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black liberation atheism ?

If only I had even heard of such a thing 2 or 3 decades ago. The only choices were semi-wacked out christians or completely wacked out muslims (not the real muslims, the american heretical sects). 

  R.

There were black atheists in the late 19th century?
I always found the embracing of the church by black people during and after the time if slavery bizarre. They were embracing the church which facilitated their enslavement and oppression. This was mentioned but not really addressed.

So far as the enlightenment & science go, I never was taught or believed that science is the channel to Truth with a capital T. My science education taught me Truth is close to not existing, close enough we assume it doesn’t as a matter of course. IE, all knowledge is provisional in time even if we sometimes must assume things to be true to progress.

Prof Lackey refers to white humanists who used humanism to justify oppression and indignity of blacks- I would like to know more about this. Who were these people?

I’d don’t accept post-modernism on the grounds it is an arbitrary construction, a manufactured idea with no grounding in reality.

Prof. Lackey- a merely editorial observation. The phrase ‘the way I would phrase it is this’ most oft is needless. However you phrase is the way you would phrase it.

In the discussion around post-modernism, it appeared that DJ and Dr. Lackey were bantering about “truth” without defining it or recognizing that they may meant different things when they refer to “truth.” However, I fault Dr. Lackey for switching definitions midstream. He admitted that he would go to a medical doctor (scientist) for health reasons that are associated with his own body. How does he then allow science to be a “fiction” when he’s undergoing a medical procedure? Is it a fiction when he’s having a bone set, a skin cancer removed, or a heart transplant? Does the fact that they can do these things with increasing success and rigor make the knowledge true, or is it still fiction? I think that Dr. Lackey needs to examine what he means and either use different words or define his terms before starting such discussions.

DJ’s conduct and sharpness in this interview, however, make it one of his best ever. He was courteous and calm, and consistently articulate in not letting Michael get away with his own form of “intellectual masturbation” (a quote from the show). In particular, DJ was most profound when he commented that Michael’s statement lacked profundity. I don’t often listen to the podcasts a second time, but I plan to do so with this one.

In my younger, less informed (and still Christian) days, I read Richard Wright’s books with awe at his perspective. However, I was on my own and had no context in which to place them. I appreciated this podcast to help me place Wright’s writing within the world of atheistic humanism ... sort of.

I really enjoyed this discussion, and wished it could continue.

Michael Lackey manages to get his points across (particularly de-bunking the cartoon caricature of ‘post-modernism’ so popular among secularists and skeptics) without inspiring Mr. Grothe to get his back up, as happened during the infamous Chris Hedges interview.

The point is that colonialism and imperialism have always found ‘humanist’ ideological handmaidens alongside missionary christianity and continue to do so. Lackey’s argument about the contribution of Black American atheism to the critique of both religion and Enlightenmnent humanism (without lumping the two together) which then furnished tools for a critique of so many other forms of human oppression (eg., the woman question) illuminated a vast region of which I am ignorant but would certainly like to learn more about. During the interview, Lackey doesn’t mention the influence of the Communist International on Wright (or of Marxism in general), which might have pulled some of the philosophical and political threads together…

Another thing glaringly missing was any reference to the role of ‘humanist’ apologists for the so-called ‘War on Terror’ and the racist ‘clash of civilizations’ ideology more broadly (thought Edward Said was mentioned in passing). Recall CFI’s recurring problems with this - eg. its inability to take a position even on such obvious crimes as the U.S. assaults/occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, as leading ‘new atheists’ cheerlead for ‘humanist’ cluster bombing in Iraq and toy with the prospect of nuking Iran (Harris) ‘because of the way they think’.

One wonders whether the obvious topics of Marxism and the Middle-East in Dr. Lackey’s discussion might be casualties of the creeping ‘homeland security’ mentality and its deadly effect on academic freedom.

I really enjoyed this podcast as well.

I have struggled with the concept of postmodernism, which seems to mean a lot of different things to different people.  I have yet to understand the full gravity of this term and would appreciate further explanation into why postmodernism does or does not conflict with the humanist perspective.  Personally I feel no conflict between the two and feel this could be resolved with a concise definition of the term.

In the interview Michael & DJ agreed on the short definition that postmodern thought was (correct my paraphrasing) “skepticism to the extreme”.  Even to the point that our concept of “truth” is really just a collection of pragmatic connections.  I think identifying aspects of a philosophy (humanism isn’t off limits to critical analysis) that are not satisfactory to everyone is admirable, and by cross referencing all of those unsatisfactory aspects we can better hone in on a more unified position.

Edit: Furthermore, I suspect the main reason postmodernism is commonly susceptible to the criticism of being exclusive in their own language, is that not enough has been done to break the concept up into easy to digest concepts.  I would say that the concept of natural selection was somewhat unfairly characterized as “survival of the fittest”, but even that shortcut concept got everyone closer to the main idea (atleast collectively).

I find the claim “if there were no human being, there will be no concept of gravity” a non sense or a empty claim, depending on the meaning of the words.

If you acknowledge that even without any human being (or any alien advanced enough to observe the gravity fact) there be sill gravity, well, the above claim is meaningless and empty.

If you believe that without any being advanced enough to observe gravity there will be no gravity, well, it is nonsense.

Right, Barto. I haven’t listened to the podcast, and so I don’t know how that issue came up, but the general knock on postmodernism is its tendency to go in for a species of vulgar relativism, whereby ‘truth’, ‘evidence’, ‘reason’ are just various sorts of social construct, without any particular merit. That sort of philosophy is a direct rejection of the entire Enlightenment project.

There may be other, less extreme forms of postmodernism that aren’t quite as problematic; however all the sorts I am familiar with at the very least involve an overgrown verbiage that makes them very difficult to read and understand. And the complexity of the verbiage is in no apparent relation to the complexity or depth of the thinking. Of course, I am speaking in generalizations and there may be exceptions.

Sate, There have been some very useful books discussing the critique of humanism, and in my estimation, Martin Halliwell’s and Andy Mousley’s book (Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues) is the best.  But let me briefly explain why I believe it is the best.  Mousley and Halliwell examine a variety of humanisms, and they specifically explain why each form of humanism has had its own distinctive problems.  However, like myself, they have ultimately tried to defend humanism.  But you ask specifically for a name.  In my book, I spend a lot of time discussing Aime Cesaire, who claims in Discourse on Colonialism: “it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him.”  Cesaire, therefore, concludes: “At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.”  Cesaire quotes and discusses the work of many humanists in this book.  In my book, I try to explain why Cesaire offers such a nasty view of humanism.  But here’s the strange thing: Cesaire calls himself a humanist.  So while Cesaire critiques humanism, he ultimately believes in humanism. 

As for your comment about postmodernism, there is something very fascinating going on here.  You say that you were never taught to believe in Truth with a capital T, and that your training in enlightenment, science, and IE have taught you that truth is provisional.  According to many postmodernists, your definition of truth would qualify you as a postmodernist—in the Postmodern Condition, Jean-Francois defines postmodernism simply as “incredulity toward metanarratives.”  Postmodernists claim that no metaphysical or absolute Truth exists.  What we have of “truth” is a provisional construct that shifts and evolves in relation to the community of language users.  Granted, there are some extreme postmodernists, who hold that all truth is equally non-truth, but most postmodernists I know and study hold that some truths can be extremely valuable constructs, while others truths are extremely destructive.  Where I think you would probably differ from postmodernists is in your claim about an arbitrary construction.  Yes, postmodernism is anti-foundational (in the sense that Rorty defines).  But postmodernists would claim that all systems of knowledge are arbitrary constructions, whether people believe it or not, whether they think so or not.  Most postmodernists would say that they unabashedly acknowledge that their systems of knowledge are arbitrarily constructed.

I have so much more that I want to say, but I am really in a rush at the moment.  Talk to you later, michael

Right, Barto. I haven’t listened to the podcast, and so I don’t know how that issue came up, but the general knock on postmodernism is its tendency to go in for a species of vulgar relativism, whereby ‘truth’, ‘evidence’, ‘reason’ are just various sorts of social construct, without any particular merit.

A really really great podcast. I think it deserved a couple of minutes more or a second part. Lackey and DJ exposed their POV and entered a very well reasoned discusion really worth listening. There was when prof. Lackey came with the phrase about gravity.

The kind of posmodernism I know was born in order to justify (or defend) psychoanalysis. I tend to believe that here (one of the two remaining psichoanalytics countries in the world) the humanist academia (humanist used as an oposition to natural science and mathematic) embraces posmodernism as a way to protect psychoanalysis from the inquiry of scientific psychology: after a weird turn, is not science what challenges psychoanalysis, is psychoanalysis what challenges science because it exposes that science is a narrative.

So maybe I am being unfair with the real posmodernist (I swear I was about to write real scotmen ), but the ones I met support the ridiculous claim that there are no laws whatsoever in the universe or that our science is not even a good approach to those laws. Of course, they write it in a computer builded upon the solid state physic theory.

I don’t have any trouble admitin that our science didn’t reach the ultimate ‘Truth’, but I don’t see how it is posible to claim that there are no laws in the universe or that our science is no better aproximation to these laws than, for instance, chamanism.

I find the claim “if there were no human being, there will be no concept of gravity” a non sense or a empty claim, depending on the meaning of the words.

If you acknowledge that even without any human being (or any alien advanced enough to observe the gravity fact) there be sill gravity, well, the above claim is meaningless and empty.

If you believe that without any being advanced enough to observe gravity there will be no gravity, well, it is nonsense.

Not only do I agree with Barto, I also think that by making this kind of statement Prof Lackey commits post modernism’s usual sin - playing with words. As a professor of English I would expect that he would understand that unless we have agreed meanings for words, language is meaningless. What does the word ‘concept’ mean? As highlighted by Barto, it can mean either the item (e.g. gravity) itself or it’s linguistic description. Only the latter is a human construct, but to say that it’s fiction is silly because it has no independent life; it’s simply a way of conveying a truth, not a truth in its own right.

He also confuses the scientific endeavour, which is a human construct, and scientific knowledge, which most certainly is not.

I wouldn’t say this kind of silliness is mental masturbation, because it’s not even fun…

NH Baritone, I want to briefly respond to the following: “I fault Dr. Lackey for switching definitions midstream. He admitted that he would go to a medical doctor (scientist) for health reasons that are associated with his own body. How does he then allow science to be a “fiction” when he’s undergoing a medical procedure? Is it a fiction when he’s having a bone set, a skin cancer removed, or a heart transplant? Does the fact that they can do these things with increasing success and rigor make the knowledge true, or is it still fiction?”  PZ Myers and I have been hashing this idea out for the last year, and we finally figured out what divides us.  PZ invited me to give a lecture on the different types of atheism, and I claimed that, according to postmodern atheists, science is a fiction.  PZ said that scientists would neither accept nor appreciate this claim.  But I retorted: fiction is a positive phrase for us in the humanities.  It doesn’t mean that something is not “true.”  From a postmodern perspective, all concepts are fictions.  Why?  They start with the claim that, because there is no God, there can be no pre-existent concepts waiting to be discovered.  What we have of concepts are human constructions.  Freud’s theory of the unconscious, Nietzsche’s will to power, and gravity are all concepts about the world.  In the Gay Science, Nietzsche clarifies this point nicely: “We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live—by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody now could endure life.  But that does not prove them.  Life is no argument.”  The word table is not the same thing as the referent table, and for Nietzsche (and most postmodernists), the moment we enter the world of language, we have entered the world of fiction.  Given this view of language, does it follow that language is useless or meaningless?  While Nietzsche and many postmodernists insist that there is no metaphysical Truth, they do insist that truth, as a constructed fiction, is crucial for human living.  When I say that science is a fiction, I mean this in a positive sense—I consider scientists artists.  Indeed, I consider them some of the most important artists alive.  Now here’s the key point that I, as a postmodern humanist, would make.  The fiction of Enlightenment reason marks a decisive advance in human history, because scientists have created (not discovered) a rigorous method for systematizing our experiences in the world.  If traditional humanists favored science over religion because science gave them epistemological access to Truth, postmodern humanists favor science over religion because science has created a system and method of knowledge that is democratically accessible to all people.  Religion, in my view, is a closed system of knowledge—when somebody claims that they have knowledge of a moral Truth because God disclosed it to them, I am absolutely lost, because I have no idea what the word God means.  But science has created a method that allows us to test and verify its propositions.  My motivation, therefore, for favoring science is not that it gives me Truth, but that it is an empirically verifiable system of constructed knowledge. 

For postmodern humanists, it is possible to call science a fiction, but also to consider the truths of science both valuable and useful.  I feel the same way about Freud’s theory of the unconscious.  In race theory, we make a distinction between conscious and unconscious forms of racism.  Is there really a thing called the unconscious inside of humans?  To my mind, that is an incoherent question.  What I would say is this: Freud created a fiction about the human that enables us to talk intelligently about our experiences in the world.  But, following Nietzsche, just because it is useful, it doesn’t follow that it is True. 

I hope this clarifies what I was trying to say.  By the way, this was my first radio interview, and I think the nerves got the better of me at times—I just listened to the podcast, and I certainly was not as clear as I could have been.

Talk to you later,
michael

Balak, Thank you so much for your kind remarks.  I want briefly to address your claim about “the cartoon caricature of ‘post-modernism’ so popular among secularists and skeptics.”  To my mind, your claim could be applied to postmodernists as well as humanists.  At many universities today, most professors in the humanities are postmodernists.  Unfortunately, many of them have uncritically accepted some of the postmodern critiques of humanism, and since I am a staunch defender of humanism, the fundamentalist postmodernists attack me quite viciously for my endorsement of humanism.  But I always try to point out that the picture they have of humanism is nothing more than a cartoon caricature.  I find that the same thing happens with fundamentalist humanists.  Instead of laboring over the thirty most important books by postmodernists, they dismiss postmodernism without really knowing much about the movement. 

But change is coming.  PZ Myers and I have been considering doing a conference that would bring together humanists and postmodernists in order to clarify our differences and underscore our similarities.  We will not be inviting fundamentalist postmodernists or fundamentalist humanists, because, instead of actually listening to other people, instead of trying to understand what other people are saying, they merely go on the attack—like fundamentalist Christians.  PZ and I have spent the last year patiently listening to each other and clarifying our positions to each other, and what we have discovered is that very little separates us.  Yes, I call science a fiction, and while this bothered PZ last year, he now knows that this has an extremely positive meaning for postmodernists.  Moreover, we now realize that we just have different reasons for claiming that Enlightenment rationalism marks a decisive advance for culture—he sees it in terms of advancing scientific knowledge, while I see it in terms of radical democracy. 

Again, thank you for your comments.

Yours Sincerely,
michael

My motivation, therefore, for favoring science is not that it gives me Truth, but that it is an empirically verifiable system of constructed knowledge. 

But why do you ultimately favour a verifiable knowledge system over non-verifiable ones?.

I do and I have an explanation why I do favour those: because they are much better at predicting the outcomes of reality. I would say that the predictive capacity is the ultimate reason that leads us to prefer a MD over a chaman.

This predictive capacity leads me to think that there is something like reality and we tend to be closer to it with verifiable knowledge than with non-verificable knowledge.

Moreover, the word verifiable means, as I see, a kind of realism: you verify the knowledge against something, against some system of reference. I’d say that that system of reference is reality, or, at least, a good aproximation. This is the ultimate reason of why the scientific knowledge is so good at predicting the outcomes of reality.

(Entering a discussion about phylosophy with a humanities teacher using my second language… maybe I am running toward a public humiliation on this thread )

Entering a discussion about phylosophy with a humanities teacher using my second language… maybe I am running toward a public humiliation on this thread

Don’t worry, you won’t be the first! (I’ve been there a few times myself)—-anyway, publicly humiliating participants is not the purpose of these forums!

science is a fiction.  PZ said that scientists would neither accept nor appreciate this claim.  But I retorted: fiction is a positive phrase for us in the humanities.

There are so many things to disagree with Lackey about in this podcast, but (for the sake of time right now) I’ll simply disagree with one thing: this desire to use the word “fiction” in a way that is completely disconnected from the way the majority of English speakers use it.  You simply can’t use this word to describe what postmodernists think of science unless you mean “untruth”.  First of all, it’s horrendously misleading (if not flat-out deceptive).  If I said “Lackey is a liar*” and then attached a little footnote (*and by liar, I mean interesting guy), you wouldn’t accept that because words have meanings.  Postmodernists are messing with the accepted definitions of words.  Second, what if we accept the phrase that “science is a fiction” and “Lackey is a liar”?  Now, we have a problem because everyone reads those sentences with the old definition of “fiction” and “liar”.  Now, everyone in the world thinks that scientists believe that “science is a fiction” and Lackey admits that “he is a liar” - but they understand those phrases using the old (aka established, accepted) definitions.  Oh, but don’t get offended if everyone in the world refers to you as a “liar”.  Postmodernists REALLY need to use other words, not use alternative, opaque, personalized definitions of existing words that mean something entirely different than their real meanings.  You’d almost think that postmodernists are going out of their way to confuse their listeners (and maybe they think the whole “accepted definitions of words” is “so last century”).

princeton definition of Fiction:  * a literary work based on the imagination and not necessarily on fact
                                  * fabrication: a deliberately false or improbable account

Definition of Science: The collective discipline of study or learning acquired through the scientific method; the sum of knowledge gained from such methods and discipline; A particular discipline or branch of learning, especially one dealing with measurable or systematic principles rather than intuition or natural ...

I have not yet listened to the podcast, so I’ll have to reserve my opinion about the body of the discussion until then, but I fail to understand where these two definitions meet or agree with each other.

PZ invited me to give a lecture on the different types of atheism, and I claimed that, according to postmodern atheists, science is a fiction.  PZ said that scientists would neither accept nor appreciate this claim.  But I retorted: fiction is a positive phrase for us in the humanities.  It doesn’t mean that something is not “true.”  From a postmodern perspective, all concepts are fictions.  Why?  They start with the claim that, because there is no God, there can be no pre-existent concepts waiting to be discovered.  What we have of concepts are human constructions.  Freud’s theory of the unconscious, Nietzsche’s will to power, and gravity are all concepts about the world.  In the Gay Science, Nietzsche clarifies this point nicely: “We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live—by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody now could endure life.  But that does not prove them.  Life is no argument.”  The word table is not the same thing as the referent table, and for Nietzsche (and most postmodernists), the moment we enter the world of language, we have entered the world of fiction.  Given this view of language, does it follow that language is useless or meaningless?  While Nietzsche and many postmodernists insist that there is no metaphysical Truth, they do insist that truth, as a constructed fiction, is crucial for human living.  When I say that science is a fiction, I mean this in a positive sense—I consider scientists artists.  Indeed, I consider them some of the most important artists alive.  Now here’s the key point that I, as a postmodern humanist, would make.  The fiction of Enlightenment reason marks a decisive advance in human history, because scientists have created (not discovered) a rigorous method for systematizing our experiences in the world.  If traditional humanists favored science over religion because science gave them epistemological access to Truth, postmodern humanists favor science over religion because science has created a system and method of knowledge that is democratically accessible to all people.  Religion, in my view, is a closed system of knowledge—when somebody claims that they have knowledge of a moral Truth because God disclosed it to them, I am absolutely lost, because I have no idea what the word God means.  But science has created a method that allows us to test and verify its propositions.  My motivation, therefore, for favoring science is not that it gives me Truth, but that it is an empirically verifiable system of constructed knowledge. 

What a mess. Which is it? Is science a fiction? Or does it provide us concepts which can be used to make empirically verifiable predictions?

If it is the latter, then it is not the former.

There is a distinction between fictional concepts like phlogiston and concepts which hook onto reality like electron and gravity.

I have to say, this was a hopelessly confused podcast, and I don’t think DJ did enough to illuminate the deep problems with it. Firstly, I have no idea what “absolute truth” or “truth with a capital ‘T’” means. These are buzzwords of some sort; no scientist uses them, and no decent philosopher does, either. All there is is “truth” with a lower-case ‘t’.

Secondly, if Lackey believes that there is no such thing as truth, or that there are no true concepts, then how is he going to argue that in fact slavery was wrong, and that in fact African Americans were subjugated by European Americans? How is he going to argue that certain white concepts about blacks (their supposed moral and intellectual inferiority) were false? Simply because all concepts about everything are false? That is an absurd argument.

Third, if in fact there are no true concepts, and if all arguments end up being a species of fiction, how does Michael Lackey go about writing a scholarly essay for publication? Does he do research? Does he care what his primary sources actually say? Or does he feel free to make up what he will about them, as a species of fictional construction?

Fourth, Lackey claims that “humanists” asserted all sorts of racist rot about black inferiority. But if so, the problem is not a “lack of humility about the concept of truth”, instead there is a lack of knowledge about the truth of racial equality. Lackey claims that if one understands that the concept “human” is merely human-created, that is, a species of fiction, one will be able to have a “life-affirming form of humanism”. But this has things precisely backwards. If the concept “human” is always and only a species of fiction, then the racist concept of human is just as good, just as justified as the concept which implies racial equality. Again, this is an absurd argument.

Fifth, at several times in the podcast Lackey refers to certain novels, certain philosophers and certain claims as being particularly good. Does he really mean that they are good, or simply that he is able to write up some fiction about them being good? Would it be just as good a fiction for one of his colleagues to write that they were some of the worst? If not, why not? And if so, then of what use is Lackey’s claim that they are good?

Sixth, Lackey defines post-modernism as claiming that “all knowledge is human construct”. In that case, the (claimed) crimes against black people are themselves human constructs, on the same footing as people who claim that there were no crimes against black people. Or, perhaps more accurately, they are on the same footing unless it makes you happier to believe one rather than the other, in which case, whichever one you prefer will be the better one for you. There is no independent way to decide if crimes were actually perpetrated, since anyhow it’s all just a species of fictional narrative.

Seventh, Lackey says he has profound respect for scientific truth and that human reason was a great invention. But this appears only to be a species of rhetorical ploy, since there is no correspondence between scientific claims and external reality, and no way that human reason can actually lead us to any knowledge of the world. Nevertheless he says he would accept doctors rather than angels when it comes to his own health; this is inconsistency on his part, or perhaps it’s just that doctors make him happier and angels don’t. He says that he likes science and feels “blocked off” by religion, however his reasoning about the distinction between the two simply falls apart. If there is no actual correspondence to reality which science can reveal by repeated experiment, then what precisely is the distinction between science and religion? It seems to come down to his own personal feeling of being “blocked off”, but I have no idea what that means. I do not feel “blocked off” from a concept of God, I simply believe that it is fictional in the way that other concepts are not. Lackey can’t go that route, which is what leads him to these weird emotional falsity-substitutes like “blocking off”.

Eighth, as erin said very well already, there is a lot of really silly confusion about the distinction between concepts and reality. Of course, in a sense, all concepts are human-created.
DJ said it well—this is not only not very profound, it is positively banal. But also of course, some of them are accurate representations of reality, as was DJ’s example of gravity. One cannot on the one hand claim that the concept of gravity is a human fiction and on the other hand claim that you could survive jumping off a ten story building. You cannot, at any rate, if you want to be consistent. The concept of gravity that allowed you to survive would be erroneous.

So in sum it looks as though this strategy blocks one off from being able to actually make sense of racial injustice or indeed any honest claim about the way the world actually is.

Retrospy and Tinyfrog, I want to briefly respond to your posts.  First, Retrospy says: “Michael & DJ agreed on the short definition that postmodern thought was (correct my paraphrasing) ‘skepticism to the extreme.’  Even to the point that our concept of ‘truth’ is really just a collection of pragmatic connections.”  From my particular postmodern perspective, I would not call postmodernism extreme skepticism.  In fact, I am planning to write an essay to explain why postmodernism ultimately makes skepticism incoherent.  But you should know that this idea is only in its early stages of development.  So what is my definition of postmodernism?  For most postmodernists, because there is no God, there can be no pre-given truth or concept about the world.  Concepts are not mind-independent facts dangling from a heaven of Ideas.  Rather, they are human-constructed fictions that assume a provisional form.  Does this position imply that concepts are false or useless?  Absolutely not.  In fact, they have considerable value, because they help us to systematize our experiences of the world.  But why can’t they be true, one might ask.  The answer here is two-fold.  First, there is no God who has authored the concept, so the concepts must be of human origin, rather than from some neutral or objective source, such as God.  Second, by acknowledging that concepts are created by humans, we simultaneously acknowledge that they are limited and provisional, because they were constructed by limited and biased humans.  So whatever constructs we construct, we must acknowledge that they will probably shift and evolve in relation to the new systems of knowledge that the language community adopts.  In a sense, DJ is a postmodernist because his approach to truth is somewhat (not totally) similar to mine.  He says:  “There’s not one thing called science that says, ‘x, y and z’. Scientists are human each with their own motivations, backgrounds, and biases. It just so happens that the methods of science are the best methods we’ve found to overcome personal bias, personal motivations and all that stuff.”  DJ, if you object to me referring to you as a rational postmodernist, please let me know, and I won’t do it again. 

Now Tinyfrog, you say: “I’ll simply disagree with one thing: this desire to use the word “fiction” in a way that is completely disconnected from the way the majority of English speakers use it.  You simply can’t use this word to describe what postmodernists think of science unless you mean “untruth”.  First of all, it’s horrendously misleading (if not flat-out deceptive).”  To my mind, the real question is this: do postmodernists have a compelling reason for referring to science as a fiction?  And I believe that they do.  Why?  Postmodernists spend a lot of time explaining how people in power have been able to justify degrading others by virtue of controlling language.  For instance, from Aristotle, to Aquinas, to Kant, women have been portrayed as inferior to men.  Postmodernists argue that Woman, according to Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant, is not a transcendental signifier (a mind-independent concept), but rather, it is a patriarchal construction.  Many postmodernists go on to show how this same thing happens to black people, gays and lesbians, atheists and agnostics, etc.  Their point is this: what we have of concepts are constructions, words that humans have been injected with meaning.  In Beloved, Toni Morrison puts it this way: “Definitions are for the definers, not the defined.”  Obviously, Morrison is being critical of the way discourse functions to secure power for those in power.  So why would postmodernists claim that it would be useful to refer to science as a fiction, in a positive sense?  The answer is this: a fiction is provisional.  We don’t accept it as metaphysical truth, but nor do we reject it as useless.  By calling science a fiction, we humbly acknowledge that the concepts we have are of human origin, and therefore cannot be treated as stable ontological structures.  But it must be noted here: even though postmodernists acknowledge that science is a fiction, it does not follow that they allow for an anything goes philosophy—this is just the cartoon caricature of postmodernism that I am trying to debunk.  If you look carefully at most postmodernists’s work, you will see that social justice is ultimately at the base of their project.  Drucilla Cornell’s book The Philosophy of the Limit is one of the best works to document this part of the postmodernist project.

I have much more to say, but I have a ton of student papers to grade.

Talk to you later,
michael

Barto, I like this claim that you make: “This predictive capacity leads me to think that there is something like reality and we tend to be closer to it with verifiable knowledge than with non-verificable knowledge.”  If we, as humans, can construct systems of knowledge that make sense of the world in which we live, systems that have a predictive capacity, does it necessarily follow that there is a reality out there?  Granted, we know that there are physical objects out there in the world.  But does it necessarily follow that there are corresponding facts and concepts that are best suited to signify those objects?  Isn’t it possible that humans simply constructed discourses to systematize their experience of the world?  And even if we admit that those concepts are human constructed, does it follow that they are useless and false?  When I say that a concept is human constructed, I don’t mean that it is false.  Postmodernists don’t live in the world of the either/or absolute.  But nor do they hold that anything goes.  I emphatically reject religion and God (I have taken a firm stance on this position, and I do so as a postmodernist), because I cannot figure out what people are talking about when they discuss these terms.  I privilege science because it has constructed (not discovered) a rigorous method of knowledge that we can use effectively to make sense of the world in which we live.  But just because the method is useful and accessible, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is metaphysically true.  What it does indicate is that it is superior to religion, because it is something that we can all rationally discuss. 

My three-year old daughter is demanding that I read her a book, so I have to stop writing for the moment.

Talk to you later,
michael

Don’t worry, you won’t be the first! (I’ve been there a few times myself)—-anyway, publicly humiliating participants is not the purpose of these forums!

I see these are wonderful forums and that humiliating participants is not the purpose: I’ve tried hard to achieve a public humiliation but I wasn’t sucesful… 

Anyway, I have to battle with my english and with my lack of phylosophy background in this thread

Micheal, I see we agree that there is something like a material reality out there. That’s great. Well, I guess we will agree that there that reality follows what we could call laws, because the same physical objects behave in the same way under the same circumstances.

We develop a system to explain the facts we observe, right. We also have a very good predictive capacity on certain areas because we build models of the reality (we can have this exchange because we can accurately predict the behaviour of solid state physics for instance). Of course we cannot be sure if the models we develop are just a set of convenient representations that give the same outcome than reality for diferents reasons or we have not a convenient model but a description of the reality itself.

My engineering background leads me to think that when two diferents models reach give the same outcome, some underlying concepts are, at least, similars. It is very dificult to build two diferent models, very diferents in theirs underlying mechanism, which reaches the same conclusions in the long run as you add test data. Of course, it could happen, but I’d say it is unlikely.

Simply, post-modernism has engaged in a sequence of intellectually dishonest attacks on science motivated by politics. Triggered because science has accidentally stepped on one of the doctrines the post-modernist holds, commonly one used to justify social justice. Science is thus undermined while the fruits of science, as with many anti-science movements, are still enjoyed. This is not coherent, if science is useful it is in its relation to nature, you cannot have your cake and eat it too.

Extreme scepticism follows from post-modernist arguments, regardless of whether post-modernists embrace epistemic solipsism or not, post-modernist attacks on empiricism demotes science to the level of religion, that very much is everything goes. The disconnect is in whether post-modernists actually hold these positions, or whether they are feigning them. Moral relativists are not amoral, even though it follows from their arguments. The caricature of post-modernists may be untrue, but it is the post-modernists who perpetuate this idea with the positions they claim to hold.

Furthering the suspicions that post-modernists are charlatans is the consistent engagement of obscurantism, e.g. using an uncommon meaning for a common word, while refusing to define it, where the audience cannot reasonably be expected to understand. Much of post-modernist writing remains meaningless to me almost certainly for this reason, with the odd trivial, or obvious statement, and the positions that I have mentioned. A simple explanation is that this deception is a defence of weak, incoherent, nonsensical arguments. I fail to see a sensible statement that has not, and could not, have been stated as obvious by a scientist like PZ Myers, but in a succinct and lucid way.

Hi AJ, Did you actually listen to the podcast?

Just curious.

Dougsmith: Sixth, Lackey defines post-modernism as claiming that “all knowledge is human construct”. 

What is the real objection here? That “all knowledge is a human construct” is an uncontestable statement of fact. The question is what humans construct their knowledge out of... out of close observation of natural and social phenomena in their constant motion, contradiction and development, or out of fairy tales, dreams, and rationalizations which mask, distort and obscure these phenomena?

Without giving a shred of credence to post-modernism… any argument to the effect that “all knowledge is NOT a human construct” is simply a religious argument, i.e. positing a ‘knowledge’ that exists somewhere suspended outside time, space and human society…

Without giving a shred of credence to post-modernism… any argument to the effect that “all knowledge is NOT a human construct” is simply a religious argument, i.e. positing a ‘knowledge’ that exists somewhere suspended outside time, space and human society…

I have the feeling we are agreeing here but using terms in different ways. Let me put it this way, re. the claim that “all knowledge is a human construct.” It is either trivial or false.

Trivially, all knowledge of which we are aware is human, since we are humans and only we have knowledge. (Actually, even this is false since other animals have knowledge; but let’s leave aside that objection as picking nits). Knowledge is made up of concepts, and concepts come from human brains, so knowledge is trivially a human construct.

However, the move that Lackey is making here is not the trivial one. He does not believe that this is a trivial claim. Much the opposite. This is because he seems to believe that anything humanly constructed is a species of fiction. And then we get a claim that is not trivial at all: it is the claim that all knowledge is a species of fiction, a “construct” in the radical sense that it is one way of an infinite number of mutually logically exclusive ways of constructing the world. And this latter claim, while no longer banal, is simply false.

Of course, nobody is claiming that “knowledge” exists somewhere outside of thinking beings. That would be absurd. Instead, what we say is that knowledge is (very roughly; I don’t want to get into a huge essay about epistemology here) justified true belief. So if you know that it is raining in Toledo that is because:

(1) You believe that it is raining in Toledo.

(2) It really is raining in Toledo.

and

(3) You have good justification for believing (1)—e.g., you are in Toledo and looking out your window.

Now, I suppose the response here is that we can not know whether we really have knowledge or not, since we can’t get outside of our heads to see whether or not (2) is true, irrespective of doing the sort of work alluded to in (3). In a sense that is so; we are not guaranteed certainty by our epistemic methods. But so what? Descartes’s foundational epistemology was wrongheaded, and put more pointedly, it does no justice to our ordinary concept of when we know things and when we don’t. Everything we say, we say provisionally, given the best evidence available to us.

So no, all knowledge is not a human construct. Beliefs become knowledge by their relation to the way things are in the world. While human beliefs are human constructs, only some of those beliefs are warranted enough to be knowledge. That warrant is done by the world.

Without giving a shred of credence to post-modernism… any argument to the effect that “all knowledge is NOT a human construct” is simply a religious argument, i.e. positing a ‘knowledge’ that exists somewhere suspended outside time, space and human society…

I have the feeling we are agreeing here but using terms in different ways. Let me put it this way, re. the claim that “all knowledge is a human construct.” It is either trivial or false

Trivially, all knowledge of which we are aware is human, since we are humans and only we have knowledge. (Actually, even this is false since other animals have knowledge; but let’s leave aside that objection as picking nits). Knowledge is made up of concepts, and concepts come from human brains, so knowledge is trivially a human construct.

I would dispute that this awareness is trivial to begin with.

The problem arises exactly where ‘knowledge’ or ‘science’ is institutionally, linguistically and culturally identified with reality itself (i.e. the world as it exists independently of our perceptions). As Lenin pointed out, however, science at best can only provide successively closer approximations in describing how the world works, while always remaining in and of the society which produces it. Hence the misidentification of science, civilization, reason etc. with the imperialist ambitions, crimes and self-interests of ‘the West’ (broadly speaking), a sadly recurring theme which can be traced back to some of the key founders of Enlightenment Rationalism (a tradition which I nonetheless uphold from a Marxist perspective - with this important qualification).

  However, the move that Lackey is making here is not the trivial one. He does not believe that this is a trivial claim. Much the opposite. This is because he seems to believe that anything humanly constructed is a species of fiction. And then we get a claim that is not trivial at all: it is the claim that all knowledge is a species of fiction, a “construct” in the radical sense that it is one way of an infinite number of mutually logically exclusive ways of constructing the world. And this latter claim, while no longer banal, is simply false.

This, to the extent that it is true, would be where I too would part company with Lackey and other post-modernists.

Of course, nobody is claiming that “knowledge” exists somewhere outside of thinking beings. That would be absurd.

Wrong, this is exactly what religion claims; but religion is only one species of idealist thinking.

I would argue that CFI suffers from a similar belief that ‘science’ stands outside of human society… which is why it cannot seem to disentangle its ‘humanism’ from loyalty to U.S. imperialism and its institutions, according to which, simply put: ‘We’ bring ‘science’ and ‘enlightenmnent’ while ‘They’ (the official enemy) bring darkness, bigotry and oppression.  Any scientific understanding of the actual political and economic motivations and interests which underlie such pronouncements regarding ‘the West’ is thus rendered, by definition, both immoral and irrelevant. (“They hate us for Our Freedoms” blah blah blah).

Exploding this type of dangerously simplistic (and self-serving) amalgam is a vitally important project for any ‘humanism’ worthy of the name.

So no, all knowledge is not a human construct.

Yes it is. And any genuine science must start from the inevitable gap between even the very best, most accurate human construct and the objectively existing reality. That gap is where the ‘fiction’ inevitably resides, and it is eminently reasonable for Mr. Lackey to point it out.

Apologies for not taking on many of your epistemological observations, Doug. Not that I doubt their relevance, only that my brain is too small and philosophical awareness too limited.

Look, Balak, without getting into the political stuff, of course I agree that scientific theories are always approximations to the way the world works, and of course science can be misidentified with improper ends. But to be able to make these observations one has to hold:

(1) that there is a “way the world works” (or an “objectively existing reality” which you also made reference to) that can be approximated, and

(2) that there really are proper and improper ends.

If it’s all just a species of fictional storytelling, then frankly, it’s impossible to get any political or ethical argument off the ground.

Just to emphasize something I said in my last post:  reality or way the world works can be approximated by human endeavor and theorizing. If the world is simply some sort of unknowable monad or “thing-in-itself”, then it’s absolutely useless for any purpose other than philosophical hairsplitting.

And if we can approximate it, that means that there are some theories which are closer and others which are farther away. The world is the standard by which we measure our thinking. So again, knowledge is not simply a human construct. At the very least it is a human construct constrained by the way the world is.

So it’s not enough simply to assert that there is some sort of external reality, but that we can’t know anything about it. The distinction between that sort of ontology and Berkleyan idealism (the view that the world is only made up of minds) is trivial.

I have no quarrel with anything you have said above. But I would add that that the distinction between the socially-created (fiction) the and externally-existing (reality) is inherently political while at the same time vitally significant for genuine, scientifically-informed humanism.

That someone like PJMeyers is willing to engage some of Lackey’s points is, in my opinion, a good thing.

Unfortunately, I am grading a ton of papers for the next few days, so I can’t really respond very much, but I do want to respond briefly to the following comments from Doug Smith: “I have the feeling we are agreeing here but using terms in different ways. Let me put it this way, re. the claim that “all knowledge is a human construct.” It is either trivial or false.

Trivially, all knowledge of which we are aware is human, since we are humans and only we have knowledge. (Actually, even this is false since other animals have knowledge; but let’s leave aside that objection as picking nits). Knowledge is made up of concepts, and concepts come from human brains, so knowledge is trivially a human construct.

However, the move that Lackey is making here is not the trivial one. He does not believe that this is a trivial claim. Much the opposite. This is because he seems to believe that anything humanly constructed is a species of fiction. And then we get a claim that is not trivial at all: it is the claim that all knowledge is a species of fiction, a “construct” in the radical sense that it is one way of an infinite number of mutually logically exclusive ways of constructing the world. And this latter claim, while no longer banal, is simply false.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, but let me say only this for now.  I (and many postmodernists, though not all) consider the claim that all knowledge is human constructed of staggering significance.  But why?  It is not because I want to construct an infinite number of ways of constructing the world.  Rather, it is to underscore that whatever construct we have is provisional.  “Women are defective in reason.”  Because so many intellectuals spewed this nonsense, many people (women included) believed it.  Postmodernists retort: this is a constructed fiction about women.  Doug, I suspect that you would say that the claim about women being defective in reason is nonsense.  So you would retort: we can reject this prejudiced view of women.  Moreover, given our more sophisticated methods of science, we can now provide a more accurate (and less prejudiced) definition of a woman’s nature.  The whole idea hinges on a belief, which Balak intelligently articulates: “any argument to the effect that “all knowledge is NOT a human construct” is simply a religious argument, i.e. positing a ‘knowledge’ that exists somewhere suspended outside time, space and human society.”  Indeed, in my book, I take the following claim from Jean-Paul Sartre very seriously: “Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it.”  So the question is this: why would postmodernists insist on calling all knowledge systems fictions?  Fictions, as a system of knowledge, can be extremely effective in making systematic sense of the world in which we live, which is why Barto’s claim about the predictive nature of human systems of knowledge is so important.  But if we acknowledge that the knowledge system is human constructed, it underscores the system’s provisional nature (as DJ points out in the passage I quoted in an earlier post), it encourages us to look at the knowledge system as someone’s construct (just because Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant said or implied that women are defective in reason, it does not necessarily follow that it is true), and it is the logical outcome of an internally consistent atheistic worldview—Nietzsche refers to such atheists as unconditional honest atheists, and I consider myself to be such an atheist. 

Balak, to my mind, Nietzsche’s whole project was an attempt to reject the following claim from Plato.  When discussing the type of knowledge that poets possess, Socrates claims in the Ion: “it is not they [the poets] who utter these precious revelations while their mind is not within them, but that it is the god himself who speaks.”  Therefore, Socrates concludes: “these lovely poems are not of man or human workmanship, but are divine and from the gods.”  For Plato, whenever knowledge is tainted by the human, it ceases to be genuine knowledge.  Knowledge, to be authentic and true, must come from God, which is what Balak was trying to say.  Nietzsche argues that when we admit that knowledge is human constructed, we are implicitly affirming our humanness, our creative impulses.  To suggest that knowledge is authentic and true only when the human does not play a role in its construction would be, according to Nietzsche’s model, an anti-humanist move.  Moreover, to acknowledge that all knowledge is human constructed would be the most radical affirmation of the human and humanism possible.  But just because we acknowledge that systems of knowledge are of human origin, it does not follow that these systems are useless or false.  Only the sloppiest postmodernists make such a claim.  Unfortunately, there are plenty of sloppy postmodernists. 

I have so much more to say, but I really have to get back to grading papers. 

By the way, this is a very useful discussion.

Talk to you later,
m

Beliefs become knowledge by their relation to the way things are in the world. While human beliefs are human constructs, only some of those beliefs are warranted enough to be knowledge. That warrant is done by the world.

Clear, intelligent, and short explanation. It doesn’t posit any kind of special knowledge or anything related to God concepts.

any argument to the effect that “all knowledge is NOT a human construct” is simply a religious argument, i.e. positing a ‘knowledge’ that exists somewhere suspended outside time, space and human society…

This is nonsense, showing a complete lack of comprehension of the above description of knowledge. It is no surprise to me that it has been ignored.

Beliefs become knowledge by their relation to the way things are in the world. While human beliefs are human constructs, only some of those beliefs are warranted enough to be knowledge. That warrant is done by the world.

Clear, intelligent, and short explanation. It doesn’t posit any kind of special knowledge or anything related to God concepts.

Isn’t the requirement for special knowledge exactly the problem with a corresponence theory of truth?  We’re evaluating the correspondence of our knowlege to what?  The world?  Or the world as we know it?

Isn’t the requirement for special knowledge exactly the problem with a corresponence theory of truth?  We’re evaluating the correspondence of our knowlege to what?  The world?  Or the world as we know it?

This is only a problem if you believe we must have “special knowledge”. We don’t. All we have is normal knowledge, and we can be wrong about it. But when we are right, it is because our beliefs are in the right relation to the world.

Beliefs become knowledge by their relation to the way things are in the world. While human beliefs are human constructs, only some of those beliefs are warranted enough to be knowledge. That warrant is done by the world.

Clear, intelligent, and short explanation. It doesn’t posit any kind of special knowledge or anything related to God concepts.

Isn’t the requirement for special knowledge exactly the problem with a corresponence theory of truth?  We’re evaluating the correspondence of our knowlege to what?  The world?  Or the world as we know it?

Why is this relevant to my post?

Indeed, in my book, I take the following claim from Jean-Paul Sartre very seriously: “Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it.”

Here we slip from bad philosophy into pseudoscience. There is plenty of good work, if preliminary, into human nature, in cognitive psychology, sociology and anthropology. Steven Pinker goes into this evidence in some detail in his books. In general I would avoid relying on novelists to do theoretical science work.

The rest of this I’ve already dealt with.

This is only a problem if you believe we must have “special knowledge”. We don’t. All we have is normal knowledge, and we can be wrong about it. But when we are right, it is because our beliefs are in the right relation to the world.

I realize this seems veer into epistemology, but how would we know when our beliefs are in the right relation to the world?  Our best stab at what is on the far side of the correspondence is the very thing we’re comparing it to.  To say anything meaningful at all about the far world as it is side of the correspondence without invoking some sort of knowledge of it (or dogma) is a difficult arrangement for me to grasp.  To do so with normal knowledge seems circular.

Why is this relevant to my post?

I was under the impression that Doug was relying on a correspondence theory of truth and that you felt doing so was admirable because it requires no special knowledge.

I realize this seems veer into epistemology, but how would we know when our beliefs are in the right relation to the world?  Our best stab at what is on the far side of the correspondence is the very thing we’re comparing it to.  To say anything meaningful at all about the far world as it is side of the correspondence without invoking some sort of knowledge of it (or dogma) is a difficult arrangement for me to grasp.  To do so with normal knowledge seems circular.

Well, yes, this is epistemology. If you ask how we know our beliefs are in the right relation to the world there are two possible answers, depending on the thrust of your question.

The first answer is the obvious one—the one we’d use if asked this sort of question in daily life. We know our beliefs are in the right relation to the world by attempting to justify them with evidence and reason. Here you would ask, for instance, “How do you know your belief that it’s raining in Toledo is correct?” The answer could be that I know my belief is correct because here I am in Toledo looking out my window and I see drops coming down from the sky. I don’t believe I’m dreaming, and I don’t recall having taken any mind-altering drugs, although it’s certainly conceivable that I could have, in which case I suppose I could be hallucinating. But that’s not very likely.

(This method cannot, repeat CANNOT, provide certainty of anything other than very simple logical formulae. Knowledge does not require certainty).

The second answer is the “philosophical” one, the one that people tend to revert to when they are bullshitting in their dorm rooms. That is, how can you get outside your skin and know that your beliefs are correct, above and beyond your looking at the evidence for them? Now, note that this move is implicitly and illicitly assuming that knowledge involves certainty. It’s looking for a way to be certain—without possible failure—that what you believe is true, by looking at the world in itself and comparing it somehow to our beliefs. Of course, this is impossible. But it also has nothing to do with knowledge, and nothing to do with epistemology. What it has to do with is bad philosophy and a deep confusion about what knowledge is.

I realized that I may have been less than clear about the concept of certainty I was referring to in my previous post. Let me explain what I mean by it.

One is certain of X when one’s belief in X cannot be wrong.

This is, of course, the holy grail of many sorts of epistemological programs, e.g., Descartes’s, and the inchoate programs that many folks enter into philosophy looking for.

It is largely an illusion. There is virtually nothing that we can really be certain of.

The only thing that we can be certain of, really, are simple logical formulae of the sort:

If A then B
A————
B

Even slightly more complex logical or mathematical formulae (which in fact are simply concatenations of these if/then statements, hence logically identical to them) are not certain. We can be deeply confused about mathematical proofs, unless we are expert in the system and have studied them deeply.

There is also a more everyday concept of ‘certain’ in which we are certain of plenty of things, e.g., I am certain that it is dark outside now. This is “certainty” in the first sense of “knowledge” I discussed in my previous post. If someone asked me, “Are you certain that it is dark outside?” I would say, “Of course! Just look over there!”

This latter sense, of course, is not the philosophical, dorm room bullshitting sense of the term. (Since it’s possible that I am hallucinating, or dreaming). I like it better for that very reason. But I do understand that many people coming to this discussion may be thinking about it in the harder-edged sense that I have dissected first.

In general, let me be clear, I like to use terms in their everyday sense whenever possible. I do not like that terms such as “knowledge”, “certainty”, “truth”, “fiction”, etc. be given bizarre technical meanings. This does not imply I believe that we cannot analyze them carefully. What it does mean is that any analysis we pursue should be at least tempered by our usage of these terms in daily life.

I was under the impression that Doug was relying on a correspondence theory of truth and that you felt doing so was admirable because it requires no special knowledge.

I don’t know if Doug subscribes to that theory and I cannot speak for him. It seems straightforward to me that the text I quoted does not imply an acceptance of the theory. It doesn’t touch upon the aspects of the correspondence theory of truth.

Steven Pinker goes into this evidence in some detail in his books. In general I would avoid relying on novelists to do theoretical science work.

Yes, I have read some of his books they’re very good.

I think the recently released video of Steven Pinker is relevant to this discussion:

Steven Pinker: Chalking it up to the blank slate

One of my favourite episodes of point of inquiry is also relevant:

Ophelia Benson - Why Truth Matters

I was under the impression that Doug was relying on a correspondence theory of truth and that you felt doing so was admirable because it requires no special knowledge.

I don’t know if Doug subscribes to that theory and I cannot speak for him. It seems straightforward to me that the text I quoted does not imply an acceptance of the theory. It doesn’t touch upon the aspects of the correspondence theory of truth.

Obviously we read it differently.

Doug, I don’t think I’m hung up on certainty.  That problem dissolves for me the more I explore coherentism (both as a theory of truth and an epistemology.)  The attraction there for me is the reduced reliance on ontology or other metaphysics.  I still don’t see how one justifies the ontological commitment correspondence requires.  Surely the ability to make such a commitment arises solely from our knowledge.  It’s not that I’m uncertain, I just don’t see the need to make any leap of faith.

Tinyfrog:
I’ll simply disagree with one thing: this desire to use the word “fiction” in a way that is completely disconnected from the way the majority of English speakers use it.  You simply can’t use this word to describe what postmodernists think of science unless you mean “untruth”...

lacke010:
To my mind, the real question is this: do postmodernists have a compelling reason for referring to science as a fiction?  And I believe that they do. Why? Postmodernists spend a lot of time explaining how people in power have been able to justify degrading others by virtue of controlling language. For instance, from Aristotle, to Aquinas, to Kant, women have been portrayed as inferior to men. Postmodernists argue that Woman, according to Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant, is not a transcendental signifier (a mind-independent concept), but rather, it is a patriarchal construction.

I see several problems here. I commented on “science as a fiction”. You respond by talking about how some great thinkers came to wrong conclusions about women. Okay. First of all, the men you named are not and were not “scientists”. Second, just because a scientist says or believes something doesn’t mean it is science.  And third, they never even claimed that “science proves that women are inferior”, nor did they provide a line of reasoning or study to support the claim. So, your argument for why “science is a fiction” is reduced to ‘Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant were wrong about women’.

Perhaps the largest problem, though, is the fact that you respond to claims of male superiority by denying the existence of gender as nothing more than a concept. The obvious retort to the claim that women are inferior is to simply say “the idea that women are inferior is a patriarchal construction”, not deny the existence of gender. In fact, I saw this pattern a lot in the podcast - people would say, “the Bible legitimizes racism” or “humanists of the day legitimized racism” and then, instead of tackling the claims themselves and asking whether there’s a clear logical pathway from one to the other (there isn’t), the postmodernists use the nuclear option: deny the existence of everything, claim that everything is fiction. Wow. Talk about throwing out the baby, the house, and the neighborhood with the bathwater.

Further, by labeling everything a fiction, postmodernists do more than blur the lines between truth and untruth, they eliminate it entirely. How do postmodernists describe the difference between science and pseudoscience?  We (not only as skeptics, but human beings) want to know truth from untruth, but referring to everything as fiction, postmodernists are in a very poor position to talk about what’s true and what’s not true, and what is poorly substantiated by science and what is strongly supported by science. It seems like the postmodernists take a blurry-eyed look at science and say, “Some guy in a white lab coat says X. But, I’ve seen guys in white lab coats make major mistakes in the past. We can therefore, treat all pronouncements by men in white lab coats to be no better than stories told by shamans, dreams I had, etc.”  It not only ignores the fact that some pathways are better ways to attain information (and therefore, some knowledge is of higher quality and certainty than others), but throws up it’s hands in surrender at the idea of there even being a difference.  To postmodernists, they’re apparently all “just stories” told by different people.

In many ways, postmodernism would be a reasonable reaction to the science of 500 years ago - when “science” was often astrology, alchemy, and blood-letting.  Those are all “just stories” (i.e. they have no relation to reality, which is very very different than modern science).  Given the fact that postmodernism wants to treat everything as just stories, maybe they’re just really, really behind the times.  Maybe postmodernists should be called “premodernists”.

By calling science a fiction, we humbly acknowledge that the concepts we have are of human origin, and therefore cannot be treated as stable ontological structures.
First of all, it’s not a fiction.  To label it as such is to ignore the fact that all ideas have different levels of uncertainty attached to them.  Putting all ideas and claims at the same level, or treating them as if they are all at the same level is a kind of abuse. In my opinion, it is making postmodernists guilty of the very same thing they complain about in other people: it is using “controlling language”. Calling science a fiction is controlling language.

I can’t help but wonder if postmodernism was a jealous reaction by humanities professors to the difficulty in gaining solid information about the human condition, while the hard sciences made phenomenal progress in the 20th century.  By denying all concepts and ideas as mere fictions, they had effectively brought science down to their level - sort of a “you’re no better than me!” So, calling science a fiction is controlling language used by the humanities to subjugate and repress the respect science has earned. Postmodernism is a tool used by people in power to maintain the existing (humanities-centric) power-structure. It does this by degrading and insulting the “uppity” hard sciences.  Ironically, it does this all while claiming to “[explain] how people in power have been able to justify degrading others by virtue of controlling language”.

Second, you can say that science is always under revision without going to the extremes of postmodernism. Postmodernism is an extreme reaction, and claiming that everyone who recognizes the tentativeness of science is a “postmodernist” is capturing a lot of people who most definitely do not agree with postmodernism (I certainly don’t). It seems that your definition of science is “enlightenment era science” (from several hundred years ago). It is a caricature.

I found this thread very interesting.  I was reading Lackey’s response and when he described post-modernists affection toward science because of its accessibility or democracy and I got to thinking.  What makes it accessible to everybody?  To answer my own question, its that we all have very similar brains which allow us to experience the world in a very similar way.  This along with the language we constructed allows us to share experiences and observations (while still knowing that one’s personal experiences can never be shared because we do not share a mind or the same personal history that has brought us to the point in time where we are sharing an experience) be it through a story being told or seeing a movie at the same time or star gazing what have you.

But it is the brain that allows us to share the experience.  And the brain is a part of a physical, dare I say, reality.  It is THIS physicalness that is Truth.  Without this physicalness than there would be no brain to construct the language to share our experiences.  It seems to me then that there is a necessary physical reality before there can be a human construct.  I will believe that science is the study of THIS reality.

Which came first, the brain or the human construct that is the brain?

I think I need a cigarette.

“We believe in nussing, Lebowski.”
-Karl Hungus

“I used to think that the brain was the most incredible part of my body until I realized, look who’s telling me this.”
-Emo Phillips

Doug, I don’t think I’m hung up on certainty.  That problem dissolves for me the more I explore coherentism (both as a theory of truth and an epistemology.)  The attraction there for me is the reduced reliance on ontology or other metaphysics.  I still don’t see how one justifies the ontological commitment correspondence requires.  Surely the ability to make such a commitment arises solely from our knowledge.  It’s not that I’m uncertain, I just don’t see the need to make any leap of faith.

Well, I’m not seeing where faith comes into it. And any fully worked-out philosophical system has to have an ontology. That’s not something that you can get away from. The only question is whether it is workable and clear or confused and hidden.

Re. coherentism, it is usually contrasted with foundationalism in epistemology. In that sense, I am a coherentist, as should be apparent from my rejection of the cartesian program. However I would prefer not to get hung up on “-isms”, since they bring a lot of unpacked baggage.

Tinyfrog:
I see several problems here. I commented on “science as a fiction”. You respond by talking about how some great thinkers came to wrong conclusions about women. Okay. First of all, the men you named are not and were not “scientists”. Second, just because a scientist says or believes something doesn’t mean it is science.  And third, they never even claimed that “science proves that women are inferior”, nor did they provide a line of reasoning or study to support the claim.

Not true. The natural inferiority of women, like the hierarchies of racial inferiority, were ‘scientifically’ proven beyond all argument by multiple lines of inquiry during the 19th Century, and prominently featured in textbooks well into the 20th.

That the ‘Sciences’ (e.g. phrenology, social darwinism) supposedly justifying this position were later shown to be crap (or refined to reject these earlier tenets) simply illustrates that science cannot escape its nature as a human endeavor, intimately linked with social conditions. The theories of racial hierarchy supporting eugenics, by the way, continue to enjoy periodic revivals in a number of disciplines, not to mention the popular press. Stephen J. Gould’s remarkable work “The Mismeasure of Man” is no post-modernist tract, but certainly underlines the relationship between science and capitalism’s need to cultivate ‘scientific’ rationalizations for the prevailing social order.

In fact, I saw this pattern a lot in the podcast - people would say, “the Bible legitimizes racism” or “humanists of the day legitimized racism” and then, instead of tackling the claims themselves and asking whether there’s a clear logical pathway from one to the other (there isn’t), the postmodernists use the nuclear option: deny the existence of everything, claim that everything is fiction. Wow. Talk about throwing out the baby, the house, and the neighborhood with the bathwater.

One of the more irritating aspects of post-modernism is that its advocates are generally reluctant to define what the term means, while its opponents are more than ready to define it in the most pejorative and nonsensical light possible (drawing from a wealth of examples to support their most extreme conclusions).

The hostility and irritation betrayed in most of the reactions to Lackey’s use of this little word ‘fiction’ are perhaps the best confirmation that he is on to something significant. Imagine a living breathing post-modernist appearing on - of all places - POI and the CFI forums, where we “defenders of Science” all thought we were safe! Why this Lackey fellow even has the impudence to respond thoughtfully and at length to our posts, while accepting major aspects of the enlightenment rationalist worldview (cries of outrage)!

Clearly, the incestuous relationship linking ‘science,’ with politics, money and state power (i.e. the real world) has major implications for science itself… so why would the pro-science camp, of all people, object so angrily to placing such a relationship in the sharpest possible focus? 

But rather than standing back and dispassionately examining where Lackey is coming from historically, weighing the contributions and shortcomings of post-modernism as an approach (and acknowledging the range of opinion among its adherents), we get post after post taking turns ‘swinging for the fences’ at postmodernism (in its standard CFI-issue cartoon version), but rarely making contact with, or even acknowedging a single real point Lackey is making.

I have other points on this under consideration, but for now “big up yourself” to POI and Mr. Grothe for (occasionally) taking us somewhere off the tired old track of ‘rationalist’ self-congratulation.

Second, just because a scientist says or believes something doesn’t mean it is science.

Added formatting for emphasis just in case this point is missed. You can’t call phrenology science, and “beyond all argument”, that’s absurd. It is not science, if someone were to study the creation and methodology of phrenology then it should be obvious it is pseudo-science. Newton believed in alchemy, that doesn’t delegitimise calculus, Newtonian physics, or Newtonian optics, but conversely it does not legitimise alchemy. Science is knowledge gained by the scientific method, if you think that phrenology is science then you have absolutely no idea what the scientific method is, so cannot say anything intelligent about science.

My point was that phrenology was generally understood as “Science” according to the standards of the 19th Century, and was later exposed to be, in fact, serving other social purposes. Today, likewise, “Science” can be used by some to support various elements of race theory. Does this mean science is simply a narrative on the same plan as alchemy, shamanism or religion? No. Does it point to the need to understand “Science” in its social context? Yes. And above all to remove the idealist, semi-religious aura that some of its would-be defenders (including at CFI) seem prone to attach to the word.

Lots of things were considered science in the 19th century and earlier that are clearly not science as we use it today, you’re conflating two separate things. It is not 19th century figures that determine what is science and what is not science. It has no relation to the scientific method or modern science, you’re ignoring decades of work in the philosophy of science, this is not the 19th century. You cannot blame science for pseudo-science or non-science, you cannot criticize science by using examples of non-science, this is the type of intellectual dishonesty I was talking about. It is not the social context that determines the validity of a theory, that sounds to me like passing knowledge through a filter of doctrine. Whether it is genuine science or not determines the validity. Scientists already treat their study as provisional, they are highly sceptical, highly critical of each others work, no scientific knowledge is ever treated as dogma or doctrine. If you do not know what science is, you cannot legitimately criticize it, or participate in it.

The hostility and irritation betrayed in most of the reactions to Lackey’s use of this little word ‘fiction’ are perhaps the best confirmation that he is on to something significant.

Touche.

I have continued to ask myself what could possibly be the value in calling sciences (or all thoughts for that matter) a ‘fiction’, given all the obvious downsides?  Then it donned on me, by keeping this idea on the back burners (a provisional construct) it acts as another tool in the toolbox to amplify skepticism and aid in overcoming personal bias.  Lackey would say, claiming all science can be broken down into a meta-narrative or a construct. This seems to be the same thing Doug says about certainty not being 100%:

It is largely an illusion. There is virtually nothing that we can really be certain of.

Let me reiterate with an example.  When the Dover Trials were getting started the media called Ken Miller to get his reaction to the sticker that warned that “evolution is a theory” being added to his text books.  He surprised them by saying something like, “That’s great!  They just didn’t take if far enough.  It should say that all sciences are theories, they are just the best theories to date.”

This response is extremely humble and attentive to the integrity of science.  It points out how science is an ever updating tool, constructed by people, which can only be updated because certainty never reaches 100%.  We should all strive to hold to the big picture concepts that bring on this clarity when analyzing truths.  I didn’t become an atheist because it was true; I became an atheist because it was the most likely conclusion given the evidence.

Basically what I am saying is that “yes, science is a fiction” but we need to remember to go one step further.  Everything we call knowledge is a fiction, it’s the commonality between our understandings that get us as close to truths as we are able.  Science happens to be the best method for distinguishing these commonalities, to date, because it can be verified by different observers when the conditions are replicated.

Just like we didn’t get mad at Ken Miller for making everyone in the Dover trial think harder about science, we can’t get mad at Michael Lackey for making us think harder about epistemology.  However, another of Lackey’s comments appears to rubs me the wrong way and I’d really like to hear more.  I assume this is related to the Munchhausen Trillema?

Lackey
I am planning to write an essay to explain why postmodernism ultimately makes skepticism incoherent.

abstract thought / side note: does the following count as a joke, and is it funny?

Should Munchhausen be spelled with one “h”? 

Well, I’m not seeing where faith comes into it. And any fully worked-out philosophical system has to have an ontology. That’s not something that you can get away from. The only question is whether it is workable and clear or confused and hidden.

Re. coherentism, it is usually contrasted with foundationalism in epistemology. In that sense, I am a coherentist, as should be apparent from my rejection of the cartesian program. However I would prefer not to get hung up on “-isms”, since they bring a lot of unpacked baggage.

I hadn’t picked up on your preference for coherentist epistemology.  I’m sure reading your posts in that light will be even more instructive for me.  And yes, it was sloppy of me to lump together coherence theory of truth and epistemological coherentism.  Though I thought you had invited less technicality in terms and I thought it was clear that I was speaking about two different things.  No matter.

I may have an idea that will clarify the theory of truth point I’m trying to make here.  But I’m currently stealing a moment at work to make this reply.  I’ll put it together later this afternoon when I get a bit more time.

PC

I usually judge an idea on its merits but I’ve heard of this method. Before we all start measuring ire to see whether an argument is legitimate lets remember the other subjects that raise the same fustrations, for instance, Creationism.

Doug, and anyone else who is interested,  I’ve moved my hijack to a new thread.

Michael, if you have the time and inclination, I’d like to hear your perspective too.

Gransha, I don’t have much time, but I want to respond quickly to your message.  Your position is virtually identical to Jacques Derrida’s, and explaining why will help me expose some of the fallacious assumptions about postmodernism.  Derrida’s distinctive brand of postmodernism derives from Nietzsche’s claim in the Genealogy of Morals, which is based on this idea of the concept: “all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.”  Because there is no God to author or authorize neutral and objective concepts, what we have of concepts are human constructions.  Because human constructions are embedded within space and time, they will inevitably shift and evolve.  In other words, only that which has no history is definable in a metaphysical sense.  But since everything is embedded within history, nothing is definable.  For postmodern rationalists, concepts about gravity are extremely valuable, not because they are metaphysically true, but because they enable us to systematize our world and to function well within that world.  So when fundamentalist humanists say that postmodern rationalists deny the existence of gravity, the postmodernist can only look at the fundamentalist humanist with absolute puzzlement.  Postmodernist rationalists believe that science, as a fiction, is one of the most effective systems of constructed knowledge we have available to us for living the good life.  THEY DO NOT REJECT SCIENCE, REASON, OR LOGIC: THEY MERELY CLAIM THAT THEY ARE EXTREMELY VALUABLE HUMAN CONSTRUCTIONS.

(As a side note: Fundamentalist Christians consistently tell me that atheists cannot be moral.  But when I retort: let’s look at the writings of humanists, skeptics, postmodernists, and atheists, and you will find that they consistently take moral stances.  And when we examine their lives, we find that they actually behave in a moral way.  No matter how much I argue, they simply refuse to listen.  You cannot argue in a rational or civil manner with fundamentalists.  I would say that the same applies to fundamentalist humanists.  No matter how much I tell them that postmodernists discriminate between conceptual systems, no matter how many times I claim that fiction does not necessarily mean false, no matter how many times I say that I respect science and that I think religion is nonsense, no matter how much I affirm the need for logic and reason, fundamentalist humanists impute to me (and postmodernists) a position that I do not at all hold—that in calling science a fiction, I am denying the existence of gravity.  They treat me the same way a fundamentalist Christian treats me: as if I’m stupid, uneducated, or evil.  The problem here, of course, is not with humanism.  The problem is with fundamentalism, and you don’t have to be a Christian to be a fundamentalist.)

Now let’s get to the core of the position.  Since concepts are human constructed, and since they have a history, we can never totally pin them down.  This is Derrida’s position.  Take, for instance, the idea of postmodernism.  What do we mean by postmodernism?  The line of postmodernism I follow runs from Nietzsche, Vaihinger, and Saussure through Sartre and late Wittgenstein, to Derrida, Lyotard, and Nancy.  But there is another tradition of postmodernism that begins with Heidegger and builds toward Deleuze and Guattari.  Now, if you were to ask me to define postmodernism, I would probably give you a language-based definition, and in my definition, the writings of all the writers I mention above in the first list would play some sort of role.  If you ask a Heiedeggerian-inspired postmodernist, he or she would probably give you a Being-based definition.  Put simply, there are an infinite variety of definitions of postmodernism, though they all seem to have something to do with getting rid of metaphysical truth.  In their details, they differ from one person to the next.  Given the infinite number of possibilities, Derrida draws exactly the same conclusion as you (Gransha), that “one’s personal experiences can never be shared because we do not share a mind or the same personal history that has brought us to the point in time where we are sharing an experience.”  When Derrida says that we can never have exact knowledge of a concept, what he means is this: words take shape within different contexts, and since our contexts are so radically different, and since there is no such thing as a transcendental signifier, the concepts that we have will differ from one person to the next.  Does this mean that gravity, for Derrida, translates into non-gravity?  Absolutely not.  What it does mean is that two people will never have matching concepts in their two brains.  But if they understand the basic axioms of a particular conceptual system, they will be in the same ballpark.  So gravity, for a postmodernist, cannot mean non-gravity—that is just a humanist’s cartoon caricature of postmodernism, and when humanists make that joke about postmodernism, they are saying nothing about postmodernism.  They are just disclosing the fact that they haven’t read postmodernist texts. 

I have so much more to say, but I really have to run.

Talk to you later,
michael

Postmodernist rationalists believe that science, as a fiction, is one of the most effective systems of constructed knowledge we have available to us for living the good life.

Why is it effective for living the good life? To propose this as an assurance that you don’t reject science is another deception, you’re being intentionally vague. When favouring science you say nothing about its relation to nature.

THEY MERELY CLAIM THAT THEY ARE EXTREMELY VALUABLE HUMAN CONSTRUCTIONS

It implies relativism and extreme scepticism, your explanations only make this clearer. If by “constructions” you mean the same as other post-modernists and how the term is commonly used then clearly this is the case. If not then you can’t expect readers to understand you, as with “fiction” meaning “provisional” (a perfectly unobjectionable word). You can’t disregard the utility of language, which is to communicate.

Also, sticking “fundamentalist” in front of humanist, and “rationalist” behind post-modernist, is not arguing in a rational or civil manner, and neither is continually being disingenuous.

AJ, Of course language has utility.  That’s its function.  I don’t understand why it wouldn’t have utility.  And as for relativism, there needs to be some nuance here.  There’s absolute relativism—gravity, as some humanists impute to postmodernists, could equally mean non-gravity.  Postmodernists would reject that assertion, and they would do so because of the way we use the word gravity.  But then there’s soft relativism—the word gravity will have different meanings within different contexts and among different people.  You probably have a thousand pieces of information in your brain about the concept of gravity, and I might have only 847 pieces of information.  Those subtle shades of meaning will never match up.  We will never be able to say with certainty that your fictional concept of gravity is the same as my fictional concept.  But we have both accept some similar ways of conceptualizing the word gravity (despite all of our minor differences and nuances), which is why we can have a discussion about the word.  That’s the postmodernist position about language be unstable.  By the way, I’m not trying to persuade any of you to become postmodernists.  I’m just trying to show you that we are not as stupid, uneducated, irrational, or illogical as many of you portray us to be. 
m

AJ, One last comment: you seem to be critical of my usage of postmodern rationalists and fundamentalist humanists, but let me briefly explain why I do this.  There are, no doubt, make postmodernists who are intellectual hacks—their work is sloppy, incoherent, and inconsistent.  And some postmodernists do adopt an anti-rationalist position.  I find that brand of postmodernism unfortunate and unconvincing.  So I distinguish postomdern rationalists from anti-rationalist postmodernists.

Now what about fundamentalist humanists.  Here’s an interesting thing for me.  Some people have commented on this thread that DJ caught me when he pressed me on the topic of their being no concept out there because there is no God.  Do you all realize that before the interview with DJ, he goes over the questions with the person he is going to interview?  Do you also realize that he tells the person he is going to interview that he intends to challenge him or her during the interview.  Here’s what he said to me: I’m going to challenge you in order to draw you out, in order to get as much of the position out there as possible.  DJ is, in no way, shape, or form, is a fundamentalist humanist.  During our email conversations before the interview, he asked extremely respectful questions about my view on postmodern humanism, and he even said that he liked much of what I was saying.  I do not believe that he wholeheartedly agrees with what I say (in fact, I’m relatively certain that he would disagree with me on some key issues), but I can assure you, he listened patiently to my ideas, he understands what I am saying, and he has been supportive and respectful during this whole process.  There are, however, fundamentalist humanists who will use the exact same strategies as fundamentalist Christians to demonize those people with whom they disagree.  To my mind, fundamentalism is less about the ideas than one holds than it is about the way we engage others. 

I hope this explains why I make these distinctions. 
michael

And in this case it would seem that post-modernism is badly explaining trivial claims. It seems trivial to suggest words, as meaning carriers, are relative to context and person. We cannot be certain that others have the same concept of gravity. Post-modernism, in this regard, doesn’t seem to be adding anything new, or objectionable. Concepts as “pieces of information” is not helpful, also a difference in quantity of pieces of information doesn’t necessarily mean a different concept. We can’t be certain that the concepts in minds are the same. Scientists don’t have to be certain that their concept of gravity is the same, just be reasonably assured that it is. We don’t have to be certain, but we can investigate, reduce, and test expressions of concepts to a high standard. As you can assure me that DJ understands you.

As you should know, “fundamentalism” has a common meaning. You use words expecting me to know the meaning of them, but cannot reasonably expect me to understand new meanings carried by words with different common meanings. The same goes for “fiction”, “construction”, and “post-modernism”. If I use the common meanings of these words, your statements seem to be suggesting a truth relativism, and extreme scepticism. If you’re not using those meanings, then you might as well make up new words, because I’m not going to understand you either way. When you say you accept science, but think it’s a construction, that’s a contradiction to me, knowing what I know about post-modernism and what a construct is.

When I say “relativism”, as I understand in common in general, I am talking about truth relativism. This seems to be confirmed, if the only difference you can give between science and religion is that one can be rationally discussed or it’s democratic then that’s a rejection of science as knowledge. If science is not superior because of its relation to truth, but for its democratic and rational nature, then knowledge gained by science has no different relation to truth than the revelations of religion, that implies to me truth relativism and extreme scepticism, a rejection of science.

By the way, I’m not trying to persuade any of you to become postmodernists.  I’m just trying to show you that we are not as stupid, uneducated, irrational, or illogical as many of you portray us to be.

I would say that postmodernism isn’t so much something you can be persuaded towards.  It’s more of a nuanced classification for the way you have already been framing or classifying knowledge.  I would say that terminology has been somewhat of an inhibitor in the way I classify or internalize concepts, but terms and labels gain usefulness as the demands of expressing ideas and concepts rise in complexity.

This shouldn’t be an “I’m right, you’re wrong” dichotomy.  It’s up to the individual to decide if an idea has utility.  You just owe it to yourself to make sure you comprehend what is being communicated before you make up your mind.  Or you might miss out on something.  This is where I would make a statement that effectively says: Critical thinking = extremely valuable.

I really appreciate Mr. Lackey for taking the time to hash out the details for us.  At this point I don’t think the case can be made that postmodernism is wrong.  There may be a case that postmodernism is unrefined to the point that it doesn’t hold significant utility.  I would say AJ’s suggestion of replacing the word “fiction” with “provisional” or even “conditional” has merit, at least among this crowd.  Unless of course you are utilizing the value in “the shock factor”.

Michael Lackey,

Curious… My first education on postmodernism was in college from an Art History Professor named Dennis Raverty.  His educational background lists the University of Minnesota.  I know some of his past work had to do with reviews on African American artists.  I’m wondering if you’ve ever crossed paths or maybe you’re familiar with his first book in 2005 Struggle Over the Modern: Purity and Experience in American Art Criticism?

-Scott

AJ, You suggest that postmodernism’s revaluation or transvaluation of words is trivial, but in an earlier message, I tried to explain why this is the case.  Let me make the point a slightly different way this time.  Postmodernists are more concerned about issues of social and political justice than anything else.  By claiming that all truth systems are human inventions, that gives us some distance from the concepts that we create—when I say distance, I do not mean that we reject the constructed concept.  I mean that we acknowledge that someone or some group of people formed that discourse.  In my earlier email, I used Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant to illustrate my point, and somebody said that this has nothing to do with science.  In a sense, it is true that my example does not have anything to do with science.  It has something to do with language theory.  How do certain discourses come into being?  What is the process by which a discourse gains cultural legitimacy?  Who controls the discourse?  Who suffers from the formation of particular discourses?  Who benefits? When postmodernists discuss science, it is as a secondary matter.  So when I used Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant to make my point, I wasn’t trying to make any negative or positive comment about science.  I was trying to make a point about language.  Now why is it important for postmodernists to treat concepts as provisional (here I will follow retrospy’s advice, and shift to the word provisional, since it is not nearly as objectionable to many of you)?  Because it invites us to interrogate the concept.  It invites us to be in a perpetual state of comprehending and criticizing, re-evaluating and transvaluing the concept.  Postmodernists consider it of vital importance to hold all concepts as provisional, not because they want to suspend judgment, but because they insist on an endless interrogation of the social and political utility of the concept.  You dismiss the postmodernist’s treatment of the concept as provisional, because you suggest that that is an intellectually obvious move that most scientists take as a given.  My whole point throughout this thread has been that postmodern rationalists and sober humanists are more alike than unalike, and PZ and I have found this to be true, so it doesn’t surprise me that you see the two as making the same obvious intellectual move.  But they have different motivations for making their move.  Humanists tend to focus on science, logic, and reason, while postmmodernists tend to focus on social justice, political systems, and economic models.  This is not to say that humanists do not focus on these things as well.  They do.  But postmodernists do not give science and reason the same kind of priority that humanists do.  This is not to say that postmodernists reject science and reason.  It is just to say that these things are weighted differently. 

Hope that makes some sense.

Talk to you later,
michael

Scott, I don’t know this guy.  But I just started teaching here in Minnesota last year.  I was at Wellesley College just outside of Boston for the last three years.  It looks like Raverty went to the U of M as an undergrad.  Is his work worth reading?  Let me know, michael

First let me second retro’s appreciation for Michael Lackey’s generosity in taking the time and effort to share his ideas with us galley-slaves here in the POI discussion forum. This has been an unusual treat.

Postmodernists are more concerned about issues of social and political justice than anything else.

On the contrary, I would argue that post-modernism represents a profound and demoralized flight from any genuine political struggle among liberal/leftish inclined academics since at least the late 1960s.  ‘Radical skepticism’ toward all ‘systems’ provides, among many other advantages, optimal maneuvering room for a comfortable and quiescent academic career in which nothing is actually worth fighting for (outside one’s personal ambitions).

In the increasingly repressive political climate that has arisen, especially in North America since the destruction of the USSR, it has also provided cover and accommodation for the ideological general drift to the right, especially to escape association with the dreaded “M” word (Marxism), which become a embarassing skeleton in the career closet for many in the ‘progressive’ professoriate.

Sadly, there is all too much accuracy to the caricature of the cynical, middle-aged ex-radical tenured boomer cruising toward retirement using ‘post-modern’ cliches as a figleaf for political bankruptcy.

Balak, You say: “I would argue that post-modernism represents a profound and demoralized flight from any genuine political struggle among liberal/leftish inclined academics since at least the late 1960s.  ‘Radical skepticism’ toward all ‘systems’ provides, among many other advantages, optimal maneuvering room for a comfortable and quiescent academic career in which nothing is actually worth fighting for (outside one’s personal ambitions).”

I agree and disagree with this claim.  Let me start with the agreement.  In a sense, postmodernism has run its course, and this is clear insofar as there is little being published about postmodernism today that is relevant or rejuvenating.  Moreover, there is an historical precedent for the bankrupt condition of contemporary postmodernism.  In 1956, the Marxist theorist, Georg Lukacs, published an extremely important essay titled, “The Ideology of Modernism” (if you haven’t read this, I think you would enjoy it), and he explains why modernism and existentialism are politically and socially irrelevant.  Many of the same arguments Lukacs makes about modernism and existentialism could apply to postmodernist theory today.  Some versions of postmodernism have become so obsessed with the play of signification and the abyss of knowledge that they have no value within the political sphere at all.

However, there has been a major development that is significantly altering the academic scene.  For instance, there are many academics who are trying to bring together divergent theoretical positions.  What has happened in the last thirty years is a massive fragmentation within the disciplines, which has caused so many groups to start attacking each other.  PZ and I have noticed that there are stunning similarities in our approach to the intellectual and political life.  But we have also noticed that there is incredible hostility on both sides: many humanists consider postmodernists intellectually inept and incoherent, while many postmodernists consider humanists criminals and oppressors.  These caricatures, of course, are mostly misleading and uninformed, and a number of us are trying to combat these caricatures by bringing the disciplines together—hence, the idea of a postmodern rationalist.  Instead of fighting amongst ourselves, when we share so much in common, I have been working to bring people together, not necessarily to reconcile the positions, but to identify the similarities and to understand the differences.  We can generate excitement and effect change when we are working to realize similar goals, and I have found that postmodernists and humanists, when they engage each other in respectful ways, discover that they share many of the same values.  Postmodern and postcolonial theorists have formed some powerful bonds, and the result has been fairly positive.  Marxism, which has suffered horribly over the last twenty years, can work well with postmodernism as well as postcolonialism, etc. 

By the way, Balak, are you an academic?  Given your messages, you sound like you are very familiar with both postcolonial and Marxist theory.

In any event, I do think that it is time that we underscore our similarities and join forces in order to stop the right wing madness that is corrupting our culture and universities. 

Well, gotta go.

Talk to you later,
michael