Ron said to dmb:
...It is like the art of discussion, or to be more precise, the art of persuasion has become lost. To all involved it's an either/or proposition. Science has been bundled with atheism. Religion uses relativism with devastating effectiveness in this aim. What's worse is science/atheism isn't helping it's case with letting the "facts" speak for themselves. All in all religion is winning the game of persuasion and science, critical thinking and reason have been hijacked to promote the myth of certainty and the absolute. ... dmb says: It looks like Lee McIntyre pretty much agrees with you, Ron. He has a book on the topic but also wrote a recent essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education titled "The Attack on Truth: We're living in an age of Willful Ignorance". I especially like the part where he says, "some left-wing postmodernist criticisms of truth began to be picked up by right-wing ideologues who were looking for respectable cover". http://chronicle.com/article/The-Attack-on-Truth/230631/ "To see how we treat the concept of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care anymore. Politicians pronounce that global warming is a hoax. An alarming number of middle-class parents have stopped giving their children routine vaccinations, on the basis of discredited research. Meanwhile many commentators in the media — and even some in our universities — have all but abandoned their responsibility to set the record straight." "While many natural scientists declared the battle won and headed back to their labs, some left-wing postmodernist criticisms of truth began to be picked up by right-wing ideologues who were looking for respectable cover for their denial of climate change, evolution, and other scientifically accepted conclusions. Alan Sokal said he had hoped to shake up academic progressives, but suddenly one found hard-right conservatives sounding like Continental intellectuals. And that caused discombobulation on the left. 'Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies?,' Bruno Latour, one of the founders of the field that contextualizes science, famously asked. 'Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we said? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why can’t I simply say that the argument is closed for good?' 'But now the climate-change deniers and the young-Earth creationists are coming after the natural scientists," the literary critic Michael Bérubé noted, "… and they’re using some of the very arguments developed by an academic left that thought it was speaking only to people of like mind'." But Pirsig's classical Pragmatism doesn't have this problem and neither do James or Dewey. The next quote comes from a review of Larry Hickman's book, "Pragmatism as Post-postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey". "On Hickman’s reading, Dewey is entirely 'post-postmodern,' since Dewey did reach some postmodernist conclusions (e.g. rejecting foundationalisms, metaphysical realisms, cultural hegemonies, grand narratives) only to travel even further to a positively coherent system of thought. Rorty and his postmodernist friends reveled in the romantic wild fields opened by radicalized relativisms of all kinds; Dewey, alas, was no radical. Dewey’s naturalistic metaphysics, his biological theory of inquiry, his cultural historicism, his democratic progressivism—intertwined strands of stability explain why we really were never in an 'anything goes' or 'all is permitted' situation." Hickman presents John Dewey as a thinker who "both anticipated some of the central insights of French-inspired postmodernism and, if he were alive today, would certainly be one of its most committed critics". As Hickman paints it, Richard Rorty was right to say that when certain postmodernists reach the end of the road they're traveling they will find Dewey there waiting for them. "On my view," Rorty wrote (in The Consequences of Pragmatism), "James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling." http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/csp/summary/v045/45.1.shook.html Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
