A consensus builds... I'd be interested in hearing both your thoughts on what kind of relativism this is. In addition to the special relativism of the Dirac equation and quantum field theory, there is an additional relativism of quantum mechanics put forward based on state.

The idea is that, since the laws of physics must apply in all inertial frames, there must be some transform between superposed states and eigenstates. For instance, an electron in the double slit experiment is in a superposition of positions in a non-negligible way (a wave) while the lab is not. However there must be an inertial frame for the electron itself, and in that frame the lab would be in a superposition of locations.

Since the observer-dependence of collapse in these Wigner's friend experiments is essentially a disagreement between observers in their own frames as to whether something is in superposition or not, something like this might be the answer.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-08155-0

But I don't see why objective approximations of the past would not be useful in approximate predictions of the future. Scientific approximations tend to improve in accuracy over time. — magritte

Oh definitely. You can Wang a satellite around the solar system and land it in a predetermined patch of ocean with Newtonian gravity alone.

Overall, I don’t see why we should treat incest any different than we treat homosexuality. I’m sure a lot of you would disagree and I’m wondering if someone can provide some sort of defense for treating homosexuality differently from incest. — TheHedoMinimalist

Does homosexuality lead to offspring with genetic disorders, high infant mortality, children with broken immune systems, and weak hearts? If not, then the two are not comparable. Homosexuals do not have to worry about the suffering of their future offspring directly caused by their homosexuality, nor do they or society have to pay the medical fees for mitigating that specific suffering. Incest has been taboo since prehistory, likely not because of an anti-liberal agenda, but because it leads to unhealthy babies.

A man wants his daughter to be beautiful. — TheMadFool

Beauty relies on facial symmetry.

Incest causes high probability of facial assymetry.

The offspring of the man with his daughter is his daughter.

Ergo the man should not mate with his daughter.

No. Many Worlds is a subject relative branching. It's simply part of the universal wavefunction. — InPitzotl

That's a contradiction right there.

Observation processes are to be described completely by the state function of the composite system which includes the observer and his object-system, and which at all times obeys the wave equation (Process 2).
(underline mine; italics in the paper) ...just to show I'm not making this up — InPitzotl

You're not making it up, but it doesn't say what you purport it to say, that branching is observer-dependent. That the observer is a physical system is not in dispute. In MWI, when system A is entangled with system B and system B branches, system A also branches. That is what a straight reading of the mathematics tells us.

Observer-dependence tells us something different, that branching may have occurred for B and not for A, even though A and B are entangled. That A might entangle with a superposed state and still see it as a superposed state. That is not compatible with MWI as is, at least not obviously or without modification.

I think that is contestable. Registration, in that passage, is an 'act of measurement', not simply an interaction between any particles. — Wayfarer

It's there in the quote you provided, unless you're a panpsychist and believe that silver bromide has mind.

It is the registration on the plate which changes that state of affairs, which seems to bring it into existence. That is what the many worlds interpretation seeks to avoid. — Wayfarer

Indeed, and this is where the paper above differs. Effectively that registration reduces the number of possibilities to unity for you (or it), while staying distributed for me (or some other device). So something else is going on here.

That seems glaringly anachronistic.

Ah okay, I wasn't aware of this. Note though:

A phenomenon is not a phenomenon until it has been brought to a close by an irreversible act of amplification such as the blackening of a grain of silver bromide emulsion or the triggering of a photodetector.

Minds are not required to bring things to a close: a molecule will do the job, and it's an act of epistemology to reduce the wavefunction to what fits with the molecule. This seems consistent with Bohr's meaning elsewhere, that collapse is an observer-independent decoherence that could be but is not necessarily caused by a conscious measurement.

For the record, I was with Bohr on this, insofar as it seemed unwarranted to assume that a photon actually traversed any space at all between creation and destruction (photons are clicks in photon detectors). The new paper linked in the OP might change my position on that: being able to detect a photon non-destructively suggests that it is a field, not just a delocalised event.

P.S. I should add that observer-dependent facts is only one possible interpretation, even if it is the one that gets preferential treatment in paper titles.

The other options are non-locality (FTL communication) and super-determinism (backward or nonlocal causality). In a previous thread on determinism and quantum mechanics, I put my weight behind a kind of superdeterminism, in particular two-way causality, though I'm unsure how it applies to this seeming observer-dependence.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2020.00139/full

My preliminary read interprets "observer-dependent" as experimental set-up (subsystem)-dependent: different subsystems observe (measure) different aspects of the universe — 180 Proof

Indeed, or even just reference frame dependent: Wigner occupies a different reference frame to his friend. Whatever the underlying reality, he and his friend have a different viewpoint and witness different aspects.

Objective pluralism and not subjective relativism — 180 Proof

I don't think subjectivism has anything to do with it either, but as I said above relativism a la SR (and QM is special-relativistic) looks very much on the table. However, and I've asked this of others in the past and not quite got an answer, what differentiation do you make between a maximally pluralistic objectivity (e.g. one objectivity per reference frame) and relativism (as in frame-dependence, not subjectivity, as would apply to an atom, a device, or a point in spacetime)?

There's a part of your post in which you briefly stopped speaking of entanglement and spoke of observation. That's the part I referred to in my previous reply to you.

When Wigner's friend communicates to Wigner that they have made a measurement, if Wigner and his friend weren't already entangled (unlikely) they would be so at that point. Wigner hasn't made an observation of alive/dead, but is nonetheless entangled with the system that is in superposition. At this point, what Wigner observes in each should be determined: this is universal collapse in a nutshell, and branching in MWI replaces universal collapse. No interference between the two branches should be observed by Wigner after entanglement but prior to measurement.

This is why in MWI you don't need an additional branching to explain why Wigner's and his friend's observations always match up and no interference occurs: entanglement (not necessarily observation, just entanglement) ensure that Wigner always measures the same as his friend. You can construct the cross-terms, but these would be additional branches with a weight of 0 (since the probability is given by the integral over all space of two orthogonal terms, which is zero).

What we see instead is evidence of observer-dependent collapse: Wigner knows that collapse has occurred for the friend, but for Wigner the friend is still in superposition as evidenced by interference effects between the alive and dead terms (collapse has not occurred for Wigner).

This is inconsistent with MWI in which Wigner must either be in the branch in which his friend measured an alive cat or a branch in which his friend measured a dead cat.

As Andrew suggested, you'd have to modify MWI to allow Wigner to not only branch after entanglement but to observe evidence of the alive/dead cross-terms before Wigner's measurement is made (Andrew's merging), that Wigner is somehow sufficiently in communication with his friend to gain knowledge that his friend (EDIT) has made a measurement but not sufficiently entangled to collapse that superposition until he himself has made an alive/dead measurement.

As far as I see it, wavefunction realism as per MWI takes the onus away from physics and puts it back on consciousness if it's going to explain Wigner. To observe a superposition, Wigner would have to be in physical communication with something but remain effectively unentangled such that interference can be observed. Since consciousness isn't a factor in these experiments, I think that can be rejected.

Wait, like SR, the QM framework is objective – subject-invariant – but just not universal (or absolute), no? — 180 Proof

The recent experiments are being used to suggest that QM is observer-dependent:

https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/20/5/350

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-0990-x

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-0984-8

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/quantum-paradox-points-shaky-foundations-reality

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw9832.full

I was hoping so :up:

The question as to whether the universe is probabilistic (Einstein vs Bohr) isn't a settled matter. But the dream of some objective measuring framework is long dead.

I thought pOmO was thought by its AP detractors to be "not even wrong". :yikes: — Janus

Is that why they fail to find fault with it?

Modern scientific method excludes or ‘brackets out’ the subject, so as to arrive at ‘the view from nowhere’, i.e. an understanding of reality that is as devoid of all traces of subjectivity. But in so doing it then forgets or overlooks the fact that knowledge of anything whatever always requires the judgement of an observing subject. — Wayfarer

I think I have said this to you before, but this is massively out-of-state thinking. Special relativity killed off the idea that there's a special frame of reference for an ideal observer (a god's eye view) and quantum theory made it abundantly clear that observing an experiment makes you part of the experiment (gonzo science if you will).

Many Worlds is fully compatible with Wigner's Friend. It's just a situation where worlds not only can split but also merge again under the right conditions. — Andrew M

That would be different to many worlds in itself. If you have to add a thing (merging criteria) that's a new theory.

Is not the above exactly what Many Worlds says happens? — Pfhorrest

No, many worlds is a universal branching. When Wigner's friend measured the cat, the universal wavefunction would split then universally. Wigner has to measure live cat in the branch in which his friend measured live cat and dead cat in which his friend measured dead cat. In Wigner's friend, Wigner's branching isn't determined until Wigner himself makes a measurement.

In MWI there is a single, real (ontic) wavefunction. The cat (third term) is in superposition and Wigner (first term) and his friend (second term) have made no measurement:

(A) | not measured > X | not measured > X ( | alive > + | dead > ) / root(2)

After the friend measures:

(B) | not measured > X ( | measured live > | alive > + | measured dead > | dead > )/root(2)

At this point Wigner and his friend are unentangled, however if they become entangled, it evolves to:

(C) ( | must measure alive > | measured live > | alive > + | must measure dead > | measured dead > | dead > )/root(2)

that is, once entangled, there can be no interference between the live and dead terms apparent to Wigner. What the recent experiments show is that, even after Wigner's entanglement, those interference effects persist, and Wigner remains as per (B). It is only when Wigner _knows_ his friend's measurement outcome that he himself branches, i.e. the wavefunction is epistemic, not ontic.

Surely, if Alice reports to Bob that she observed that the cat is alive, Bob is not seeing Alice as in a superposition of having both observed the cat alive and observed the cat dead; Alice is observably in one of those states. — Pfhorrest

That's correct, hence:

even tell me you have made such a measurement — Kenosha Kid

rather than "tell me what measurement you made".

Also I think Copenhagen has always been epistemological despite talk of collapse. Per Bohr, — Andrew M

Copenhagen was originally epistemological, yes. Iirc Bohr himself went the ontological route in the end (I didn't know this until someone here found a relevant quote, should be able to dig it out if need be). But anyway there's a bunch of ontological Copenhagenists out there.

I've argued this before, but I think the usual Cartesian subjective/objective dichotomy is badly broken and not a useful way of thinking about the world. — Andrew M

Yeah me too but there's a lot of Cartesians here and I think they'd find it interesting.

There was a pessimistic vibe in CLS -- and a prescient one at that, having 70 years ago predicted ecological doom by way of overpopulation and overdevelopment -- which optimist humanists tended to hate, not see, or misrepresent. — Olivier5

Ah I think I misread you originally anyway, ignore me.

Pomo got it wrong in an interesting way, and as usual it is up to analytic philosophy to set things straight... after all, that's what it does. — Banno

Interested to know what you think AP will get right that pomo got wrong.

Okay then :roll:

Actually I was in East Berlin recently, and the architecture is surprisingly decorative. — Kenosha Kid

Well that didn't work. Anyway, it's lovely :rofl:

It's not Soviet brutalism; nor the phalic expressions of capitalism. It sits in the heart of a avowedly communist nation, a postmodern twist. — Banno

Weirdly, Soviet architecture was much more decorative than Western modernist architecture. I think their take was that buildings still ought to inspire. Marxist architecture is purely functional and cheap.



EDIT: Actually I was in East Berlin recently, and the architecture is surprisingly decorative.

So are you asking whether we should have philosophy that rejects or eshews grand narratives? Or? — Janus

Yes, or a philosophy of ethics, politics, aesthetics, etc. for that already being accepted as the case. Is there some need, whether it has been met fully, partially, or not at all, to move beyond modernism to something that deals with the living in postmodern condition (the perceived breakdown of grand narratives, as you say)?

The p0m0 philosophers = p0m0 philosophy. You're taking what I wrote out of context to make a distinction without a difference. — 180 Proof

I don't see how. I'm assuming you can differentiate between carpentry and a firm of bad carpenters.

exploring how language and culture limits and determines our worldviews and systems of values seems a useful endeavor. — prothero

I think so to. Logocentrism needs some sanity-checking.

I suppose the usefulness of critiques of modernism depends on what one assumes to be the basic tenets of modernism. If they are materialism, reductionism and determinism then yes I think critiques are well placed and very useful. — prothero

Yeah this is a huge issue. Post-modern architecture is a revolt against modern architecture, which is essentially Marxist. It is not a revolt against modern literature or philosophy. Postmodern art is a revolt against modern art, which is essentially Freudian. It is not a revolt against modern ceramics or philosophy.

This diversity of what pomo is (or is against) has a correlate with the diverse (sometimes contradictory) modes of modernism itself. There isn't really a thing called modernism. Like postmodernism, it's fundamentally an era, not a movement.

A modernism that can be both Descartes and Kant, both science and idealism, both industry capitalism and Marxism, is not coherent. Really what modernism is as I see it is a general way of thinking in terms of history, destiny, and the limitless transcendental power of the mind. It's a belief in a universal ideal that we are destined to arrive at, a rationalist Zion.

Postmodernism is the acknowledgement that there's more losers than winners in that game. The only way to have more winners is to have more games, different rules sitting side-by-side: architecture that is austere and flippant, culture that is high and low, ethics that are personal and global, etc.

I'll take exception to this on Wittgenstein's behalf!

Whereof one cannot speak... you would have him apply language games?! No, that would be absurd. Instead he acted, choosing the most dangerous activities as an Austrian solder; going to work as a mere hospital orderly during the second war. — Banno

That started out like a contradiction but didn't end that way...

Okay, somehow this got lost on firest read of the OP. — 180 Proof

I can't imagine how, it was right there on page 6 of 29.

The p0m0s are great exemplars of how not to do philosophy: obsession with philosophies – and adjacent (media? lifestyle? consumer? rhetorical? sociological?) signifiers / narratives / representations / identities :yawn: – in lieu of philosophizing. That said, I think "justifies" is the wrong word (it hangs me up); intellectually beneficial, or edifying, seem clearer. Anyway, my verdict: p0m0 isn't worth a philosopher's time. In this sense I vote "no". — 180 Proof

But as per the last thread, that's not answering the question being asked. In fact, you answered this question in the previous thread:

(pomo needs a better class of postmodernist).
— Kenosha Kid
I'll drink to that! :up: — 180 Proof

in which you agreed that the issue is not with there being a postmodern philosophy but with the postmodern philosophers we had. But then I think getting straight answers out of the pomophobes is a big ask :razz:

I want to know just which philosophers you count as being postmodernist and why you would count them as such before answering that question. — Janus

For this purpose it's not relevant. I'm not asking which pomo philos are worth a damn, just whether we should have postmodern philosophy at all. Essentially it takes the answer to the last poll as a given and asks whether dealing with the postmodern condition in philosophy in particular is worthwhile, irrespective of the particular personalities and their takes on it.

Another way of asking this is: even if you detested every postmodern philosopher to date, is there good reason to wish for some better postmodernism of the future, or is the whole field pointless by virtue of being postmodern?

What do you mean by "justifiable"? — 180 Proof

The way I'd probably break this down is as follows: does postmodernism have
- descriptive
- predictive
- prescriptive
- novel
value? (Will add more e.g. cognitive if you like.) — Kenosha Kid

I appreciate that the OP is unforgivably long.

Such an attitude is post-modern in that it is able to supersede the typical obsessions and tropes of the modern period, but it is a-historical, in that it is deeply informed by the worlds' perennial philosophical traditions. — Wayfarer

For the record, I'd say a philosophy with the qualities you describe is assuredly _not_ postmodern. It sounds like a narrative that aims for one over-arching answer to everything.

EDIT: But yes I appreciate it's not modernism either.

Or should I pose the question to the administrators? — ssu

Be my guest.

You can also Google "substitution fallacy" and conclude something about pretending that simple matters of recorded fact and deep mysteries of philosophy are equivalent.

What is the unit of entropy in QM? — god must be atheist

Boltzmann's constant has an SI unit of Joules (energy) per degree Kelvin (temperature), so entropy is the same. These are easily Googlable questions btw.

Right, PM is just a passing moment in the self-reflective sub-processes of modernism, or better, modernity. — Janus

Or possibly: we can just redefine 'modernism' to mean whatever we need it to mean.

EDIT: Kind of analogous with lots of other isms: communism, Americanism, and even environmentalism (e.g. David Cameron redefining natural gas as not a fossil fuel).

An alternative term to 'postmodernism' is 'late modernism'. I'm not so interested in debating terminology, but if both sides agree that post-/late modernism occurred, and just disagree whether we're at a late stage of the same category or an early stage of a new one, given that either category and where it starts or ends is arbitrary, the sensible thing to do is compare the start of modernism with the disputed end/late stage. Otherwise we're in danger of confusing transition with some meaningless assertion of continuity.

Lévi-Strauss was therefore fighting at UNESCO for the rights of the 'primitive' to be left alone by Western civilization, to be protected from it (including from UNESCO itself). He prophetized that globalization - if it was to result in one unique world culture - would kill human creativity, precisely because he saw exchanges between different culture as positive.

The paradox he highlighted in his argument was that ethnocentrism is universal. Each culture believes it is 'special' and 'better' than the others, at least in certain ways. And each culture tries to preserve itself, while incorporating interesting elements from other cultures. This is not a bad thing. Rather, it is the sine qua non condition for future creativity, for the historical agency of nations and cultures. — Olivier5

Are you basing the second paragraph on your understanding in the first? Because it doesn't follow. CLS wasn't appealing to an innate ethnocentrism in isolated groups; he was compelling external societies to keep away for the sake of diversity. Ethnocentrism isn't the right conclusion here.

Today's 'metanarrative' is that the West is (by default) wrong and guilty, and other cultures are always right and wonderful. All the while, Western capitalism is destroying the planet and our common future, and those academics who meekly condemn Western cultures bask in the limelight of their self-disgust and enjoy the material comfort they provide... It's downright obscene. — Olivier5

That's the obscene bit, not the destruction of the planet? This is another false dichotomy: you can't without hypocrisy criticise the extremes of Western capitalism and enjoy the bare minimum of it. Of course you can. It's not capitalism versus primitivism, it's unsustainable, destructive capitalism versus sustainable, green capitalism.

Theoretically there is an infinite number of microstates. — god must be atheist

Degenerate microstates for a particular macrostate.

This is a very good explanation except there is no definition involved. Could you please rephrase this to make it into a proper definition? — god must be atheist

S = k ln(W)

Entropy S is Boltzmann's constant k times the natural log of the number of microstates W.

Great post!

It's not just the Holocaust that changed minds about race in WWII. The US armed forces, for instance, were forced to have black and white people fighting side by side, which helped a bit. (Not the ones that got killed, obviously.)

I agree with the influence of anthropology. CLS made it quite rock-'n'-roll so it had a broader impact than just other academics.

As for the interwar years generally, yes, that makes sense to me as I've mentioned a couple of times. The French existentialists were also sexy (not literally, urgh! Except Camus. Even I'd let him do me) pop cultural icons that had a genuine impact on "real" people.

This is precisely why I put in option 2 in the poll: I think a lot of people think of postmodernism as post-everything social constructivists WHO ARE RUINING EVERYTHING when a) they're not nearly free enough from their own metanarratives to qualify and b) postmodernism is first and foremost a description of the present in context of the past, and only after that a prescription (can't be a totalitarian proscription) for the future.

On the contrary, your red lumpy legs indicate that mosquitoes like you quite a lot. — Olivier5

Then why do they want to change me?!?

In MoDo, reason is inadequate yet indispensable. — 180 Proof

Is this true? Did Descartes think that reason was inadequate? Did Leibniz, Spinoza? I'm sure there's exceptions you'll know better than I, but I expect your inadequacy of reason is coming in at Kant, who is precisely who conservative philosophers blame for the alleged death knell of modernism and midwifery of pomo.

MoDo – gradual / radical essays in (attempts at) emanicipation from cultural-socioeconomic enchantments, mystifications, reifications, etc – is also the problem of (with) MoDo — 180 Proof

It's a nice story, but do you like horror stories too? Cultural-socioeconomic enchantments like Marx? The terror? The technological Utopia? Reifications like Freud? How about spiritualism? The pomo-vs-modernism debate boils down to picking and choosing to forward some story, like a defense attorney versus the prosecution. Referring to your next point, (attempts at) getting beyond that seem justification enough.

My question for the apologists: What has p0m0 proposed in philosophy that e.g. atomists, skeptics, kynics, freethinkers, anarchists, fallibilists, critical rationalists or absurdists have not already proposed more clearly, cogently and also that is less co-optable – commodifiable – by late capitalism (i.e. Neoliberal "post-truth" populism)? Asking for an old friend. :cool: — 180 Proof

Since you didn't like my last answer, I'll do you one better and make it the subject of the next thread. This one was about whether or not the postmodern era ever happened. The results of the poll seem pretty static now and no one is backing up the argument that it didn't, or the anachronistic argument that pomo caused it. So the next question for me is: do we need a postmodern philosophy (irrespective of the one we got) which will naturally involve looking at the one we got.

Sure thing.

You're probably aware of the idea of energy levels in quantum mechanics, often depicted as concentric orbits which is inaccurate but might do for now.

The higher the energy of an electron in an atom, the higher up these energy levels it is. Energy levels are labelled n=1,2,3,... In addition to these energy levels, for each value of n there are possible different angular momenta available, essentially the shape of the orbit in the concentric picture.

Those possible values are finite for finite n, and go L=0,1,2,...,n-1. In the absence of an external magnetic field, each of these orbit shapes have the same energy.

So for a hydrogen atom in its lowest-energy state (n=1), there is precisely one orbital shape: L=0. No angular momentum. Straight through the goddam middle. For the next highest energy level n=2, L=0 or 1: straight through the goddam middle or a tight orbit. For the next highest, L=0, 1 or 2: adding a slightly less tight orbit.

There are other parameters than L. There's spin S, and how L and S are coordinated, and these follow similar rules: for a higher energy level n, there are an increased number of possible values of these parameters. These are the electron shells you would have been taught in chemistry: 2, 8, 18, etc. that underpins the periodic table.

Thus as you add energy to a bound electron, you increase the number of equivalent states it could end up in, which is how entropy is defined in QM, from which you can derive statistical mechanics and its definition of entropy (and then thermodynamics and its version of entropy).

:up:

You don't need to approach lightspeed. Any velocity through space is at the expense of your velocity through time, which is what time dilation is. It's just that it's pretty negligible until you get to a decent fraction of lightspeed.

Any curvature of spacetime will do it. A wormhole is a valid example. There's always been talks of warp speed engines that contract the space in front of you and expand the space behind you.

Entropy is originally a thermodynamic concept. Thermodynamics is reducible to statistical mechanics, which has its own definition of entropy which approaches that of thermodynamics. Statistical mechanics is entirely reducible to quantum mechanics, which has _its_ definition of entropy which yields statistical mechanics' definition.

In quantum mechanics, entropy is basically the number of microstates -- exact and degenerate quantum states -- that make up a macroscopic state.

Pretty much everything on earth is. Even the landscape in most places is anthropic. — Olivier5

The mosquitoes near my house are very misanthropic, and I have red lumpy legs to prove it.

Right. Of course, who here is saying that science is the only way to do anything, Kenosha Kid?

Absolutely nobody. — ssu

Then you lost me here:

Starting from people studying the social sciences, which ought to use similar questioning, objectivity and try to refrain from subjectivity even if the answers cannot be gotten by performing laboratory tests as in the natural sciences. — ssu

The basic problem in my view is that postmodernism is basically criticism of something depicted vaguely as modernism, yet unfortunately to understand it one should first clearly know and understand what is criticized in the first place. That usually is what is missing. — ssu

I'll be honest, if we're talking the worst of pomo anti-science, of which there is a lot, I'm not sure there's even a lot of interest. Saying that E=mc^2 is an androcentric, misogynistic narrative for favouring the male lightspeed over more feminine constant speeds isn't exactly trying to engage with the field. It's just pointing at things and shouting MONSTERS!!! aka feminism.

But that's not true of Kuhn, Latour, people like that who actually studied science or studied scientists in situ.

I do wonder though how well deconstruction works on something that requires specialist knowledge of a difficult field. Do you include the bibliography or not? Technically you shouldn't, but then how can you follow the text? Might make an interesting exercise. I'd say that keeping an open mind about a text means being able to approach it from all angles, including a scientific one. But it doesn't follow that you have to be doing science to critique science.

Because if what you are taught only is what Foucault, Derrida and etc. have written without starting from those "age old white men from the Enlightenment"...( — ssu

Then already you have a scarcity of discourse. If that is the state of social studies across universities, then it seems we have a totalitarian metanarrative on our hands :yikes:

Far too easily, and I can remember this from decades ago, the student who had studied contemporary social history (with postmodernism or similar ideas) would use the observation that "science is a social construct" as a refutation, something that questions a scientific hypothesis. — ssu

But likewise you'll still find today people who see "science is a social construct" as a blasphemy or assault. Whatever their view of science is, that really is refuted. Including by me, pomo or no pomo #nopomo

Sure. Even Derrida himself can be deconstructed. — Olivier5

And therein lies p0m0's self-subsuming self-refutation just like relativism, global skepticism, nihilism – categorical deflations, or negations, which necessarily apply to themselves as well. Derrida deferred. — 180 Proof

I was hoping to come onto this. If one can deconstruct Of Grammatology, does that mean one cannot deconstruct Of Grammatology? Is "One cannot deconstruct Of Grammatology" a possible reading of Of Grammatology?

I think the accusation that pomo is self-refuting isn't that well thought out. Another example: is postmodernism a totalitarian narrative? In other words, can an argument for a diversity of discourses be a dominating discourse? I'd say: only if you're doing it wrong.

I mean, would speaking about science be necessarily a narrative? It can take the form of a narrative, but I don't think it's strictly necessary. Describing what photons do when they hit the eye or why the Earth goes around the sun is an explanation of observable facts. — Manuel

You're hitting on precisely the sort of thing we have to be careful about. I've recycled this story a lot on here but I find it genuinely insightful and I like to share the love.

There was a conference quite a few years ago that aimed toward a sort of state-of-the-nation for physics. One of the questions to cover was: What is a photon? The answer the conference reached was: A photon is a click in a photon detector.

That's how you make sure you're speaking of facts, not theories. I found this distinction really important as a postgrad, it's rather helped define my outlook and is probably partly the reason why I, with a physics background, am somewhat receptive to pomo.

That a photon exists in spacetime between its creation event and its destruction event is a story we tell ourselves. It's a very good story, and may well approximate reality better than any other story we ever tell ourselves about photons, but it also might not be true.

Empirical facts like clicks in photon detectors or observations of bodies in the solar system are not stories, it's true, but they have to be communicated and that _is_ a story, and as part of the scientific method they should feed back into theory and that too is a story.

I see a click in a photon detector but that's not science. Consensus about facts is necessary. Or, at least, I need to tell a good enough story to convince an editor and two referees that consensus is obtainable such that I wouldn't lie about it.

The story I tell about a scientific fact, e.g. that I heard a click in a photon detector, might be trivially undone by three lab assistants saying that there was no click. It's my story against theirs. I might know they're lying, but I might be lying, or mistaken. Ultimately we have to narrate.

This however doesn't clear up why postmodern lenses are an improvement over mitigated skepticism, for example. — Manuel

I don't think it has to be an improvement in terms of a particular criticism, but the idea is that we have diverse discourses each sceptical about each other, which ought to yield diverse criticisms, not just of science but science criticism. Also if we're counting deconstruction, which I think we should, it is an improvement to have another methodology by which to do so.

What according to you then is the scientific method?

Or you think the scientific method is a totalitarian metanarrative? Very postmodernist. — ssu

Ha ha thanks I think? No, as I said above, imo Lyotard confused an algorithm for a narrative. I'm not making the same mistake. The narrative here is that science is the best and only way to do anything, and so social studies and science studies should be scientific, right? That's a totalitarian metanarrative (as Lyotard would have it, and I'd agree).

Evidently science is a social construct, but
it is constructed via a certain method, which combines observations, hypotheses building aka modeling, and sharing and critiquing. Not everything goes. One has to anchor one's models in observations aka facts. — Olivier5

I agree. But the question is on how we interpret, discuss and represent those facts or, as Latour pointed out, how we ignore them if they're not the right facts. (Or in my area -- computational physics -- stop debugging when you get the right answer.)

That is precisely the value of Pomo to me: to make scientists (and others) better aware of the permanent presence of cultural a priori and biases in their own mind, as unsaid, unarticulated présuppositions, as these permeates their work more that they sometime should. — Olivier5

Well that's one value, and one that science has done very well out of despite the Sokals of the world. But pomo isn't limited to science, it's any text or discourse.