Reading and Relativism an Introduction to the Science Wars1
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Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture Kindle
BEYOND THE HOAX: SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Alan Sokal | 488 pages | 19 Mar 2010 | Oxford University Press | 9780199561834 | English | Oxford, United Kingdom Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture PDF Book Jul 02, Ugh rated it liked it. Views Read Edit View history. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. Friend Reviews. Read an excerpt of this book! This may have been his thinking, but I thought it came off as arrogant. Javascript is not enabled in your browser. Everyone in the US - even the Amish - makes at least some use of the fruits of science. Sokal is one of the most powerful voices in the continuing debate about the status of evidence-based knowledge. Religion, politics and survival It may be a particularly shitty butterfly, but that doesn't mean it's at all interesting to break. I found Sokal's critiq The only aspect of the Sokal Hoax I was aware of before I read this book was that the hoax article Sokal wrote about physics was submitted to a publication that did not subject articles to peer review. To ask other readers questions about Beyond the Hoax , please sign up. His critique would also gain more credibility from encompassing his own community: the failure of scientific institutions to address the abuse of statistical methods or promote systematic reviews is no less of a threat to progress than the ramblings of postmodernists or fundamentalists. However, he is a de The first couple of chapters the ones describing the hoax were pretty good, but after that it veers off into armchair philosophizing about the philosophy of science; it's not that I didn't agree with him on most points, but if I'm going to spend time reading about the philosophy of science, I'm going to read what a specialist says about it. -
Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought This Page Intentionally Left Blank Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought
Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought This page intentionally left blank Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought Vladimir Tasic OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2001 OXTORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 2001 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue. New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tasic, Vladimir, 1965- Mathematics and the roots of postmodern thought / Vladimir Tasic. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-513967-4 1. Mathematics—Philosophy. 2. Postmodernism. I. Title. QA8.4.T35 2001 510M—dc21 2001021846 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Maja This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As much as I would like to share the responsibility for my oversimplifications, misreadings or misinterpretations with all the people and texts that have in- fluenced my thinking, I must bear that burden alone. For valuable discussions and critiques, I am indebted to Hart Caplan, Gre- gory Chaitin, Sinisa Crvenkovic, Guillermo Martinez, Lianne McTavish, Maja Padrov, Shauna Pomerantz, Goran Stanivukovic, Marija and Milos Tasic, Jon Thompson, and Steven Turner. -
Science Vs. Postmodernism Debate
Science vs. Postmodernism Debate Selections from the Science vs. Postmodernism debate thread in the Philosophy Forum. All quotations are in red. Responses to the quotations are by John Donovan unless otherwise noted. Quote: Originally Posted by geoff23 This whole "self-refuting" theme seems to have been pervasive around here for a while now. Philosophy itself is "self-refuting" is it not? My profile lists my favorite philosopher as Richard Rorty - described by some as "the anti-philosophers philosopher" and accused of "blowing up philosophy". The problem with deciding if science and Kuhnian based post-modernism are incompatible, is trying to figure out if one is talking about the "strong programme" of post-modernism or not. Claims that science is just another narrative or way of "knowing" the world or that there is no eternal reality or is there is but we can never gain knowledge about it, are easily dismissed. Sokal and Bricmont say on the self-refutation aspect: "Research in history, and in particular in the history of science, employs methods that are not radically different from those used in the natural sciences: studying documents, drawing the most rational inferences, making inductions based on the available data, and so forth. If arguments of this type in physics or biology did not allow us to arrive a reasonably reliable conclusions, what reason would there be to trust them in history? Why speak in a realist mode about historical categories, such as paradigms, if it is an illusion to speak in a realist mode about scientific concepts (which are in fact much more precisely defined) such as electrons or DNA?" PoMO studies of power and influence and other social mechanisms in science are more than welcome- I view vested corporate influences in science (e.g., global warming or pharmaceuticals) a grave threat to the integrity of science. -
Deleuze and Heidegger on Truth and Science
Open Philosophy 2018; 1: 173–190 Michael James Bennett* Deleuze and Heidegger on Truth and Science https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2018-0013 Received May 28, 2018; accepted August 16, 2018 Abstract: Deleuze and Guattari’s manner of distinguishing science from philosophy in their last collaboration What is Philosophy? (1991) seems to imply a hierarchy, according to which philosophy is more adequate to the reality of virtual events than science is. This suggests, in turn, that philosophy has a better claim than science to truth. This paper clarifies Deleuze‘s views about truth throughout his career. Deleuze equivocates over the term, using it in an “originary” and a “derived” sense, probably under the influence of Henri Bergson, who does similarly. Moreover, William James and pragmatism were to Bergson what the early analytic philosophers Frege and Russell are to Deleuze: excessively scientistic foils whose confusions about truth arise as a result of failing to distinguish science from philosophy. By situating Deleuze’s conception of truth in relation to the early Heidegger’s, which it to some extent resembles, the paper concludes by suggesting that, surprisingly, neither kind of truth Deleuze licenses applies to science, while both apply to philosophy. Science is indifferent to truth in the way that some of Deleuze‘s readers have incorrectly wanted to say that he thinks philosophy is. Keywords: Deleuze, truth, science, adequation, sense, Heidegger In the bad old days of the “science wars,” Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accused Gilles Deleuze -
Fashionable Nonsense Delivers the Perfect Coup De Grace.” — B a R B a R a E H R E N R E I C H , a U T H O R of Blood Rites a N D the Snarling Citizen
— 7------ 1------ 7------ 7------ 1------- A New Yot\ Times Notable Book of the Year A Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller _j_____1_____1_____ I_____I_____I_____L_____/____ /____ L____ L____ L_L _/ “A thoroughly hilarious romp through the postmodernist academy. Fashionable Nonsense delivers the perfect coup de grace.” — B a r b a r a E h r e n r e i c h , a u t h o r of Blood Rites a n d The Snarling Citizen FASHIONABLE NONSENSE POSTMODERN INTELLECTUALS’ ABUSE of SCIENCE Additional praise for Fashionable Nonsense “Sokal is trying to stake out a territory free from the political claims of cul ture.” — Edward Rothstein, The New York Times “The modem sciences are among the most remarkable of human achieve ments and cultural treasures. Like others, they merit— and reward— respect ful and scrupulous engagement. Sokal and Bricmont show how easily such truisms can recede from view, and how harmful the consequences can be for intellectual life and human affairs. They also provide a thoughtful and con structive critical analysis of fundamental issues of empirical inquiry. It is a timely and substantial contribution." — Noam Chomsky “A brilliant and entertaining book...Fashionable Nonsense exposes the fraud.” — The Advocate “A debut that promises to be [the debate’s] most explosive incarnation yet.” — Kristina Zarlengo, Salon Magazine “Sheer chutzpah and cleverness .. .The book is a sobering catalog o f idiocies by some of those claimed to be the best thinkers of our times.. .1 recommend this book.” — Russell Jacoby, Los Angeles Weekly “[An] important and well-documented book...Every passage is followed by the authors’ often humorous debunking of the writers’ garbled science and obscure language. -
Rainer Friedrich
Arion11.1 16July03 8/8/03 4:53 PM Page 33 Theorese and Science Envy in the Humanities: A New Take on the Two Cultures Divide RAINER FRIEDRICH Peter Michelsen illuminatori octogenario We in the humanities used to ridicule the clumsy and obfuscating language of sociology as masking the often trivial nature of its contents. Sociologists, we quipped, say what everybody knows in a language that no- body understands. We cheered C. W. Mills, when in a cele- brated exercise he summed up the gist of a drawn-out, virtually impenetrable paragraph by Talcott Parsons in one brief sentence. Sociologese was our name for this academic dialect, and we had some innocent fun with it. But now our innocence is gone and the joke is on us; for the humanities have been producing something worse. Arising from hyper- trophic theorizing, a steady proliferation of neologisms, for the most part unnecessary or vacuous, has been bloating the critical idiom of the humanities. THEORESE Theorese is the name of the beast. Among the justifications its apologists offer for the spawning of its neologisms, there is one that gives the game away. If there ever was an unnec- essary one, it is narratology. Its coiners, apparently com- manding small Latin and less Greek, must have assumed a Greek word by the name of ‘narratos,’ to which they un- abashedly added the suffix -logy, thereby creating a linguis- tic monstrosity (topped only by another pseudo-Graecism, homographesis, claiming to denote ‘gay writing’—which also proves that a little Greek can be a dangerous thing). -
The Deconstruction of Mathematics: a Criticism of Reuben Hersh's What Is Mathematics, Really? and the Humanist Philosophy of Mathematics
Otterbein University Digital Commons @ Otterbein Mathematics Faculty Scholarship Mathematical Sciences 1999 The Deconstruction of Mathematics: A criticism of Reuben Hersh's What Is Mathematics, Really? and the Humanist Philosophy of Mathematics David J. Stucki Otterbein University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/math_fac Part of the Mathematics Commons, and the Philosophy Commons Repository Citation Stucki, David J., "The Deconstruction of Mathematics: A criticism of Reuben Hersh's What Is Mathematics, Really? and the Humanist Philosophy of Mathematics" (1999). Mathematics Faculty Scholarship. 16. https://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/math_fac/16 This Conference Proceeding is brought to you for free and open access by the Mathematical Sciences at Digital Commons @ Otterbein. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mathematics Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Otterbein. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Deconstruction of Mathematics A criticism of Reuben Hersh’s What Is Mathematics, Really? and the Humanist Philosophy of Mathematics David J. Stucki, Mathematical Sciences Dept., Otterbein College, Westerville, OH 43081 [email protected] “My readers know how impatient I am with some pragmatists, phenomenologists, and subjective idealists of various schools who heap scorn on the notion that mathematical structures are ‘out there’ with a reality that is not mind dependent. For these thinkers, mathematical reality is located within human experience. Like…the overwhelming majority of eminent mathematicians past and pre- sent, I am a Platonist in the sense that I believe mathematical pat- terns are discovered, not invented. Of course, they are still invented, in a sense. Everything humans do and say is what hu- mans do and say. -
Polish Philosophical Studies, IX
Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change Series IVA. Eastern and Central Europe, Volume 40 General Editor George F. McLean God and Post-Modern Thought: Philosophical Issues in the Contemporary Critique of Modernity Polish Philosophical Studies, IX by Józef Życiński Translated by Kenneth W. Kemp and Zuzanna Maślanka Kieroń The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy Copyright © 2010 by The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy Box 261 Cardinal Station Washington, D.C. 20064 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Życiński, Józef [Bóg postmodernistów. English] God and post-modern thought : philosophical issues in the contemporary critique of modernity / by Józef Życiński; translated by Kenneth W. Kemp and Zuzanna Maślanka Kieroń. p. cm. -- (Cultural heritage and contemporary change. Series IVA. Eastern and central Europe ; v. 40) (Polish philosophical studies ; IX) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Christianity--Philosophy. 2. Postmodernism--Religious aspects-- Christianity. 3. God (Christianity) I. Title. BR100.Z9313 2010 2010038354 230.01--dc22 CIP ISBN 978-1-56518-267-7 (pbk.) TABLE OF CONTENTS Abbreviations v Preface vii Introduction: In Search of Traces of the Invisible 1 I. The Main Trends of Postmodernism 7 The Names of Postmodernity The Fourth Man of Postmodernity The Multiplicity of Postmodernisms Constructive Postmodernism Perennial Philosophy in the Light of Postmodernism II. The Death of God or the Return of Polytheism? 23 Between the Dance and the Death of God Overcoming Despair Dancing Dionysius Christ and Dionysius Mystical Lightness of Spirit The Logic of Divine Paradoxes Inculturation into Postmodernity III. Anthropological Premises of the Dionysian Denial of God 35 Thinking Otherwise A Nomad in a Concentration-Camp Universe The Anthropology of the Nomads A Call from the Depths of Pain IV. -
Places As Assemblages: Paradigm Shift Or Fashionable Nonsense?
Athens Journal of Architecture - Volume 1, Issue 4 – Pages 295-310 Places as Assemblages: Paradigm Shift or Fashionable Nonsense? By Milica Muminovic Ever since Heidegger’s definitions of being and dwelling, and further interpretations of those definitions in the work of Christian Norberg-Schulz, the theory of place has been developing as a category of phenomenology. The notion of being is considered unseparated from building and thus fundamental for the definition of place. In the past decade, the phenomenological tradition in place theory has been challenged, largely inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s opus is particularly interesting because of the introduction of a new kind of realism, positioned between phenomenology and materialism, where being is replaced with becoming. In nonphilosophical circles, that emerging epistemology and ontology is usually referred to as assemblage theory. For some scholars, assemblage theory is a problematic opus; for others it represents potential for the further development of existing theories. Despite being introduced in various disciplines, most of the research in this field terminates with assemblage as a metaphor, while losing all the complexity of Deleuze’s ontology. In place theory, assemblage appears in the work of Kim Dovey and his book Becoming Places (2010). This work represents a systematic effort to introduce new ontology into place theory and raises questions of the impact this ontology can have for the creation of a new approach to place. Thus we might ask: is this another example of fashionable nonsense that architects seem to embrace? Or are we hypothetically dealing with a different view of place? This paper aims to discuss the ways in which assemblage theory might be affecting common notions we have about place. -
Dawkins Review of Intellectual Impostures
Dawkins Review of Intellectual Impostures http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/dawkins.html Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins [Published in Nature, 9 July 1998, vol. 394, pp. 141-143.] Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont Profile: 1998. Pp. 274. £9.99 To be published in the USA by Picador as Fashionable Nonsense in November 1998 Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following: We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously. This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, one of many fashionable French 'intellectuals' outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, previously published in French and now released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattari goes on indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and Bricmont, "the most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered". -
Sokal Affair
Some lessons for us scientists (too) from the \Sokal affair” Pablo Echenique-Robba Instituto de Qu´ımica F´ısica Rocasolano, CSIC, Spain BIFI, ZCAM, DFTUZ, University of Zaragoza, Spain [email protected] http://www.pabloecheniquerobba.com November 25, 2013 Abstract In this little non-technical piece, I argue that some of the lessons that can be learnt from the bold action carried out in 1996 by the physicist Alan Sokal and typically known as the \Sokal affair” not only apply to some sector of the humanities (which was the original target of the hoax), but also (with much less intensity, but still) to the hardest sciences. The reader probably knows about the famous \Sokal affair". This refers to an illumi- nating action designed and carried out by Alan Sokal in 1996. The physics professor at NYU submitted an article entitled \Transgressing the boundaries: Towards a transforma- tive hermeneutics of quantum gravity" to Social Text, a high-impact, well known academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. In Sokal's own words, what he wanted to test was this: \Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies |whose editorial col- lective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross| publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideolog- ical preconceptions?" (Sokal, 1996a). That is, he deliberately sent and absurd article which was \a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense. structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics" (Wikipedia, 2013), an article that he wrote \so that any competent physicist or mathematician (or undergraduate physics or math major) would realize that it is a spoof" (Sokal, 1996a). -
Criticism of Falsifiability
Criticism of Falsifiability Nicolae Sfetcu February 22, 2019 Sfetcu, Nicolae, "Criticism of Falsifiability", SetThings (February 22, 2019), MultiMedia Publishing (ed.), URL = Email: [email protected] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/. This is a partial translation of: Sfetcu, Nicolae, "Distincția dintre falsificare și respingere în problema demarcației la Karl Popper", SetThings (3 iunie 2018), MultiMedia Publishing (ed.), DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.10444.72329, ISBN 978-606-033-139-1, URL = https://www.telework.ro/ro/e- books/distinctia-dintre-falsificare-si-respingere-in-problema-demarcatiei-la-karl-popper/ Criticism of Falsifiability Thomas Kuhn criticized falsifiability because it characterized "the entire scientific enterprise in terms that apply only to its occasional revolutionary parts," (Kuhn 1970) and it cannot be generalized. In Kuhn's view, a delimitation criterion must refer to the functioning of normal science. (Kuhn 1970, 802) But Kuhn ignored Popper's sophisticated falsification and his extended theory. Kuhn objects to Popper's entire theory and excludes any possibility of rational reconstruction of the development of science. In Kuhn's view, "there can be no logic, but only psychology of discovery". (Lakatos 1978, 90) In a brief comparison of Hume, Carnap and Popper, Watkins points out that the development of science is inductive and irrational according to Hume, inductive and rational according to Carnap, non-inductive and rational according to Popper. (Watkins 1968) Extending this comparison, it can be added that the development of science is non-inductive and irrational, according to Kuhn.