. This result is the same for all theories of non-trivial expressivity. There is no way around this, you cannot formalize truth. You can only push the notion of truth out into a meta-level, which again has an unformalizable notion of truth. This is not a deep philosophical failure, it's just a technical aspect of mathematics. If mathematics cannot pin down absolute truth, what hope does the concept have in far more complicated situations? It's a useful heuristic but when you look at it closely enough, you see its incoherence. I'm glad that there are philosophers out there who critically engage with the social implications of this incoherence. [1] http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theo...
tetromino_ 9y ago
This book (which I haven't read, so cannot comment as to its arguments' validity) claims to list a large number of examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense
- danharaj 9y ago
  Reviews by professional philosophers of Sokal's book criticize it harshly as worse-than-skimming of the texts the book claims to treat. Sokal's claim to fame in the anti-postmodernism conversation is the Sokal affair which was deliberately overblown: Sokal created a nonsensical paper pretending to draw philosophical conclusions from quantum gravity and shopped it around. He managed to find a journal that would publish it: One that wasn't peer reviewed at the time the Sokal affair happened. Even worse, the journal asked him to clarify his writing, which he refused to do, further weakening the implications of his stunt. The Bogdanov affair [1] should be noted as a scandal in physics, one similar to the Sokal affair, though it wasn't a deliberate attempt to discredit the academic rigor of the physics community. There are extremely good criticisms of postmodern scholarship. For example, criticizing the impenetrability of pomo jargon which is optimized for communication between experts is perfectly legitimate. It's also true that at times when authors are being sloppy it is misconstrued as an attempt to be provocative. On the other hand, authors like Deleuze were trying to be provocative. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
  - mccoyspace 9y ago
    agreed. There are many examples of attempts to put into dialog these different traditions of postmodernism vs humanism/analytic rationality: The Foucault/Chompsky debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8 The Heidegger/Cassirer debate: https://newrepublic.com/article/81380/heidegger-cassirer-davos-kant https://newrepublic.com/article/81380/heidegger-cassirer-dav...
remarkEon 9y ago
I’d venture to say most, if not all, make some variation of the claim “Truth is relative”, which in isolation isn’t that profound of a statement to make. But when it’s much of the foundation of your ideology it leads you to very dark places. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativism
- bbctol 9y ago
  That link gives some context to the tension between postmodernism and relativism. A claim that postmodernism is based on the idea that "truth is relative" is a pretty severe overreach; even the most radical of influential postmodernists are going to be epistemic relativists, not truth relativists (even Derrida was baffled by accusations that he didn't believe in objective truth.)
- danharaj 9y ago
  "Truth is absolute" leads to dark places as well. It was the absoluteness of the """immortal science of marxism-leninism""" which gave ideological cover for Stalin's atrocities, and the """application""" of Darwin's theory to the structure of society which gave legitimacy to the ruling classes of the imperial states over their colonies. Saying truth is relative is a statement about the operationality of truth, its status as an aspect of human reasoning, which is fallible, which has no basis in the absolute. The proposed antidote is exactly the solution supposed by the scientific method: the intersubjective corroboration of individual observations, evidence, reasoning. However, this plainly reveals where truth, science, can fail: It is in this corroboration where atrocities in the name of some transparent, universally available truth are smuggled into society. That is why postmodern thinkers take the footing that they do. Especially when in the post-war period it was more and more obvious how massive the contradictions were within both liberalism and marxism as they were idealized, and the world as it actually was.
dragonwriter 9y ago
Post-modernism inherently critiques many of the assumptions underlying the practice of traditional science, including the objectivity and reliability of evidence. For the most part (though extremes that go beyond this can be found) this isn't an attack on science and empiricism as useful techniques, but more a cautionary critique that it is impossible to completely avoid subjectivity and cultural influence, and that that cannot, in the general case, be safely ignored.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  The attack being overly generalized, even to good quality evidence and reliable working processes while not being constructive. Not being constructive is the major failing of the whole postmodernist philosophy.

> You can't reason with postmodernists since they eschew science and evidence-based reason as tools of oppression. Which postmodern authors eschew science and evidence-based reasoning?

_rpd 9y ago

> Sara Giordano argues that "traditional science" relies on "a colonial and racialized form of power," and must be replaced with an "anti-science, antiracist, feminist approach to knowledge production.” https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10021 https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10021

oconnore 9y ago
This website is ridiculous, featured article: "Trump Jr. says universities teach students to hate America"
- Zee2 9y ago
  The professor's words still stand independent from whatever website decided to feature them.
  - danharaj 9y ago
    Paper: http://catalystjournal.org/ojs/index.php/catalyst/article/view/122/pdf_3 http://catalystjournal.org/ojs/index.php/catalyst/article/vi... Abstract: In this paper, I argue that those of us who have left the Sciences proper and moved to feminist studies spaces have continued to do science through our teaching. In a moment when the impulse to do real science is palpitating in our feminist hearts, I suggest that we critically examine the political stakes of our affective attachments and detachments from s/Science(s). I consider what it means to be attached to a Science that earned its epistemic authority through its co-constitution with colonization and slavery. I argue that passion for science may act to strengthen the relationship between Science and Truth and conversely, willful refusal and failure may be used to break the bond. I offer critical science literacy as a practice that can directly challenge the epistemic authority of Science and be read as "doing science" or more broadly as "rewriting knowledge." Honestly, sounds nothing like the original link which is a poorly written polemic that is obviously done in bad faith (at least to me). I think the abstract is interesting enough that I'll read the paper myself and come to my own conclusions once I have spare time.
    - AstralStorm 9y ago
      What a bad thesis. Does she mean western science which is older than 15th century and a reaction against religious enslavement of ideas? Or Chinese science from BC? Out perhaps just industrial revolution, which is just a tiny chunk of whole science? I suspect this is some form of argument from ignorance or cherry picking. The argument "comes from slavery" can be applied to everything. If it is about science fuelling colonialism, perhaps, but the same thing can be said about both capitalism, feudalism and more. People have often used gains of all kinds to further selfish agenda at the cost of others.

WalterSear 9y ago

The postmodern ones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism "...postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony or rejection toward grand narratives, ideologies and various tenets of universalism, including objective notions of reason, human nature, social progress, moral universalism, absolute truth, and objective reality. Instead, it asserts to varying degrees that claims to knowledge and truth are products of social, historical or political discourses or interpretations, and are therefore contextual or socially constructed."

danharaj 9y ago
Science doesn't need a conception of objective reality or absolute truth to work. Evidence is still evidence even without absolute truth or objective reality. In fact, the scientific method is crucially reliant on the intersubjectivity of scientists, not direct access to a supposed external truth/reality. It's also a fact that this reliance on subjectivity indicates the ways science can fail. Science is not a platonic ideal, it is a human process. Human processes can fail due to human factors. These failures can have horrendous implications for society: atrocities are committed in the name of science. When Richard Feynman talks about cargo cult science [1], everyone agrees that he has made a deep point about the process by which science is done and is clearly in favor of science. All the same, it is possible to criticize science as a contextual, social construct in order to find the ways it can fail while still being in favor of science. A great deal of postmodern philosophy falls into this camp, but you won't learn that by cherry-picking summaries from wikipedia that say less than you think they say. Aside below In mathematics, the fact that there is no absolute truth is merely a technical fact. Tarski's undefinability theorem [2] says that arithmetic truth cannot be defined in arithmetic. This is easy to see: Arithmetic makes use of arbitrarily nested quantifiers. If arithmetic truth were an arithmetic statement, then it would necessarily have some finite number of alternating quantifiers (forall A. exists B. forall C. ...), but the truth of a formula with a greater number of alternations can't be defined by such a truth formula of lesser complexity. Like all results of this sort, they are just an application of the diagonalization argument. This result is the same for all theories of non-trivial expressivity. There is no way around this, you cannot formalize truth. You can only push the notion of truth out into a meta-level, which again has an unformalizable notion of truth. This is not a deep philosophical failure, it's just a technical aspect of mathematics. If mathematics cannot pin down absolute truth, what hope does the concept have in far more complicated situations? It's a useful heuristic but when you look at it closely enough, you see its incoherence. I'm glad that there are philosophers out there who critically engage with the social implications of this incoherence. [1] http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theo...

tetromino_ 9y ago

This book (which I haven't read, so cannot comment as to its arguments' validity) claims to list a large number of examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense

danharaj 9y ago
Reviews by professional philosophers of Sokal's book criticize it harshly as worse-than-skimming of the texts the book claims to treat. Sokal's claim to fame in the anti-postmodernism conversation is the Sokal affair which was deliberately overblown: Sokal created a nonsensical paper pretending to draw philosophical conclusions from quantum gravity and shopped it around. He managed to find a journal that would publish it: One that wasn't peer reviewed at the time the Sokal affair happened. Even worse, the journal asked him to clarify his writing, which he refused to do, further weakening the implications of his stunt. The Bogdanov affair [1] should be noted as a scandal in physics, one similar to the Sokal affair, though it wasn't a deliberate attempt to discredit the academic rigor of the physics community. There are extremely good criticisms of postmodern scholarship. For example, criticizing the impenetrability of pomo jargon which is optimized for communication between experts is perfectly legitimate. It's also true that at times when authors are being sloppy it is misconstrued as an attempt to be provocative. On the other hand, authors like Deleuze were trying to be provocative. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
- mccoyspace 9y ago
  agreed. There are many examples of attempts to put into dialog these different traditions of postmodernism vs humanism/analytic rationality: The Foucault/Chompsky debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8 The Heidegger/Cassirer debate: https://newrepublic.com/article/81380/heidegger-cassirer-davos-kant https://newrepublic.com/article/81380/heidegger-cassirer-dav...

remarkEon 9y ago

I’d venture to say most, if not all, make some variation of the claim “Truth is relative”, which in isolation isn’t that profound of a statement to make. But when it’s much of the foundation of your ideology it leads you to very dark places. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativism

bbctol 9y ago
That link gives some context to the tension between postmodernism and relativism. A claim that postmodernism is based on the idea that "truth is relative" is a pretty severe overreach; even the most radical of influential postmodernists are going to be epistemic relativists, not truth relativists (even Derrida was baffled by accusations that he didn't believe in objective truth.)
danharaj 9y ago
"Truth is absolute" leads to dark places as well. It was the absoluteness of the """immortal science of marxism-leninism""" which gave ideological cover for Stalin's atrocities, and the """application""" of Darwin's theory to the structure of society which gave legitimacy to the ruling classes of the imperial states over their colonies. Saying truth is relative is a statement about the operationality of truth, its status as an aspect of human reasoning, which is fallible, which has no basis in the absolute. The proposed antidote is exactly the solution supposed by the scientific method: the intersubjective corroboration of individual observations, evidence, reasoning. However, this plainly reveals where truth, science, can fail: It is in this corroboration where atrocities in the name of some transparent, universally available truth are smuggled into society. That is why postmodern thinkers take the footing that they do. Especially when in the post-war period it was more and more obvious how massive the contradictions were within both liberalism and marxism as they were idealized, and the world as it actually was.

dragonwriter 9y ago

Post-modernism inherently critiques many of the assumptions underlying the practice of traditional science, including the objectivity and reliability of evidence. For the most part (though extremes that go beyond this can be found) this isn't an attack on science and empiricism as useful techniques, but more a cautionary critique that it is impossible to completely avoid subjectivity and cultural influence, and that that cannot, in the general case, be safely ignored.

AstralStorm 9y ago
The attack being overly generalized, even to good quality evidence and reliable working processes while not being constructive. Not being constructive is the major failing of the whole postmodernist philosophy.