> The folks I cannot at all have a reasonable discussion are the > postmodernists...the ones who believe that there is no truth, just > competing narritives. > > Dan M.
Hm. As the closest things to Brin-L's token PoMo there may be a way to approach this. First Post-modernism works best for humaninties and near humanities like lit-crit and history. Its applicability lessens as you move toward chemistry and mathematics. However, PoMo does make what I think should be requisite skeptical moves for *any* scholarly discipline. 1) Assuming a pre-existing (that is empirical) reality is an unwaranted form of platonism. The good skeptic will at most assume that there are only subjective perceptions of objects. 2) The good skeptic will not assume that subjective perceptions can necessarilly be reconcilled or effectively communicated. Congruence of subjective positions must be demonstrated. 2b) Furthermore, such demonstrations are themselves expressions of subjective positions. 3) Not withstanding #1 and #2, the percieved relevance of problems in *any* field of inquiry are very subjective. Problem relevance must always be understood in a social context as a political-economic problem. 3b) It follows that while it might be that a given truth-statement-per-subjectivity may in some sense be regarded as a qualified universal truth, the relevance of the said truth, and above all the fact that the question that led to the truth was even posed must be understood not only as subjective positions, but more importantly as *interested* points-of-view. 3c) Being the *result* of interested subjectivities, any finding (no matter how universally acceptable as fact or truth) is unlikely to be Pareto optimal. It produces relative winners and loosers. 4) All of the above apply to themselves. Therefore, if you disagree with me you are not exactly wrong, rather you are just a cretenous philistine totalitarian @#$%er who needs to read more good artsy-fartsy literature and *much* less science fiction. As a social scientist I tend to regard items in families #1 and #2 as particularly conservative epistimological postions. While true, their truth is largely irrelevant for many research problems--like all of chemistry. However, items in family #3 should be regarded as behavioral science fact. They are pretty much a cynical, real-politic description of how inquiry works--and more importantly how it gets funded. They should be very important for any scholar or professional who is serious about self-criticism or social responsibility. Chemists and mathematicians are hardly exempt.
