
On Post-Modernist Philosophy of Science (2000) - iamjeff
https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/Postmod.htm
======
pjscott
> She: I've heard that the main thing is to avoid relativism. But I'm a
> physicist, and that presents a real difficulty. Without relativity there'd
> be no possibility of making measurements and we'd each be prisoners, to all
> eternity, in some single point of view. In my discipline, we need the
> relativity of frames of reference in order even to begin work. I have a
> special need for relativity because I work on events close to the Big Bang.
> You don't need relativity, too?

I think it's safe to say that, with this paragraph, Bruno Latour failed the
Ideological Turing Test: this conflation of philosophical relativism with the
physical theory of relativity is not something that would ever be uttered by
someone who knew what the latter is.

It gets worse from there. Please, anyone who's tempted to write a dialogue
with a fictional person holding an opposing viewpoint: talk to one first! Find
out what their arguments really are! And, if possible, learn their views well
enough that your summary would seem accurate to one of them.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> Please, anyone who's tempted to write a dialogue with a fictional person
> holding an opposing viewpoint: talk to one first! Find out what their
> arguments really are! And, if possible, learn their views well enough that
> your summary would seem accurate to one of them.

Amen. It might also prevent the deliberately insulting language that Latour
adopted. Clearly, he holds the scientific camp in contempt. An actual dialog
might have demonstrated to him that there was more there than ignorance and
mistaken ideas.

------
hcs
The discussion near the end of Philip Scranton was the most interesting and
coherent part of the article for me, while earlier Dutch is mostly just
incredulous about the words used by Latour and Derrida.

I think he makes a good point about a mutual misunderstanding:

> The history of science as presented in science texts, especially older ones,
> is rightly unsatisfactory to sociologists. In the interests of providing
> students with a heuristic framework (frequently a historical approach is the
> best way to explain a complex concept) and a sense of historical
> orientation, the accounts were streamlined to the point where they presented
> a highly linear view of science devoid of false starts, blind alleys, and
> personality clashes. The reason textbooks do it perhaps a tad better than
> they used to, by the way, is partly due to the insights of sociologists.

> Sociologists, on the other hand, need to realize that the way _they_ present
> the history of science can seem just as distorted. However honorable their
> intent, their language _seems_ at times to deny the existence of objective
> knowledge.

~~~
thisrod
The language used in sociology _does_ deny the existence of objective
knowledge, for excellent reasons that sociologists are happy to explain. It's
a way to manage a massive problem.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20160529025038/http://www.cardif...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160529025038/http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/contactsandpeople/harrycollins/sociology-
of-science.html)

We might know objectively that matter is made of atoms, and sociologists know
that too; but Dalton, Boyle and Lavoisier didn't know it. It's easy to tell a
story about what they did and why they did it, and the story will end with
everyone finding out that matter is made of atoms. But, in order for the
beginning of that story to be an objective explanation of what people did, it
has to make sense whether or not matter turns out to be made of atoms.

Causality runs forwards in time. Therefore, atoms were discovered as a result
of the actions of people who didn't know about atoms, and atoms did not
directly affect the actions that led to their discovery.

If atoms caused the discovery of atoms, it would have happened ten billion
years ago, not two hundred.

~~~
schoen
Thanks for the link to the Collins article; I found it very interesting.

I have some questions about your argument that the atoms didn't cause their
discovery, but I don't think I have time to formulate them clearly right now,
so I'll just stop with thanking you for the link. :-)

~~~
thisrod
Here is an exercise: draft your account of how atoms caused the discovery of
atoms, then imagine how I would rewrite it as an account of how the
luminiferous aether caused the Michelson-Morley experiment.

My account is obviously bullshit, because the luminiferous aether doesn't
exist. So, if your story is not bullshit, there must be a specific causal link
in my story that doesn't have an analog in yours. Find it.

~~~
warrenpj
This seems suspicious to me, like you're playing a game with words that I'm
not able to precisely identify.

Isn't this conflating objective reality (which we can only theorize about)
with objective knowledge about reality (which can improve over time but never
be perfect)?

The theory of the luminiferous aether "caused" the Michelson-Morley
experiment, the outcome of which was inconsistent with the luminiferous aether
actually existing. The theory of atoms "caused" many experiments, the outcome
of which was consistent with atoms actually existing.

What causes theories to exist? Conjecture and criticism motivated by logical
and empirical problems. The problems are "caused" by objective reality, of
which atoms are one part (at a certain level of explanation, anyway).

An account of the development of scientific knowledge should explain the
development of these problems, the conjectured solutions, and criticism made
to them, and why the current explanations are the best available in light of
this history. At no point do we need to claim that the current explanations
are the best possible, but they are still objective knowledge.

~~~
thisrod
> The theory of ...

This is starting to sound like history or sociology. The next step comes when
you notice that the "the theory of" keys on your typewriter are getting
excessively worn, and adopt a convention that any reference to "atoms"
actually means "the atomic theory of matter".

There's a convention in scientific reasoning, that I'm not allowed to say,
"Einstein believed that spacetime is curved", although in fact he did. This is
a safety measure: if we forbid people from saying that, we don't lose much,
but we avoid some common ways of fooling ourselves.

Sociologists are coming from the other side. They are allowed to say, "because
Einstein believed that spacetime is curved", but they can't say "... because
spacetime is curved." The readers know that spacetime is curved, and it's
tempting for them to forget they are not the people whose actions they want to
explain, and those people acted as if spacetime were flat. Perhaps they
noticed things that were inconsistent with spacetime being flat. They never
directly noticed that spacetime was curved: if it were possible to notice that
directly, no one would ever have believed otherwise.

------
aub3bhat
Having met with some of the "Science and Technology Studies" students and
floored by the ignorance of basic technical facts by some of the people they
quoted to be correct, I believe this postmodernist trend arose out of post-
cold war technological superiority.

With Science and Technology no longer needed to fight against a powerful
enemy, it was easy to devalue it. However times are changing.

A society can only ignore science and facts in favor of meaningless word salad
as long as their security does not depends on it.

------
hyperpape
I'll go ahead and confess that I haven't read the whole article, but I think
it will still be valuable to relay that as a former philosophy grad student
(though not a philosopher of science), my first response was "who the fuck is
Andrew Pickering?"

Don't think that the initial quote is the norm in philosophy.

~~~
iamjeff
Strangely, Pickering's Wikipedia photo instantly reminded me of Guillermo
Gómez-Peña. Here is the latter drinking a bottle of pepper sauce:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIfAk-
guplA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIfAk-guplA).

------
leoc
Well, this is old newspaper. The Science Wars were a product of the post-'60s
worldview, in which good-natives-versus-wicked-colonisers was more or less the
overarching theme and rationality was suspect; they quickly died the death in
the revised, post-9/11 master narrative of Enlightenment-versus-superstitious-
darkness, which wasn't fertile ground for even modest and non-radical
skepticism about The Science. A classic document of this is the "Why Has
Critique Run out of Steam?" paper, in which Bruno Latour scrambles to get with
the just-modified program: note the 2003/4 date. [http://www.bruno-
latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-I...](http://www.bruno-
latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-INQUIRY-GB.pdf) Of course we'll have
to see how things develop in future, now that the post-2001 frame of reference
is already fading in people's minds.

------
coldtea
> _In a century that produced Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and Slobo
> Milosevic we still see philosophers and sociologists seeking the roots of
> evil in externals like family violence, poverty, television, even
> circumcision and lack of breast-feeding (and no, I am not making those
> up!)._

Whereas the correct answer is what? Some disturbed individuals like Stalin,
Hitler, Pol Pot etc are the cause? Or was it "philosophy" that perverted them
-- because Hitler sure as hell didn't read much philosophy.

And what about the millions of victims of atrocities from the "civilized"
colonial powers not mentioned in this list, because they're third world so
nobody cares, and b) they kill the nice argument about "pure evil" leaders
motivated by philosophy. Those crimes were motivated by the almighty buck.

> _Calling twentieth-century philosophy superficial gives it too much dignity;
> vacuous is the closest term._

Yeah, man, you dismissed it in a sentence. How intellectual. And
coincidentally, how anglo-saxon, the very culture that never understood
continental philosophy to begin with, and deals mainly in scientism and crude
empiricist platitudes.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> Or was it "philosophy" that perverted them -- because Hitler sure as hell
> didn't read much philosophy.

Unfortunately, he read enough Nietzche to become dangerous. (Or perhaps he was
dangerous anyway, and read enough Nietzche to provide a smoke screen...)

------
gaur
Jacques Derrida is the Picasso of bullshit artistry.

~~~
thanatropism
Could be -- I know some so-called "post-modern" philosophers to be meaningful,
but I know very little about Derrida.

Still, where professor Dutch starts sounding like a crackpot is when he
strawmans Latour and Derrida into a crusade against the purity of Scientific
Objectivity. No deconstructionist I know of has ever picketed a chemical lab;
"green activists" have done that -- and to throw christian young-earth
creationism and Velikovsky on the lap of mr. Derrida, well, that just sounds
like asking someone whether they have stopped beating their wife already.

I do wonder if the rise of this scientistic reactionaryism (not the self-
satisfied belief in science, but the need to go out and write lengthy rants on
subjects they know nothing about) has to do with the stagnation of fundamental
physics since the 1970s. I mean -- professor Dutch sounds like he was promises
a priesthood and then denied access to God.

------
ittekimasu
Also see, Dawkins review of Alan Sokal's book,

[http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html](http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html)

------
thanatropism
Counterpoint: [http://retractionwatch.com/](http://retractionwatch.com/)

(Edit: now -- this, from the very bottom of the article, is disturbing:

"If you don't understand why science has a valid claim to objective knowledge,
and why undermining the belief in objective reality is dangerous not just to
science but to society at large, don't disturb those of us who do.")

~~~
jcranmer
There is a valid argument that the postmodernists bring up that the author of
this article (and science in general) seems to be ignoring. This is certainly
obfuscated by the postmodernist tendency to misuse terminology all over the
place, so it's best to use a specific example to illustrate it.

Recently, as I'm sure everyone here knows, the LHC found the Higgs boson.
Imagine an exchange between EP, an ecstatic physicist, and SP, a skeptical
postmodernist.

EP: We did it, we found the Higgs boson!

SP: Why should I care?

EP: Well, knowing that the Higgs boson means that we finally know that the
Standard Model is correct.

SP: That's cool, I guess. So you saw the Higgs boson with your eyes?

EP: No, that's impossible.

SP: How do you know it exists?

EP: Well, there's this cool thing in the LHC called ATLAS. We get beams of
protons to collide in the middle of it, and the resulting products set off
little signals inside the detector. By processing the results of these
signals, we can figure out what byproducts must have been involved...

SP: How can you find that out?

EP: _Embarks on particle physics that goes over SP 's head_

SP: This is the Standard Model you've talked about?

EP: Uh, yes...

SP: So, what you're telling me is that you've just verified the Standard Model
by assuming that it was true in the first place?

EP: ...

SP: _Walks away in smug satisfaction_

What the postmodernist gets right in the argument is that our evaluation of
the validity of scientific tools to make observation is based on a model of
how science works, and that, without care, you risk creating a circular
argument that boils down to proving models correct because you assumed them.
What they get wrong is the assumption that this circular argument is
unavoidable, and that thus the entire edifice of science is built on shaky
ground in the first place (ultimately being simplified down to "there is no
such thing as objective reality"). Ironically, what the Sokal exposed is that
the postmodernists were _just as guilty_ of the crime they accused scientists
of committing: they didn't criticize that which would have proved them
correct.

The message for scientists should be that you should always strive to make
sure that the tools are working properly. If there were a serious bug in the
code used in ATLAS, do you think that the scientists on the project would have
been equally diligent in finding and fixing that bug if it made a Higgs boson
appear where it didn't actually occur than if it hid the appearance of the
Higgs boson?

~~~
jonathanstrange
I don't think this circularity exists or plays any substantial role. Skeptics
and some philosophers seem to have a hard time understanding how dreadfully
difficult it is to come up with theory of _anything_ that is analytically
insightful and makes even remotely correct predictions.

I would be fine if someone came up with a theory of, say, electromagnetism
based on assuming the existence of the flying spaghetti monster or, to stick
to the topic, based on assuming that our reality is mostly constructed by
culture. The only thing I ask for is that those claims actually play a role in
the theory, rather than being a mere addition, _and_ that you can you can
actually use the theory to build a transistor radio.

~~~
LolWolf
> I would be fine if someone came up with a theory of, say, electromagnetism
> based on assuming the existence of the flying spaghetti monster or, to stick
> to the topic, based on assuming that our reality is mostly constructed by
> culture. The only thing I ask for is that those claims actually play a role
> in the theory, rather than being a mere addition, and that you can you can
> actually use the theory to build a transistor radio.

I cannot upvote this more. It seems all too easy to criticize scientific
methods as being baseless or assuming some odd construction about the universe
or the context or whatever it's embedded in, but it's so easy to overlook the
fact that there are only so many (read: extremely few) ways one can construct
a theory with the same predictive power as that of physics which has the same
or less number of free variables. Thank you for putting into words something
I've tried so hard to verbalize to some of my friends who please themselves
with criticizing positivism/post-positivism as being _woefully naive_
(relative to, say, constructivism), yet benefit infinitely from it.

------
nxzero
From Wikipedia on the Science Wars:

>> "dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social
construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives."

------
thefastlane
maybe it's a formatting issue in my browser, but it was less than clear when
it was the author talking, versus when he was quoting something. i had to
bail. am i not giving the paper a fair shake?

------
_delirium
I was about to say that this guy is about 15-20 years late to the party with
the polemic, but noticed from the footer that this essay is in fact 16 years
old. Maybe someone could add a (2000) to the title?

For more background on the period this essay came out of:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars)

~~~
vlehto
The weird thing here is that if everything is social construct, then science
as social construct is just as true as it would be as objective reality. Then
you can just pick science as your favorite construct and call it a day.

But for some reason "social constructionist" seem to be often incredibly
biased. Some things are "false" because they are constructs, but some things
are "true" because they are constructs. And some things are just objectively
horrible, while others are constructed as horrible.

Examples: rape culture is social construct, but mental distress from rape is
suddenly not. Nationalism is "false" social construct, but Marxism is "true"
social construct.

~~~
_delirium
I think you're conflating quite a few different people there. I mean, there
probably are some people who simultaneously hold all those views, but most
don't. For example many people doing social studies of science _do_ find
science interesting, which is partly why they spend so much time studying
people who follow that methodology— they just don't think it's a methodology
that is independent of the human culture that it arose from, and are
particularly interested in how its social practices developed (even if the
scientists themselves don't like to see what they do as "social practices").
Bruno Latour goes in this category, as something of a 'science-o-philic'
social constructionist (although he's also a "soft" constructionist, because
he views both humans and non-human entities, like lab apparatus and materials,
as jointly doing the construction, vs. it being a purely cultural phenomenon).
And generally (most) social constructionists and (most) Marxists don't see
eye-to-eye, precisely because most Marxists do think there is a scientific,
objective method (historical materialism) for analyzing social relations,
history, economies, etc., and orthodox Marxists even tend to believe objective
factors ultimately determine culture rather than the reverse.

~~~
vlehto
The spesific dude/dudette who invented the "nationalism is modern social
construct and pretty false" is in my understanding quite left leaning. People
who say this stuff out loud in real life (all three of them) are very left
leaning. Being completely opposed to nationalism makes sense in very few
instances, and comitern sympathies are one.

------
fizixer
Article with such a title doesn't have a mention of transhumanism. I'm sorry I
don't have time for this.

