Well, the truth may need some rearranging
Stories to be told
And plain to see the facts are changing
No meaning left to hold– The Human League
The downward spiral continues. Peezus’s shallow leftism has now come to incorporate postmodernism. So utterly predictable, and yet so, so hilarious.
As for the general value of postmodernist “thought”, my attempts to understand it led me to the conclusion that the parts that are true are insipid banalities, and the rest is weaponized jargon. I can’t do any better than reprint what Noam Chomsky said long ago:
Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I’m missing, we’re left with the second option: I’m just incapable of understanding. I’m certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I’m afraid I’ll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don’t understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I’m interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest — write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of “theory” that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) … I won’t spell it out.
Again, I’ve lived for 50 years in these worlds, have done a fair amount of work of my own in fields called “philosophy” and “science,” as well as intellectual history, and have a fair amount of personal acquaintance with the intellectual culture in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts. That has left me with my own conclusions about intellectual life, which I won’t spell out. But for others, I would simply suggest that you ask those who tell you about the wonders of “theory” and “philosophy” to justify their claims — to do what people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn’t already obvious, etc. These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can’t be met, then I’d suggest recourse to Hume’s advice in similar circumstances: to the flames.
A clear, cogent summary from an unimpeachable intellect. I’m sure that would be met with a calm and reasonable accusation of rape or pedophilia in return.
September 12, 2013 @ 8:07 pm
Weird: PZ's made his rep putting down the anti-scientific.
I think nonscientific ideas can be interesting and subjectively important ("Compassion is the highest virtue. Discuss."), but I abhor dressed up nonsense.
September 12, 2013 @ 11:49 pm
Yeah, there's a reason logical positivism didn't catch on.
Peezus has been privileging (pun intended) feelings over evidence for some time now, so it's no surprise one of his SJW buddies finally told him that there was a whole body of academic work he could be making use of toward those ends. It's funny that, as recently as a month ago, he was still stating that science's quest for truth takes precedence over mere practical results. New party line, comrades!
Funniest of all is his insistence that pomo is simply about "examining your assumptions." He even said in a comment that if you're doing good science, you're already a postmodernist. That's one of those statements that is so phenomenally fucking stupid, so staggeringly uninformed, it's not even wrong. It's beyond wrong.