> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The sociologists struggle with the level of confidence portrayed by most scientists. They may all today claim X=1, but the sociologists see that yesterday they claimed that X=2. That confidence, in light of conflicting history comes of as arrogance.
Scientists feel they need to portray absolute confidence because they know septics will latch onto anything to justify their views (see climate change). The problem is that disinterested parties, the sociologists, identify this conflict as a problem that scientists seem to ignore. Should the general public better understand science scientists could possibly shed the absolute confidence act, mooting the problem.
It's like talking to an ER doctor. The doc knows he is only 80% sure of a diagnosis, but the patient needs to see absolute confidence. They are the ones going under the knife. Should the patient better appreciate the science, the doc might be more honest. But given the average patient, the public, the act is necessity.
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.
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.
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.
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... 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.
>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.
> 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...)
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.
(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.")
Retractions aren't an counterpoint against the article inasmuch as a result of the scientific process. Science is bound to get things wrong, and in a larger, grander scheme of scientific processes judging science by its retractions is akin to judging someone for their childhood actions. Science develops, learns, and moves forwards, and while that doesn't render it impervious to criticism, it should be impervious to those who aren't involved in it to a significant degree. Framed in that manner, I don't think the end of the article is disturbing.
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?
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?
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?
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.
It's a form of culture jamming to disrupt the cognitive processes by which we accept things as "truth" or "reality".
Can you express this a bit more clearly? "Culture jamming" is not a broadly understood term. It's not clear why the words "truth" and "reality" are quoted. Additionally, it seems odd to combine a specific term like "cognitive processes" with a ultra-broad term like "things".
If there is an argument for postmodernism being something more than word salad, your comment does not make it well.
>Postmodernism is more like "defense against the dark arts". Yes, much of the work of e.g. Derrida sounds like long-form trolling, because it is. It's a form of culture jamming to disrupt the cognitive processes by which we accept things as "truth" or "reality".
You mean: it's a cheap and riskless replacement for actually struggling against capitalism via a materialist analysis of the conditions of the working class.
Indeed, because Derrida, after all, moves culture towards liminal sublimity. By discoursing on the always-becoming nature of the sign, he aided decolonisation of the scientific palimpsest.
[+] [-] pjscott|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20160529025038/http://www.cardif...
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.
[+] [-] sandworm101|9 years ago|reply
Scientists feel they need to portray absolute confidence because they know septics will latch onto anything to justify their views (see climate change). The problem is that disinterested parties, the sociologists, identify this conflict as a problem that scientists seem to ignore. Should the general public better understand science scientists could possibly shed the absolute confidence act, mooting the problem.
It's like talking to an ER doctor. The doc knows he is only 80% sure of a diagnosis, but the patient needs to see absolute confidence. They are the ones going under the knife. Should the patient better appreciate the science, the doc might be more honest. But given the average patient, the public, the act is necessity.
[+] [-] aub3bhat|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
Don't think that the initial quote is the norm in philosophy.
[+] [-] iamjeff|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leoc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, he read enough Nietzche to become dangerous. (Or perhaps he was dangerous anyway, and read enough Nietzche to provide a smoke screen...)
[+] [-] gaur|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thanatropism|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] orthoganol|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ittekimasu|9 years ago|reply
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html
[+] [-] thanatropism|9 years ago|reply
(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.")
[+] [-] whorleater|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcranmer|9 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] nxzero|9 years ago|reply
>> "dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives."
[+] [-] thefastlane|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _delirium|9 years ago|reply
For more background on the period this essay came out of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars
[+] [-] vlehto|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] iamjeff|9 years ago|reply
*edit: silly me, looks like I can't edit it. Perhaps someone with more karma/mod privileges could help out.
[+] [-] bitwize|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ohnomrbill|9 years ago|reply
Can you express this a bit more clearly? "Culture jamming" is not a broadly understood term. It's not clear why the words "truth" and "reality" are quoted. Additionally, it seems odd to combine a specific term like "cognitive processes" with a ultra-broad term like "things".
If there is an argument for postmodernism being something more than word salad, your comment does not make it well.
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|9 years ago|reply
> People assume that postmodernism is an attempt by the left to weaponize rhetoric for their own ends.
Some people say postmodernism is a way of giving intellectual superiority to left wing political rhetoric
> But the right has already weaponized rhetoric.
They started it (presumably with religion)
> Postmodernism is more like "defense against the dark arts".
Postmodernism is the bullshit we use against their bullshit.
> Yes, much of the work of e.g. Derrida sounds like long-form trolling, because it is.
U mad bro?
> It's a form of culture jamming to disrupt the cognitive processes by which we accept things as
Derrida is psychological warfare.
> "truth" or "reality"
Postmodernists make for shitty programmers
[+] [-] thescribe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|9 years ago|reply
You mean: it's a cheap and riskless replacement for actually struggling against capitalism via a materialist analysis of the conditions of the working class.
[+] [-] conjectures|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fizixer|9 years ago|reply