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> It's true that the practitioners of scientific and engineering knowledge don't give a fig about what the postmodernists had to say, but it doesn't follow that
by azangru 6y ago
> It's true that the practitioners of scientific and engineering knowledge don't give a fig about what the postmodernists had to say, but it doesn't follow that the postmodern critique is without effect.
Are there historical examples when radical philosophical scepticism changed the way science is done? Descartes, with his "evil demon", Hume, the solipsism of George Berkeley — they all have valid points, and they all have pointed out contradictions in things we call knowledge, with sufficient force to have been immortalised in textbooks on the history of philosophy, but they haven't changed the practice of engineering and science, I don't think.
- orwin 6y agoDepends of your definition of science, but historical science definitely changed in the 70s. Was it under the inflence of postmodernists or skeptics? Was it by comparison to other scientific fields? Was it because historian now had real formations?
- azangru 6y agoHard sciences, I think, are based on the correspondence theory of truth – their statements are tested by whether or not they correspond to what's observed in what's believed to be reality. I realise that for some sciences, such as physics, it's becoming increasingly difficult, with such proposals as string theory or many-world theory. I don't know how much of a reality, apart from physical artifacts, there is in historical science.
- dang 6y agoThe rise of science itself is the leading example.