tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post3210790984136573865..comments2023-10-10T08:02:18.073-04:00Comments on Rationally Speaking: Could it be? Science critics calls for a truceUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-14509859062439028272009-04-07T14:08:00.000-04:002009-04-07T14:08:00.000-04:00Massimo, let's agree to disagree then (w.r.t Fish,...Massimo, let's agree to disagree then (w.r.t Fish, I suspect you may be right about his personality, but I think he was right in questioning the exaggerating fears of pomo critics)! As for PKF, he would much rather be thought of as an unserious intellectual, I suspect!Ravihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11142174677242332646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-49600709083112670332009-04-07T14:02:00.000-04:002009-04-07T14:02:00.000-04:00Ravi,I'm afraid we need to agree to disagree. How ...Ravi,<BR/><BR/>I'm afraid we need to agree to disagree. How much political influence postmodernists have had or will have remains to be seen, but it is hard for me to find anything redeeming in most of their writings. <BR/><BR/>I find Stanley to be falsely modest and disingenuous in his writings.<BR/><BR/>Mathematics, by the way, is arguably *not* the foundation of all science, but simply a good tool that works well in some cases and much less so in others.<BR/><BR/>As for Feyerabend, I know he was a complex figure, but when he cheers for the creationists he loses whatever credibility he may have had as a serious intellectual.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09099460671669064269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-71501045135384085812009-04-07T11:23:00.000-04:002009-04-07T11:23:00.000-04:00Massimo,its difficult to respond to such a long po...Massimo,<BR/><BR/>its difficult to respond to such a long polemic, but I will try to touch the important issues. The mathematician Gabriel Stolzenberg, in a series of brilliant articles, shamed the ill-conceived and venomous attack on post-modernism on the part of Weinberg, Nagel, Sokal, others. He not only pointed out the ridiculous arguments and shallow misunderstanding of these authors, he challenged even their very understanding of some aspects of mathematics, the system of knowledge that underwrites their professional work.<BR/><BR/>In closing, Stolzenberg makes a wonderful point: postmodernists (and I am not one), at their most radical, challenge one of the "long-established institutions" (that's from your blog description) of power (modern establishment science). Stolzenberg writes:<BR/><BR/><I>How to Read a Book (1940: 14), [...] the author, Mortimer Adler, writes, "When [men and women] are in love and are reading a love letter, they read for all they are worth. They read every word three ways; they read between the lines and in the margins; they grow sensitive to context and ambiguity...Then, if never before or after, they read."</I><BR/><BR/>I fully endorse Stolzenberg's recommendation on how to read postmodernism. Why? Because contrary to the hysteria of Sokal and Co, and as Stanley Fish correctly pointed out at the time, a few sociologists and literary theorists in a small number of universities cannot and do not threaten all knowledge, truth, or all those other things that Weinberg, Gross, et al are so comically crusading for.<BR/><BR/>The same holds for Feyerabend, who is mostly correct in his claims (for e.g: the sections you quote on how science is taught in schools), and intentionally polemical, to counter the scientism and worship during his time, and dishes it out equally to both sides (he called Derrida an "obscurantist").Ravihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11142174677242332646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-6589441596181438662009-03-23T15:26:00.000-04:002009-03-23T15:26:00.000-04:00Thanks for a really excellent and well-balanced po...Thanks for a really excellent and well-balanced post. As a materialist and a skeptic who works in the humanities, I always feel like I'm caught in the middle of a pointless and ridiculous battle. <BR/><BR/>There's a lot that can be learned from social construction, especially with concepts like race theory. So, I find it sad that the term has become one of derision in a lot of scientific circles. Like you, I think that postmodern scholars with extreme and provocative positions bear a lot of the blame, but I also think that many skeptics have been too ready and willing to paint all postmodern thinkers with the same brush, and even dismiss the -post-linguistic-turn humanities as a whole.<BR/><BR/>I think it's important to note the differing functions of disciplines like Philosophy and Lit Crit as opposed to sciences (of all stripes). I think philosophers can get away with (and even advance general knowledge through) some fairly extreme takes on subjects like epistemology. I do believe that there are certain disciplines that serve a purpose merely by provoking. Not every field can or should use the scientific method. <BR/><BR/>I'm a historian, and I think my field should fall on the empiricist side of things. But, I think historical knowledge and practice has benefited in the past from postmodernist ideas like "social construction."<BR/><BR/>As for the anti-intellectual use of postmodern science (ie, in the Bush Admin), it's pretty cynical and opportunistic. Obviously, they were only moral relativists when it was convenient. I don't know if scholars should be held responsible for the misappropriation of challenging and interesting ideas. <BR/><BR/>I guess my point is, yes postmodernism can go to extremes, but I don't think science should throw out the baby with the postmodern bathwater.Ryanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03293070603428186814noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-9234102062410217122009-03-23T14:35:00.000-04:002009-03-23T14:35:00.000-04:00Jonathan,hmm, I went back to Collins' phrase in th...Jonathan,<BR/><BR/>hmm, I went back to Collins' phrase in the original 1981 article. I disagree with your analysis. Here is the full quotation:<BR/><BR/>"Many contributors to this new model intend only to make philosophy of science compatible with history while maintaining an epistemological demarcation between science and other intellectual enterprises. One school, however, inspired in particular by Wit- <BR/>tgenstein and more lately by the phenomenologists and ethno-methodologists, embraces an explicit relativism in which the natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge."<BR/><BR/>And he goes on to say that the special issue of which his article is the introduction takes the relativist perspective because of its "substantive" contributions...Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09099460671669064269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-16811569939228580052009-03-23T07:56:00.000-04:002009-03-23T07:56:00.000-04:00Jonathan,thanks for your thoughtful post, as usual...Jonathan,<BR/><BR/>thanks for your thoughtful post, as usual. Well, you may have noticed that I was careful enough to state that Feyerabend was not a postmodernist, but I think it is reasonable to say that he provided much inspiration to that ilk (so did Kuhn, for different reasons, and much less culpably).<BR/><BR/>As for the Bush administration, your distinction between philosophical skepticism and political cynicism is well taken, but I've even heard creationists (as you know, a large part of the political base of Bush & co.) refer to postmodernism in their arguments. Interestingly, they use it in two contradictory ways: on the one hand to "show" that science is just another social activity; on the other hand to warn against the mortal dangers of moral relativism...Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09099460671669064269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-73100494404205225652009-03-22T23:50:00.000-04:002009-03-22T23:50:00.000-04:00Massimo has heard from me about this before, but F...Massimo has heard from me about this before, but Feyerabend is a particularly weird case -- for one thing, he *wasn't* a "social constructivist" nor a "post-modernist." He was certainly wrong about a lot of things, and said some incredibly stupid things (the quote about creationism is one of those -- though the next line, which is something like "though I have no doubt that they (creationists) would be just as dogmatic and close-minded if given the chance" points towards what he was trying to do -- still, it was an incredibly stupid thing to write). But for all that, he was a realist, and believed that much of what science taught us was in fact correct -- the truth, corresponding to reality as it really was.<BR/><BR/>What he argued for -- and what makes him so weird -- was that there is no such thing as the "scientific method" and that individual scientists as well as scientific traditions basically stumble upon reality in all kinds of crazy ways and only later are able to do something like a rational reconstruction of how that part of reality was discovered and proven. <BR/><BR/>So his concern with the way that science was being taught was not that he thought that science was all a social construction and that everything was as good as anything else, but rather his concern was that by become more ordered, more formalized, more "rational," science was becoming *less* likely to make the kinds of discoveries that move forward our understanding of the way the world actually works; further, he suggested that by pretending that there *was* a method that did just that, it was inhibiting the very freedom that made real progress possible.<BR/><BR/>Now, he was, considering all the evidence, *wrong* about those claims. The progress of science has not been slowed by the increasing orderliness of some scientific domains, nor has science proven to be as monolithic an enterprise as he thought it was becoming. But that doesn't change the fact that he did *not* believe that any bit of claimed knowledge was equally constructed -- he thought there were facts, facts that corresponded to reality, and that part of what made us able to succeed was getting those facts right.<BR/><BR/>The Golem as you note is an interesting book -- some have read it as social contructivist in intent, but I can't find anything in the book to suggest that that reading is to be preferred. Rather, it seems to me, as Massimo noted, a series of cautionary tales about how experiments are conducted, interpreted, and used to support particular views "in real time" and only later come to be seen as "decisive." Pasteur was right, Pouchet was wrong, but, if Collins and Pinch have their history right, there wasn't anything in their experiments that really showed this -- and we simply got *lucky* that Pasteur won the day. <BR/><BR/>BTW: the Collins quote is in fact out of context -- what the surrounding text makes clear is that Collins is writing not about the progress of science, but about the best methodological approach to understanding the history of science. You might disagree with this approach -- there are good reasons to! -- but it isn't the same as saying that the natural world doesn't constrain science. Rather, it suggests that our account of the acquisition & spread of beliefs should not depend upon the truth of those beliefs. False beliefs and true beliefs need to be explained using the same *kinds* of accounts... So Collins recommends, as a methodological tool, a kind of radical skepticism -- *pretend* that we've no idea what the world is like, and *then* try to explain why particular historical episodes in science came out they way they did. Unfortunately, he gets carried away in his rhetoric, and sometimes sounds like he is just being crazy. Sloppiness sucks.<BR/><BR/>One last point -- to blame the social constructivists for the Bush admin. abuse of science is probably unfair. The anti-intellectualism of the Bush admin. was *not* the same as the scepticism of the post-modernists or the social constructivists. That anti-intellectualism grew out of a very different world-view, and didn't appeal to same kinds of claims. It is cynical -- not skeptical -- and simply unconcerned about truth, intellectual honesty, or rational discourse. Rather, it appeals to "faith" "gut feelings" and personal self-interest dressed up as emotional connection. Had the post-modernists never written about science, had the so-called 'strong' school of the sociology of knowledge never been formed, I very much doubt it would have change *anything* about the way that the Bush administration misused science.<BR/><BR/>OK, that's enough for now!Jonathanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11364316598293820961noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-81070253805557355502009-03-22T17:45:00.000-04:002009-03-22T17:45:00.000-04:00Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of...<A HREF="http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/421123" REL="nofollow">Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern</A> from Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2. Google is our friendUnknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06806934821914340714noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-36513991700340270272009-03-22T12:35:00.000-04:002009-03-22T12:35:00.000-04:00Ansu, do you have a reference I can look up for th...Ansu, do you have a reference I can look up for the Latour quote?Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09099460671669064269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-22243723720463468872009-03-22T12:01:00.000-04:002009-03-22T12:01:00.000-04:00As much as I hate Feyerabend, I must say that he w...As much as I hate Feyerabend, I must say that he was right about Galileo, but not by the reasons he thought.<BR/><BR/>He prevailed because of his rhetoric and style, but only because the "rules" back then where different.<BR/><BR/>Aristotle mechanics and cosmology were protected from "scientific evidence" by the church, which was free to burn those who point out the anomalies in the paradigm.<BR/><BR/>While it was easy to convince people that actually wanted to solve problems that the tool was more useful, the other barriers weren't so easy to jump, so a little of charm was needed.<BR/>But the time of Galileo was an abnormal time for science, for the “free market of ideas” wasn't free at all. The “protectionism” in those times was so strong that an already obsolete paradigm in the Greeks days was able to survive for another thousand years. Feyarabend mistake ( and I think even Kuhns) was to think that science is like that all the time. <BR/><BR/>By the way, even Latour is giving up , mostly thanks to global warming. He said in 2004: "dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we meant?"<BR/><BR/>Maybe its time for the science wars to come to an end after all...Ansuhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06113641856867468005noreply@blogger.com