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Postmodernism gone mad!

David Colquhoun

Student
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Feb 1, 2006
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Here is a paper that will make any reasonable rational person blow a gasket.
“Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism” Dave Holmes RN PhD, Stuart J Murray PhD, Amélie Perron RN PhD(cand) and Geneviève Rail PhD, Int J Evid Based Health 2006; 4: 180–1.

It starts
"Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena."

More at
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Pharmacology/dc-bits/quack.html#holmes1
and at Ben Goldacre's site http://www.badscience.net/?p=277
 
David Colquhoun said:
...the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge.
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Yeah, damn scientists demanding evidence so we can't sell any old snake oil! How outrageously unfair! :rolleyes:
 
Evidence is VERY exclusionary! There are a LOT more things that aren't true than those that are! :D
 
"Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, ..."
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We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence
between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author,
and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The
symmetry of scale, the transversality: all these dimensions remove us from
the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the
ontological binarism we criticised previously.
---Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis
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Such a hegemony makes inevitable the further ‘segmentation’ of
knowledge (i.e. disallowing multiple epistemologies), and further
marginalise many forms of knowing/knowledge.
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I knew they would use the word hegemony.

~~ Paul
 
Anyone smell a spoof, parody, satire, lampoon, chain jerking, frottage or blanc mange tennis player in there?
"Micro fascists"?
Gimme a friggin' break.
 
Ummm, "evidence-based?" Is that like, the opposite of "fantasy-based?"

Deconstruct deconstructionism.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
May I suggest the following? It is quite a good read, if somewhat controversial.
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Ah, yes, telling people they are full of nonsense immediately after they have just declared themselves full of nonsense, is about as controversial as you can get.

It's like asking a Pro-Lifer why they're for the the death penalty. :D
 
Perhaps it's not as controversial as I imagine. At least he's a bit nicer to Popper than he is to the rest of the postmodernists.

~~ Paul
 
I thought Sokal nailed the coffin shut on postmodernist critique of science. Dracula rises!*

*With a hat-tip to Wowbagger
 
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Unfortunately, Sokal didn't convince any more postmodernists than JR has convinced psychics.
 
D.C.Stove said:
Nothing fatal to empiricist philosophy of science, in other words, follows from the admission that arguments from the observed to the unobserved are not the best; unless this assumption was combined, as it was with Hume, with the fatal assumption that only the best will do.
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In other words, Godel's theorem: all formal systems (including Deductive logic) will contain truths that are not provable from within the formal system.

If I have, as Popper says I should not have, a positive degree of belief in some scientific theory, what can Popper urge against me? Why, nothing at all, in the end, except this: that despite all the actual or possible empirical evidence in its favor, the theory might be false. But this is nothing but a harmless necessary truth; and to make it as a reason for not believing scientific theories is simply a frivolous species of irrationality.
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The flip-side of "if you can't prove it false, I can believe it:" if you can't prove it false, that's no reason to disbelieve it.

Just because something may be false is not a compelling reason to assume it is false.

For the cruellest fate which can overtake enfants-terribles is to awake and find that their avowed opinions have swept the suburbs
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Just because it is a brilliant sentence. :D He spanks Popper, Feyerabend, and Lakatos pretty soundly; but he grants Kuhn at least the courage of his convictions. Kuhn alone really believes there has been no scientific progress in 400 years, and wants others to believe it; the previous fellows are constantly aghast when people take their irrationalism seriously.


So how do we know something is true, if we can't prove it? Stove seems to imply that mere observation (as J.S. Mill argued) or assumptions about the consistency of the universe (Hume's "cement in the universe") isn't adequate, but I can't see where he provided any alternative.

My summation of his article: there are two kinds of people - those that think the world derives from truth, and those that think truth derives from the world.

:D
 
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Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Perhaps it's not as controversial as I imagine. At least he's a bit nicer to Popper than he is to the rest of the postmodernists.
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I didn't get that impression. In the last part, he stomps Popper for failures of deductive logic. And then accuses him of "levity:" meaning, saying stuff that's wrong because it's better than being silent or uninteresting.

:D

The only one he was actually nice to was Hume; pointing out that Hume had moved beyond this simplistic skepticism after college.

P.S. - Thanks for the link, it was great!
 
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Yahzi said:
I didn't get that impression. In the last part, he stomps Popper for failures of deductive logic. And then accuses him of "levity:" meaning, saying stuff that's wrong because it's better than being silent or uninteresting.
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I had only read chapters I and II when I posted the link. Last night I read chapter III, where he blames Popper for the whole mess. I'm taking chapter IV on vacation. It is really quite an interesting read.

~~ Paul
 
Yahzi said:
Kuhn alone really believes there has been no scientific progress in 400 years, and wants others to believe it; the previous fellows are constantly aghast when people take their irrationalism seriously.
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Having read Kuhn backwards and forwards, I am continually mystified how anyone comes to this conclusion. Assuming he never says this explicitly, how does his line of reasoning lead to this?
 
hgc said:
Having read Kuhn backwards and forwards, I am continually mystified how anyone comes to this conclusion. Assuming he never says this explicitly, how does his line of reasoning lead to this?
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Here is Stove's citation:

"He actually believes, what the others only imply and pretend to believe, that there has been no accumulation of knowledge in the last four centuries."

T.S.Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 1962, 2nd edition, enlarged, 1970. pp.206--7.

If you have the volume at hand, could you look at pages 206-7 and tell us what they say?
 
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