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Tsukasa Buddha said:
Looks like we have some "I Called It" awards coming for some in this thread. I will gladly claim mine right now.

I would deconstruct his essay, but there is really nothing there.
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Wait....so science has to have feelings now? :confused:

ETA: I have to admit, I only skimmed it. I really don't have time for anything beyond that.
 
Humes fork said:
PZ Myers has a new blogpost for which the title pretty much says it all: Can we rehabilitate post-modernism, please?
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Probably another situation where I think PZ has 'the right idea' but might botch it.

I mentioned in the related thread on the Shermer accusation that I was always uneasy with BCSkeptics' list of things we fight including 'feminism' and 'postmodernism' - both of these things I thought were commonsense and deserve support, but of course have bonehead fringe elements that do deserve confrontation. But that's true of anything, including science, so I was confused about the special attention.

Just a concrete example of postmodernism's use in skepticism: bible analysis is textual deconstruction. It's a pretty common argument that we should try to interpret the bible in context of people writing in context of their values and knowledge at the time rather than at face value. That's postmodernism.

Another example is when we consider the economic influences on publication bias. The body of literature surrounding medical research cannot be taken at face value - we understand that publish-or-perish demands and pharmaceutical funding strategies distort the content.

Of interest: I was having a discussion with my wife last month, and she was completely surprised that skeptics took a confrontational stance against postmodernism precisely because it raises questions about the motives and knowledge of biblical authors and the environment from which the books emerged. Her church essentially equates postmodernism with atheism.
 
The Central Scrutinizer said:
Wait....so science has to have feelings now?...
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So long as he's not trying to conflate atheism and science. I know several scientists that have a personal faith system and manage to do solid science just fine.

Honestly, though, I couldn't get past:

I’m about to alienate even more knee-jerk skeptics (and good riddance!)...
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as he's climbing up on the cross/taking the pulpit in the first sentence. I dislike that when scientists feel like they have to take the pulpit when "discussing" evolution, and I know a couple, though they're both retired, because that approach doesn't help at all.
 
The Central Scrutinizer said:
Wait....so science has to have feelings now? :confused:

ETA: I have to admit, I only skimmed it. I really don't have time for anything beyond that.
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My recap:

First he spends a lot of time whining about how no one takes postmodernism seriously anymore. Then he spends an inordinate amount of time on the Sokal hoax. The hoax was... a hoax. It was just an event, but it illustrated a lot of critiques that people had about postmodernism. It is sort of like spending half your time whinging about the FSM or IPU. No one takes those as rigorous critiques.

Anyway, his core claims:

But you know what post-modernism is, right? It’s a skeptical approach to literature, art, even science, that attempts to deconstruct the premises and presuppositions and cultural influences on a work. It’s an acknowledgment that nothing humans create appears out of a vacuum and that perfect objectivity is an illusion. Yeah, it’s got jargon, lots of jargon, that can be abused and that allows airheads to give the illusion of wisdom by babbling in cliches, but it’s also a useful tool that is used wisely by many academics.
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Let me illustrate the problem right here. Go find me the definition of postmodern philosophy and a glossary of its commonly used terms. I will wait.

There is a difference between jargon and nonsense. Even the most technical astrophysics have clearly defined terms that are open to looking up. Postmodern terms, on the other hand, have had books written on them and many people still don't understand what it is all about.

Here is a good attempt:

Postmodernism is "post" because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody - a characterisitic of the so-called "modern" mind. The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philospher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism "cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself."
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Linky.

I'm going to spoiler this, but I will tell you I am not screwing with you. This is what postmodernism reads like. I read a book about this guy's book and I still can't explain it to you. Maybe I'm just slow. But this is someone trying to give you an introductory explanation:

This closure has emerged, says Derrida, with the latest developments in linguistics, the human sciences, mathematics, and cybernetics, where the written mark or signifier is purely technical, that is, a matter of function rather than meaning. Precisely the liberation of function over meaning indicates that the epoch of what Heidegger calls the metaphysics of presence has come to closure, although this closure does not mean its termination. Just as in the essay “On the Question of Being” (Heidegger 1998, 291-322) Heidegger sees fit to cross out the word “being,” leaving it visible, nevertheless, under the mark, Derrida takes the closure of metaphysics to be its “erasure,” where it does not entirely disappear, but remains inscribed as one side of a difference, and where the mark of deletion is itself a trace of the difference that joins and separates this mark and what it crosses out. Derrida calls this joining and separating of signs différance (Derrida 1974, 23), a device that can only be read and not heard when différance and différence are pronounced in French. The “a” is a written mark that differentiates independently of the voice, the privileged medium of metaphysics. In this sense, différance as the spacing of difference, as archi-writing, would be the gram of grammatology. However, as Derrida remarks: “There cannot be a science of difference itself in its operation, as it is impossible to have a science of the origin of presence itself, that is to say of a certain non-origin” (Derrida 1974, 63). Instead, there is only the marking of the trace of difference, that is, deconstruction.

Because at its functional level all language is a system of differences, says Derrida, all language, even when spoken, is writing, and this truth is suppressed when meaning is taken as an origin, present and complete unto itself. Texts that take meaning or being as their theme are therefore particularly susceptible to deconstruction, as are all other texts insofar as they are conjoined with these. For Derrida, written marks or signifiers do not arrange themselves within natural limits, but form chains of signification that radiate in all directions. As Derrida famously remarks, “there is no outside-text” (Derrida 1974, 158), that is, the text includes the difference between any “inside” or “outside.” A text, then, is not a book, and does not, strictly speaking, have an author. On the contrary, the name of the author is a signifier linked with others, and there is no master signifier (such as the phallus in Lacan) present or even absent in a text. This goes for the term “différance” as well, which can only serve as a supplement for the productive spacing between signs. Therefore, Derrida insists that “différance is literally neither a word nor a concept” (Derrida 1982, 3). Instead, it can only be marked as a wandering play of differences that is both a spacing of signifiers in relation to one another and a deferral of meaning or presence when they are read.

How, then, can différance be characterized? Derrida refuses to answer questions as to “who” or “what” differs, because to do so would suggest there is a proper name for difference instead of endless supplements, of which “différance” is but one. Structurally, this supplemental displacement functions just as, for Heidegger, all names for being reduce being to the presence of beings, thus ignoring the “ontological difference” between them. However, Derrida takes the ontological difference as one difference among others, as a product of what the idiom “différance” supplements. As he remarks: “différance, in a certain and very strange way, (is) ‘older’ than the ontological difference or than the truth of Being” (Derrida 1982, 22). Deconstruction, then, traces the repetitions of the supplement. It is not so much a theory about texts as a practice of reading and transforming texts, where tracing the movements of différance produces other texts interwoven with the first. While there is a certain arbitrariness in the play of differences that result, it is not the arbitrariness of a reader getting the text to mean whatever he or she wants. It is a question of function rather than meaning, if meaning is understood as a terminal presence, and the signifying connections traced in deconstruction are first offered by the text itself. A deconstructive reading, then, does not assert or impose meaning, but marks out places where the function of the text works against its apparent meaning, or against the history of its interpretation.
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Let's put the definitions aside because I could bore you all day with them and instead look at the real world results of postmodernism and science:

. I’ve been charged to talk about “postmodernism”, but really the movement went under a large number of names, including “relativism,” “constructivism,” “social constructivism,” “post-structuralism” and “post colonial thought.”

All these isms shared certain skeptical claims about meaning and knowledge. Knowledge was always in some way relativized to culture, so that it was possible to talk about many “equally valid ways of knowing” of which enlightenment science was only one. For some parts of science, this can be straightforward enough. For instance, contemporary biologists say that the cassowary (an ostrich-like creature) is a bird, albeit one that cannot fly. The Karam people of New Guinea, who live alongside the cassowary, say that the cassowary does not belong in the same category as the birds (which they call yakt) but bats do belong to that category. So who’s to say that the biologists are right and the Karam are wrong? Well it is easy enough to say that this is true for things like naming systems, but harder to generalize to things like thermodynamics. Nevertheless that is just what relativists about scientific knowledge tried to do.

Claims to knowledge were also always in some way “constructed” or “socially constructed” in the postmodernist movements. This meant that they had less to do with grasping the way the world actually works and more to do with creating social structures that advanced the interests of the people who claimed to have knowledge. The science of thermodynamics was not really a description of the properties of heat. It was about convincing people to buy steam engines and arranging society so that they would be happy when they bought one. The idea of the social construction of knowledge caught on, in part because it gave scholars an easy way to quickly generate work that would be published. You simply pick an idea that everyone takes for granted, say, gravity, discuss the history of the idea in a way that emphasizes political interests, and title your book The Social Construction of Gravity.
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Linky.

As you can see, it starts of well enough, but goes quite off the rails fairly quickly. End game?

Thus began the Science Wars of the 90s. A group of sociologists, including Andrew Pickering, David Bloor, Bruno Latour, and Steve Fuller. Although there were differences amongst their approaches, they all basically sought to explain the acceptance of scientific theories using only facts about sociology, and not the physical world the scientists were studying. To make the story short, they failed. Pickering was the first and most prominent defection. He was trained as a physicist, and ultimately he realized that he couldn’t prove what he set out to prove. Bloor and Latour have not done such a public turn around, but they have managed to back away from the extreme claims. Bloor basically got out of the science studies business to work on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, thus avoiding the issues that caused trouble. Latour is an odd case, because although his rhetoric was often the most bombastic, when you pay attention to what he is saying, you see that he was a moderate who acknowledged that the physical world plays a role in the development of scientific theories all along. (A lot of the misunderstanding of his views comes I think from the different role intellectuals play in France, where Latour has spent most of his career.) I any case, Latour has expressed regret that his ideas about science have been used to promote skepticism about global warming , thus illustrating the political dimension of the retreat from postmodernism. Steve Fuller also illustrates the political dimension of the issue, but in a different fashion. Rather than retreat from his skepticism about knowledge, he has gone to work for people who profit from skepticism about science. He has written articles and testified in court on behalf of the Discovery Institute, a political group which promotes creationism and intelligent design and in general attempts to insert dogmatic Christianity into science. Fuller’s work with the Discovery Institute has been condemned by many sociologists working in science studies.
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It should be clear from the complete failure of postmodernism outside of the university humanities core that there is little to learn from it.

And don't get me started on postmodern ethics. I still have nightmares.

Here's how I envision things. Skeptics and scientists would say that through experimentation and falsification we make gradual progress towards modeling objective reality more and more closely.

Postmodernists will say science is just another social construction that will always be false. Lets write more books about it.

I believe in a post modernism. That is, modernism is something to be surpassed. Postmodernism, however, is a rut of empty navelgazing. A self-imposed end of history.
 
blutoski said:
Just a concrete example of postmodernism's use in skepticism: bible analysis is textual deconstruction. It's a pretty common argument that we should try to interpret the bible in context of people writing in context of their values and knowledge at the time rather than at face value. That's postmodernism.

Another example is when we consider the economic influences on publication bias. The body of literature surrounding medical research cannot be taken at face value - we understand that publish-or-perish demands and pharmaceutical funding strategies distort the content.
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I agree and disagree. The notion of simple biases is not the exclusive domain or scope of postmodernism, because those entail that there is some objective reality they are straying from. Postmodernism would say that there is no objective truth in any research, and all is constructed by the author, culture, etc.
 
Tsukasa Buddha said:
I believe in a post modernism. That is, modernism is something to be surpassed. Postmodernism, however, is a rut of empty navelgazing. A self-imposed end of history.
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Thanks Tsukasa,

I'm by no means a postmodernist or even a modernist. But I think we can learn from bad philosophies. I think both provide a means to look at the world from a different perspective and they provide for all kinds of fun "what-if", science fiction scenarios. Ultimately they fail but provide for us a perspective of comparison (and, to be honest, really lousy self help books for con men to foist on the public).

PZ would be an insult to Apes.

Otto West: Apes don't read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it. Now let me correct you on a couple of things, OK? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself." And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.
 
Tsukasa Buddha said:
....
Here's how I envision things. Skeptics and scientists would say that through experimentation and falsification we make gradual progress towards modeling objective reality more and more closely.

Postmodernists will say science is just another social construction that will always be false. Lets write more books about it.

I believe in a post modernism. That is, modernism is something to be surpassed. Postmodernism, however, is a rut of empty navelgazing. A self-imposed end of history.
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Thanks! So, essentially, looks like a lot of the empty art-speak that fine arts majors seemed to like to engage in when they don't want to actually say someone's work is flat-out bad.
 
His first comment is just a wonderful little nugget,


PZ Myers

10 September 2013 at 1:56 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment

How long until the first mocking accusation “Meyers is a post-modernist!” comes boiling out of the ignorant swamps of twitter or youtube, I wonder.
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I really find his constant attempts at stirring up controversy sad.
 
bedlin88 said:
His first comment is just a wonderful little nugget,




I really find his constant attempts at stirring up controversy sad.
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A good troll is better at it than PZ. You don't announce that you're trolling for button-push reactions, fer crissake. It takes away half the pleasure of luring out the commenters.
 
Wow... I don't know where to begin. Apparently having scientific knowledge of your field which drives you to propose a hypothesis and carry out an experiment makes you a "postmodernist" and not a modernist. He is really bending over backwards to try and please his horde, or he is seriously clueless.

PZ wrote as a comment in the thread:

OK, guys, you really need some help here. For example:

"heat albumin to 100 degrees centigrade in a solution of phosphate buffered saline with beta mercaptoethanol at 1 atmosphere, it’s non-covalent bonds will dissociate."

That’s true. That’s a fact. Proteins have measurable, quantifiable properties. There are some wacky postmodernists out there who’ll try to argue with that, but most won’t. Instead, they’ll ask you,

What does it mean? What is the context? What is the purpose of dissociating non-covalent bonds in that molecule? What is the framework of knowledge in which that fits?

Most scientists are comfortable with the distinction between data and information (I think). You’ve plopped out a datum. Fine. Now explain why.

I get this all the time with students. You can give them a recipe to follow out of a lab cookbook, and they can follow it and it works fine, most of the time. When it doesn’t, they’re lost, because they don’t understand the mechanism, the theory, the whole big background of solutes and solvents, dissociation constants, the interactions between salts and pH and temperature, that whole massive edifice of scientific knowledge behind your simple statement that you take completely for granted.

That’s postmodernism. Wake up and notice all your assumptions.

If you’re a good scientist, you’re practicing postmodernism all the time.
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That’s postmodernism. Wake up and notice all your assumptions.
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If that were really all postmodernism was, then it would have a lot more fans in the sciences. But in practice it shows a strong tendency to be more along the lines of: notice all your assumptions, as well as all the assumptions you could have made but didn't; then imagine every inference you could draw from them and every question you could pose about them (meaningful or otherwise); and then spend all your time mentally masturbating over every possible combination of inferences and questions you can string together, preferably in the most impenetrably obfuscatory way possible, rather than dealing with the actual question you were originally trying to answer.

Yes, PZ, we get it. All methodologies have built-in assumptions and frames of reference. So rather than making an endless production number out of that incredibly obvious fact, can we just pick the ones that have been demonstrated to work consistently and get on with it? 'Cause ya know, as a species, we kinda got **** to do.
 
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Potentiated Synapse said:
... Apparently having scientific knowledge of your field which drives you to propose a hypothesis and carry out an experiment makes you a "postmodernist" and not a modernist....
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I'd bet that not only does he not do benchwork, like the protein staining he referring to, but he'd be very hard-pressed to actually explain the exact salt-pH-temperature interactions to his hypothetical student.

I can't, either, as it has been some time since I've had to know the specific chemistry involved but I sure as heck can help someone troubleshoot what went wrong.
 
Diogenes said:
Thanks! So, essentially, looks like a lot of the empty art-speak that fine arts majors seemed to like to engage in when they don't want to actually say someone's work is flat-out bad.
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My first major was Fine Art photography. Four years in the art world left me with a deep and abiding hatred of Postmodernism (and cheap, red "house" wine). And sent me back to school to learn Computer Science.

I may have to steal some of Tsukasa's criticisms for my next argument on Postmodernism, because he's far better at it than I am.
 
Tsukasa Buddha said:
I agree and disagree. The notion of simple biases is not the exclusive domain or scope of postmodernism, because those entail that there is some objective reality they are straying from. Postmodernism would say that there is no objective truth in any research, and all is constructed by the author, culture, etc.
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Nope. It's true that there's a slice of Postmodernist Philosophy that gets close to that, but the bulk of postmodernist philosophers assert that the text doesn't necessarily "map to" a reality. ie: what the author is saying with all sincerity may not actually be true, because of those biasing factors, and no document is immune. There is a tiny fraction of authors who exceed this and suggest that the underlying reality is essentially composed by the text, but they're considered crackpots even with postmodernist philosophy. eg: Rorty.

That caroon version circulates within skepticism, and combatting these crackpots has been a bit of an obsession since the 1980s - high-profile activity (eg: Sokal).

Here's Wikipedia's definition, which I find satisfactory:

...a term which describes the postmodernist movement in the arts, its set of cultural tendencies and associated cultural movements. It is in general the era that follows Modernism. It frequently serves as an ambiguous overarching term for skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, economics, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. It is often associated with deconstruction and post-structuralism because its usage as a term gained significant popularity at the same time as twentieth-century post-structural thought.
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So, to return to my examples above: biblical textual analysis is a nonremarkable postmodern undertaking and I hope skeptics would endorse it.

There are a few postmodernist philosophers who make outrageous claims about the natural sciences, but they do not represent postmodernism. These guys are easy targets - dismantling their claims is shooting fish in a barrel. It's fun - similar to dismantling junk like The Secret or What The Bleep Do We Know - but I've always wondered how it ended up as a skeptical idee fixe. And secondly, it has misinformed skeptics about what postmodernism is and this has clearly led to confusion.

At its core, I think skepticism's objection to "postmodernism" may be an accident. I think there are specific individuals within philosophical postmodernism making claims about reality being composed from text who have caught the ire of high profile scientists such as Dawkins and Chomsky, who are themselves not very clear on what's happening and use the term incorrectly in their critiques.



re: Pharyngula... This sudden aplogia for postmodernist philosophy could indicate PZ's been suborned by that fringe element - possibly self-described postmodern feminists? But his post does not endorse any of postmodern feminism's fringe claims (eg: Judith Butler or Mary Joe Frug's view that sex is social rather than biological), so it's hard to tell what's eating him at this point.
 
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