Is science the only way of knowing?

An economist friend of mine recently recommended Peter Boghassian's book Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. I had heard of the book, but my friends very high recommendations of it prompted me to order it. 

My friend and I had been discussing the issue of "critical thinking skills" and how much of the movement that has developed around this concept has been co-opted by postmodernist thinkers.

Since I had to wait for snail mail, I looked the book up at Oxford University Press. Obviously I can't adequately assess the book until I get it, but I notice that the summary at Oxford indicates that that his main line of argument is that postmodernists that postmodernists assume science is not the only way of knowing the world.

This chapter introduces a thesis that is enormously influential in the contemporary academy – Equal Validity: there are many radically different, mutually incompatible, yet ‘equally valid’ ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them. It explains in a general way how constructivist views of knowledge might be thought to underwrite this thesis.

Boghassian presumably argues against this thesis. Of course, on this particular thesis, I would find myself on the side of the postmodernists. There are clearly other ways of knowing than science. Science could never have been developed if there weren't. 

I have addressed this issue a number of times, including here, here, and here.

Now this doesn't necessarily affect the usefulness of Boghassian's arguments against the postmodernists. In fact, this is the interesting thing about arguments between modernists (of which Boghassian is one) and postmodernists: They're both right in many of their critiques of each other. Modernists limit their toolbox to only one tool, and postmodernists seem to reject limits altogether. 

The holes in modernism's epistemological net exclude things that should not be excluded and the holes in postmodernism's net are so big they let too many things through.

It seems to me many scholars like Boghassian use the word "science" in the same way that they charge postmodernists use "knowledge" or even "thinking skills," that is to say, without clear definition.

If you define science narrowly--as that method by which the hard sciences come to their conclusions, then you exclude universally acknowledged forms of reasoning (such as those practiced by philosophers like Boghassian) that, of necessity, he must himself practice in his critique of postmodernism. And if you define it so broadly as to encompass rational inquiry in general, then to call it "scientific reasoning" is misleading, since it implies only that form of reasoning used in the hard sciences is valid.

In fact, asserting that "scientific reasoning is the only valid form of reasoning" is itself vulnerable to the argument against postmodernism Boghassian apparently uses in one of his chapters; namely, that the assertion is a performative contradiction: If the assertion "scientific reasoning is the only valid form of reasoning" is true, then scientific reason cannot be the only valid form of reasoning since there is no way to arrive at that conclusion using scientific reasoning (unless, again, your definition of scientific reasoning includes all forms of rational inquiry, which, again, is misleading).

In any case, I await the book.

Create your own postmodern essay

Some of us have been subjected to the unpleasant necessity of having to read modern academic works of a, shall we say, less than ideal level of lucidity. In fact, this has become the hallmark of the intellectually cloistered postmodernist academic world: a lack of clarity.

Well, someone has come up with the ideal way you can producing a great postmodern essay of your own. It is called the "Postmodernism Generator," and is available at Communications from Elsewhere. Here is the methodology followed by the generator:

The Postmodernism Generator was written by Andrew C. Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars, and modified very slightly by Josh Larios (this version, anyway. There are others out there).

I have just tried it, and produced the following specimen of modern postmodernist academic prose:

The main theme of Bailey’s[2] critique of textual capitalism is not, in fact, deconstruction, but subdeconstruction. Thus, if capitalist socialism holds, we have to choose between the neocultural paradigm of expression and Sartreist absurdity. Lacan uses the term ‘the neostructural paradigm of reality’ to denote the paradigm, and hence the stasis, of semiotic class.

I'm thinking of submitting it to an academic journal, just for fun, on the outside chance I might be able to have my own Alan Sokal moment.

Back to premodernism: While postmodernism buries modernism, St. Thomas is still relevant

Why postmodernism's critique of modernism is irrelevant to Thomism. Another great post from Just Thomism.

Postmodern Sex and Orifice Confusion

Okay, I'm thinking about how nice it must have been in better times to open up the newspaper and read about the latest good deeds of the local women's charitable society and all the nice things it was doing for foreign orphans or something. But thanks to things like the debate over the Holsinger nomination, we find ourselves opening up the pages of the local gazette and being treated to the latest apologetic for the legitimacy of trying to use the digestive system as if it were the reproductive system by those who seem to hold the dictates of biology is extremely low esteem.

Gee. I actually got through that whole paragraph without saying what I really would rather not talk about but can't seem to avoid because certain people want to talk very publicly about what they keep insisting, in the same breath, everyone ought to stay out of because it is their own private business.

"O shame, where is they blush?"

But there it is: prominently displayed on the editorial page of the Louisville Courier-Journal. We're arguing about anal sex. Ugh. It's enough of an indignity to have to talk about it in the first place, but do we really have to endure pious sermons on why it's a sin to consider such peculiar activity abnormal?

Here is Michael Cornwall, waxing eloquent (but not particularly logical) on why homosexuals should not be distinguished by their homosexuality despite the fact that that is, literally, their only distinguishing feature:

Gays and lesbians cannot be reduced to STDs and abnormal sex. Gays and lesbians enjoy an ample culture, in spite of the roadblocks placed in their way, complete with fulfilling, loving relationships.

In other words, we have a whole group of people who define and distinguish themselves by a particular act who are now complaining that everyone defines and distinguishes them by this act. Well, if their actions are not peculiar, their arguments certainly are. "'Normal' sexual expression cannot be characterized by intake and expulsion orifices," Corwall, who is apparently confused as to which orifice is which, assures us.

Then there is this logical specimen from Todd M. Read of Jeffersonville, Indiana:

According to his logic [the logic that says that certain orifices have certain purposes], the duality of the female vagina as an entrance and an exit should confuse the human race so as there would be no reproduction. I mean, if we are all "normal," wouldn't this conflict of interests end civilization as we know it?

I don't know who Todd M. Read is, but let's just hope, for the sake of the people of Jeffersonville, Indiana, that he's not an OB/GYN (or for that matter, a plumber). One supposes that in medical school, unlike certain lodgements in Jeffersonville, Indiana, there is little confusion as to which orifice is to be used for what purpose.

And speaking of plumbers, would anyone hire a piping professional (they're not calling them that now, but I give it five years) who didn't think it out of the ordinary to hook up the sewage pipes to the water pipes? Didn't think so.

And it only adds to the indignity of having to listen to all this that these people who are arguing for the normality of the multipurpose use of orifices (and that's the last time I'm ever going to use that word--I promise) don't even believe in normality in the first place. In the postmodern world, nothing has any purpose except that to which it happens to be put. You can't really apply that idea to anything practical of course: a 11/16" socket only fits an 11/16" nut (which is one reason you find so few postmodern mechanics). But, for some reason, there are people who think all this makes perfect sense when it comes to sex.

You just can't argue that something is abnormal with people who don't believe in normality at all, any more than you can argue with someone that a stick is crooked when they don't believe in such a thing a straight stick.

But I believe in such a thing as a straight stick, even though there are some people who apparently think that is controversial.

Human Nature Makes the News

The chief obstacle encountered by the conservative cultural critic in modern times is the fact that many of his listeners are not entirely certain that they exist, or, if they have found the intellectual fortitude required to believe that they do, they are not completely convinced that this fact is very important.

People are still discussing Harvard President Larry Summers remarks several months ago at an academic conference that one of the reasons there are not more women scientists at the best universities was because of innate differences between the intellectual orientations of men and women. Most recently, he was the target of a no confidence vote of the Harvard faculty—the first in school history.

The responses to Summers remarks have generally taken two forms. The first was from outraged postmodernist liberals who asked how someone could even say such a thing. The second was from curious modernist conservatives who wanted to ponder whether Summers was, in fact, correct in his assertion.

The postmodern response is exactly what you would expect from people who have long since ceased believing in human nature. If you don’t believe in a permanent and enduring human nature, then making any statement about innate differences between men and women is simply preposterous, since nothing is innate (except homosexuality, which, if it were innate, would mean that homosexuality has moral implications, which is unacceptable to postmodernists).

The response of the modernists is also entirely consonant with their lack of interest in the topic. George Will, for example, mentions the relevance of human nature only briefly and in passing (http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/national/will/story/12135295p-13005500c.html), while the otherwise level-headed people at the New Criterion just blew by it altogether (http://www.newcriterion.com/weblog/2005_01_01_cano.html).

That all things have a nature or essence is a belief that goes back. Way back: before the postmodernists, before the modernists, and back to the premodernists, starting with Plato. Whether humans have a real nature unique to them that is shared by all men was a belief that was simply axiomatic—which is just another way of saying that it went without question. The only debate was where the essence of a thing resided: in each thing itself (Aristotle) or in some heavenly realm (Plato). The modern rejection of essences derives from William of Ockham, who questioned the reality of essences themselves. His view is called “nominalism”: the idea that words do not refer to natures, but are only convenient labels referring to groups of things with similar characteristics.

Larry Summers is not in trouble for what he said; he is in trouble for what he assumed. His remark that women may be inferior in one respect to men is not what got him in trouble. What got him into hot water was taking it for granted that men and women are different in any way at all.

Modernist thinking is almost unanimous in accepting (implicitly or explicitly) the nominalist view. Richard Weaver was right when he wrote in Ideas Have Consequences that the decline of the West began when William of Ockham questioned the existence of universals (natures or essences).