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Postmodernism gone mad!

nutty postmodernists said:
Such a ‘lovable’ fascism requires little more than the promise of success (grants, publications, awards, recognition, etc.) within its system to get us to participate wholeheartedly. Perhaps it is time to think about governing structures that impose their imperatives (academic, scientific, political, economic) on academics and researchers, and to ask ourselves what drives us to love fascist and exclusionary structures.
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Is it me, or do you think these chaps had their last grant rejected?
 
“Narrativity is impossible,” says Derrida; however, according to la Tournier[1] , it is not so much narrativity that is impossible, but rather the defining characteristic, and hence the stasis, of narrativity. The subject is interpolated into a dialectic precapitalist theory that includes language as a totality. Thus, semantic Marxism holds that truth is used to reinforce capitalism, but only if the premise of the textual paradigm of consensus is invalid; otherwise, we can assume that class, somewhat paradoxically, has objective value.
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:)
 
OK. I've just read that paper. I have to admit it was a quick read, but amongst all that pretentious bleating I don't think I saw at any point an answer to the question, "If not evidence-based medicine, what do alternative is there?"

Whereas, it seems to be an apologia for the world of sCAM, but our complaints against sCAMmers do not intersect with they critique of EBM.

1. sCAMmers actually do claim to practise according to the principles of EBM. Their problem is that they rely on crap evidence, but they most certainly do rely on evidence.

2. But, sCAMmers also depend on the fairy stories of authority figures. Holmes et al. would remove from us any ability to judge those claims. Some CAM claims might be true, but if I maliciously invented an entirely false mode of CAM you would have to accept my word for it unless you could make some appeal to evidence.

Beyond making my brain boil with frustration that peple can be so deluded as to write a paper like this one, we might also take it as a sign that EBM is winning: "outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge". Damn right, it is dangerously normative. That's the whole point. It is highly dangerous to lunatics and frauds.

Are we sure the paper is not a joke? If it is intended to be serious, and at the risk of revealing my hegemonic and paternalistic motivations, I'd say it is yet another example of the huge resentment some nurses seem to bear against those who are their professional and intellectual betters. A bit like our little friend NHCoraHSarah-I: couldn't get into medical school so find an alternative way to play at being doctor.

There is nothing so self-righteous as the indignation of the stupid.
 
Now you've done it! You've made me try to find out what the Flaming Heck postmodernism really means. :mad: I have been avoiding doing that for years. Hope you are all proud of yourselves! Go to your rooms and think about what you have done. And NO DESSERT!

*Ririon reluctantly opens a new browser tab to google*
 
Such a ‘lovable’ fascism requires little more than the promise of success (grants, publications, awards, recognition, etc.) within its system to get us to participate wholeheartedly.
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Ironically, the postmodernists completely ignore their own little mutual backpatting society as a system of rewards generating a form of success pleasing enough to drive the construction of goofy, meaningless papers. This anti-establishment, micro-clownism overlain with the Emperor's New Clothes creates a disturbing enabling of hucksterism and fraud.
 
Yahzi said:
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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Nah, I lent it out. I'll see if I can retrieve it later this week.

It just urks me to see Kuhn lumped in with the epistemological relativists when what he was really saying was that our understaning of reality improves periodically in sometimes stunning ways. He always gives primacy to how well prevailing theories explain the observed data.
 
Beerina said:
Ironically, the postmodernists completely ignore their own little mutual backpatting society as a system of rewards generating a form of success pleasing enough to drive the construction of goofy, meaningless papers. This anti-establishment, micro-clownism overlain with the Emperor's New Clothes creates a disturbing enabling of hucksterism and fraud.
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This point always gets me too. The CAM lobby deploy it regularly - doctors only practice conventional medicine in order to enrich themselves and boost pharmaceutical companies' profits. It's such a facile argument. Anyone in employment has a vested interest in remaining employed, including CAM merchants; hardly a revelation. Quite why the doctors decided on conventional medicine as their strategy seems to elude them completely, as does the fact that doctors could get exactly the same income by prescribing useless remedies (and did exactly that until EBM took off).

That the postmodernists are the extreme example of self-reverential propagation of substance-free rhetoric is supremely ironic.
 
I always wonder about the term "postmodern". Since modern refers to the time we are currently living in, surely postmodern means they are living in the future?
 
Cynric said:
This point always gets me too. The CAM lobby deploy it regularly - doctors only practice conventional medicine in order to enrich themselves and boost pharmaceutical companies' profits. It's such a facile argument. Anyone in employment has a vested interest in remaining employed, including CAM merchants; hardly a revelation. Quite why the doctors decided on conventional medicine as their strategy seems to elude them completely, as does the fact that doctors could get exactly the same income by prescribing useless remedies (and did exactly that until EBM took off).
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And if they practice SCAM, they might even be able to make money without having to spend half their twenties working insane hours as a houseman. This always seemed to me to be a major flaw in medicine as a get-rich-quick scheme...
 
Cuddles said:
I always wonder about the term "postmodern". Since modern refers to the time we are currently living in, surely postmodern means they are living in the future?
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Does it mean that this is what our future is like? Noooooooooooo.....
 
Yahzi said:
In other words, Godel's theorem: all formal systems (including Deductive logic) will contain truths that are not provable from within the formal system.


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.


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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I have not read the Stove link, but from the quotes provided it sounds like he mischaracterizes Hume and Popper. Hume's criticism of induction was not that it can lead to false conclusions, but that there is no logically valid basis for believing that any inductive conclusion is true. There's a world of difference there. Although I've frequently seen Hume given the former interpretation, I don't think that gives appropriate force to his position.
 
JamesDillon said:
Hume's criticism of induction was not that it can lead to false conclusions, but that there is no logically valid basis for believing that any inductive conclusion is true. There's a world of difference there.
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That's a -- subtle -- distinction you're trying to draw there, and one that I'm not sure I follow. (I'm reminded of Diane Keaton's line from Love and Death : "I'm not scared of death -- I'm frightened of it.")

Consider yourself invited to amplify.....
 
drkitten said:
That's a -- subtle -- distinction you're trying to draw there, and one that I'm not sure I follow. (I'm reminded of Diane Keaton's line from Love and Death : "I'm not scared of death -- I'm frightened of it.")

Consider yourself invited to amplify.....
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It's not subtle at all-- it's the difference between holding a justified (if uncertain) belief and an unjustified one. We've discussed this before, several months ago. I was smarter then than I am now, so if you don't mind I'll quote myself:
JamesDillon said:
As I recall from my grad school days, Hume argued that inductive reasoning cannot be justified by non-circular logic. Induction is the process of deriving a general conclusion from a series of individual experiences (e.g., every time I drop a ball, it falls to the floor, so I can infer that if I drop this ball, it will also fall to the floor.) Hume pointed out that inductive reasoning assumes the principle of the uniformity of nature-- i.e., that "nature" (including but not limited to the laws of physics) will behave in the future in the same way it has behaved in the past. However, this is not a logically necessary principle-- we can imagine a world in which the laws of nature changed over time. The best reason we can offer for believing the principle of the uniformity of nature is an inductive one: nature always has behaved in a uniform manner. However, Hume points out, this justification is circular because it attempts to justify by induction the very principle on which the justification for inductive reasoning rests. Thus, concludes Hume, we have no non-circular reason to believe that nature will continue to behave in a uniform manner, and the fact that it has always done so is irrelevant. Therefore, inductive reasoning, and all knowledge based on empirical observation (including science), is logically invalid.
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Hume's point, as I understand it, was not only that we can't be certain that our inductive conclusions are true; it was that induction gives us no logically valid basis to assign any weight at all to predictions based on prior experience. I have no logically defensible reason to believe that the ball is any more likely to fall to the floor when I let go of it than it is to fly to the ceiling, or remain suspended in mid-air, or anything else, despite the fact that it has fallen to the floor each of the hundred times I've performed the experiment.

Edit: Actually it must have been another thread in which you and I discussed this, because I don't see anything from you in the one I linked to. But I recall that we have, and that Ian took my side of the discussion. That unfortunate fact notwithstanding, I still think I'm right.
 
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JamesDillon said:
It's not subtle at all-- it's the difference between holding a justified (if uncertain) belief and an unjustified one.
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That's, um, a different difference than the one that you outlined earlier.

To quote your discussion from way back, "Thus, concludes Hume, we have no non-circular reason to believe that nature will continue to behave in a uniform manner, and the fact that it has always done so is irrelevant. Therefore, inductive reasoning, and all knowledge based on empirical observation (including science), is logically invalid."

That makes sense, except that it the term "logically invalid" is not self-defining.

The standard definition for "valid," in logic, is that an argument is valid if it cannot give you a false conclusion from true premises -- so an argument that is "logically invalid" is simply one that can.

Using this definition, your distinction upthread :

Hume's criticism of induction was not that it can lead to false conclusions, but that there is no logically valid basis for believing that any inductive conclusion is true.
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... appears to be somewhat confused, since the only way that an argument can fail to have a logically valid basis is, by definition, by the underlying argument to possibly lead to false conclusions.

You may be confusing the concepts of "justification" and "logically valid basis." I can certainly have a logically invalid argument that is nevertheless justifiable.

Or, to re-quote you :

Hume's point, as I understand it, was not only that we can't be certain that our inductive conclusions are true; it was that induction gives us no logically valid basis to assign any weight at all to predictions based on prior experience.
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That's a distinction without a difference -- we can only have a "logically valid basis" for a statement of which we are certain of its truth (by definition), and vice versa.

What we can have is a "justification" for belief in a statement of uncertain truth. And inductive truths -- as well as probabilistic ones -- are of that sort.

Or else I'm still not understanding the subtlety of the distinction you're trying to draw.
 
Interesting points; I'm going to have to go back and refresh my recollection of Hume's discussion, and particularly his distinction between knowledge and probability, before I can respond, as it's been a few years and you're quite right that my memory is a bit muddled on this point. I'm pretty certain, though, that Hume's concern after articulating his criticism of induction was not merely that we can't be absolutely certain about the truth of our inductive conclusions (he took that as a given from the start), but that inductive reasoning provides no basis whatsoever for making true (or probable) predictions about the future. I don't see that as a subtle distinction at all,* but perhaps I'll be able to articulate it better after a reread of the Treatise and a couple of my old papers.

* [Edit]: It's the difference between saying, "I'm 99% certain that this ball will fall to the floor when I let go of it," and saying, "I have absolutely no idea what will happen when I let go of this ball."
 
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JamesDillon said:
* [Edit]: It's the difference between saying, "I'm 99% certain that this ball will fall to the floor when I let go of it," and saying, "I have absolutely no idea what will happen when I let go of this ball."
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That difference I understand; it's the difference between logical validity and "mere" justification.

I don't think I've seen any commentator suggest that Hume didn't believe that dropping a plate is likely to break it. Hume wasn't an idiot, after all.... Hume simply suggested that there was no basis for proving that the plate would break -- his main point (as I recall) was that even explicitly assuming that the structure of induction was logically justifiable still hinged on a deeper assumption about the constency of the universe's laws.
 
drkitten said:
That difference I understand; it's the difference between logical validity and "mere" justification.

I don't think I've seen any commentator suggest that Hume didn't believe that dropping a plate is likely to break it. Hume wasn't an idiot, after all....
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Of course he believed it, but he did seem to say that the belief couldn't be justified by anything more than the brute force of psychological habit.

Hume simply suggested that there was no basis for proving that the plate would break -- his main point (as I recall) was that even explicitly assuming that the structure of induction was logically justifiable still hinged on a deeper assumption about the constency of the universe's laws.
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If by "proving" you mean "establishing with absolute certainty," I think he meant more than that. Hume took for granted that inductive arguments (which he frequently referred to as "probability," as distinct from deductive "knowledge") were incapable of reaching a point of absolute certainty at the beginning of his discussion of induction. By the end of his discussion, he believed he had shown that inductive reasoning is not even valid as to determining the probability of a future outcome, because the principle of consistency on which the inductive process rests cannot be justified by non-circular means. When I get home tonight (or maybe over the weekend) I'll dust off my copy of the Treatise (I realize that the Enquiry is generally the preferred text, but my Hume course in grad school didn't use it, and I've never gotten around to reading it) and offer some citations to support my interpretation.
 
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