Higher Superstition
by Paul R. Gross
and Norman Levitt
Higher Superstition
by Paul R. Gross
and Norman Levitt
The "science studies" people are the ones who couldn't pass freshman calculus and physics...and that says quite enough about them.
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nadia Abu el Haj site:freerepublic.com |
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It appears to be English, but all I can make out is "Blah, blah, blah."
“that modern science, in particular, is a repressive ideological edifice”
This is utter rubbish. Any progress the human race has made in the last 200 odd years is owed to “modern science”. This woman is a know-nothing.
The real difficulty is that postmodernism itself constitutes such a metanarrative, and it shows. The notion that the above-named philosophers and critics are attempting to provide merely another descriptive model is entirely false; these are activists and advocates whose purpose is to change the society sinning enough to consider scientism neutral, and the reason this becomes obvious is that in application they are providing their own normative model, that is, a metanarrative purporting to supply means for remediation.
It is the descent of linguistic analysis into gobbledygook, whose root claim is that scientism was nothing more than gobbledygook to begin with. There is no real provision within the postmodern approach for that not to be the case. Unfortunately the modern world is built under the presupposition that it is not the case, and to change that is to change some rather basic cultural underpinnings. That is, of course, the point here, but one ought to be more careful what one wishes for.
The difficulty is that a tree may not be divorced from its fruit, and a culture that produces skyscrapers, pennicillin, and space travel is not the same as one whose principal product is campfire drumming and telling fortunes by chicken bones. It may be equally "valid" judged from a sufficiently lofty set of intellectual pretensions, but equal it is not. One need only ask the participants in either if they'd prefer the other. That preference tends to be a one-way affair in practice (although there is no shortage of skyscraper denizens who would like to imagine they'd be happier dancing around a campfire and shaking chicken bones, that number tends to shrink when they actually try it and discover that pennicillin and modern dentistry do have their attractions).
This is gross silliness, the conviction by a witch doctor who cannot pass engineering calculus that it's all some sort of a plot to keep him down. Ten times out of ten it's a reach for your wallet.
