Postmodernism is Old, Let Us Go Further

A collective and intercultural pamphlet against a wrong form of skepticism

Riccardo Campa (Italy)
Michal Ossowski (Poland)
Mirabelle Le Boulicaut (France)
Monika Hołówka (Poland)
Lucas Mazur (USA)
Joanna Reinelt (Poland)
Anna Jurczak (Poland)

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Complete entry

Posted by Ola  on  11/25  at  05:42 PM

I absolutely agree!

Posted by Wouter van Reek  on  12/03  at  07:23 AM

Very good! At last!! an answer!
Maybe post-post-modernism and anti-anti-science should get less recursive names?
Like, ehhmmm... Recursionism?

Because, people just being somewhat more intelligent apes that passed the treshold where they could use recursion to suddenly understand much more then other animals (but still not that much) seems to lead to our cumbersome relationship to knowledge.
I mean, we are very stupid aren't we? So the post-modernists seam right. But then, we can use recursion to put some conclusions about some facts in a box with a label, then use some of these boxes to get to the next level etc. So in the end we can build something like the internet where our nephews the chimpasees never get past the first step, using a stick.

Posted by David Stodolsky  on  12/20  at  08:13 AM

A few years back there was an article in Current Anthropology explaining why constructivism had made such great inroads in the field. It was titled something like "...: Why anthropology took it on the chin." The idea was that anthro was vulnerable due to the lack of first person pronouns typical of antho description.

Concerning the reason the post-modern and constructivist nonsense has been so successful, my theory is the existential crisis caused by science eroding the traditional (religious) sources of meaning. By (the attempted) epistemological undermining of science, the nonsense allows the traditional to be maintained.

The Ernest Becker Foundation is best place to look for the theory:

http://faculty.washington.edu/nelgee/


The 1998 issue of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, is the best short intro to current research.

http://faculty.washington.edu/nelgee/literature/default.htm

Posted by Luis Reyes-Galindo  on  10/14  at  11:28 AM

I seriously doubt that one can classify "Harry Collins, David Travis, Trevor Pinch, David Bloor, Barry Barnes, Steven Shapin, Donald MacKenzie, Bill Harvey, Andy Pickering, Roger Krohn, Richard Whitley, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Mulkay, Nigel Gilbert, Steve Woolgar, and Bruno Latour" in the same category and not be making a very grave simplification.
There are several serious misgivings in this manifesto. While a superficial reading of say, Feyerabend, could give the impression of his being an "anti-science" character, one finds recurrently in his writings that he is anything but that (sometimes quite openly). What Feyerabend definitely was very against, was the establishment of unmovable scientific knowledge elites (in fact, of all cultural elites). Feyerabend was a physicist. One of his earlier and less radical papers, the wonderful "How to Be a Good Empiricist: A Plea for Tolerance in Matter s Epistemological" is a very good account of how a scientific theory (the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics) can become an epistemological tyrant over empirically equivalent alternatives (e.g. D. Bohm's pilot wave formulation), hence the title of the text. This he later extended to science as a cultural exercise on a social scale, indeed. But to his last day, Feyerabend insisted that he was not anti-science. How can this be true?
According to this manifesto, these author's anti-scientificism is shown by the fact that

"They believe that human reason, and especially western-type rationality (which finds expression mainly in science and technology), is harmful to humankind and that it is one of the major causes of problems in modern societies"

While this is certainly very true in postmodernist writers, I challenge the signers of the above manifesto to show me a single place in, say, the writings of Harry Collins where he either implicitly or explicitly espouses the view that "human reason, and especially western-type rationality (which finds expression mainly in science and technology), is harmful to humankind and that it is one of the major causes of problems in modern societies". Certainly, one may find that Collins challenges the epistemic idealism espoused by pro-science positivism, and his descriptions of science may be good or bad, but as far as holding the radical anti-science views as described above that is blatantly and provably untrue. I am sure that this would hold true for most of the authors mentioned alongside him upon closer examination (Latour, being a true radical postmodernist in the group, being a possible exception).
To challenge science is not to the same as being anti-scientific. To challenge science's epistemic authority is not to be anti-science. To espouse epistemological pluralism is not to be anti-science. To examine the workings of scientists in day to day life, and find that they are as fallible as everyone else is not to be anti-science. To openly discuss science's arguments and epistemic grounds is not being anti-science. In short, to criticize something is not by definition to be against the thing one is criticizing. As a physicist, one of the greatest things I see in science is the intrinsic ability of its members and makers to criticize the old by the way of a good argument (at least in principle). Indeed, science's strength may lie precisely in its ability to sustain claims to novelty by brave newcomers, itself only possible by its permanent yet balanced state of healthy skepticism (whoever claims to be a scientist and yet not a skeptic is either lying or a very bad scientist; whoever claims that these are not characteristics of scientific research, has clearly never been involved in real world science). So if these are values that are not only present but actively encouraged in scientific practice, why yet be afraid of them?

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