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