Pieceful, very well said. This is precisely why I love science so much – because it proves that not everything is constructed or relative, that certain things truly are always as they are, regardless of what language you speak or what frame of reference you use to think about it. There’s no room for cultural interpretation when, say, reporting the measurement of a constant whose value reproduces to within one part in a billion regardless of where and when you measure it (assuming your measurement apparatus and technique are good enough).

The deepest irony of postmodernism is this: the essence of the idea is that all thought systems are only valid within certain contexts. The postmodernist – deconstructionist approach is in itself a system of thought; but somehow its strongest adherents never notice that, by their own logic, there must be a limit beyond which their system is invalid. Science – or perhaps more accurately, mathematics – clearly defines that limit.

On a related note, one might say that effective field theory is the ultimate postmodern scientific theory since it explicitly defines the energy scales over which it is valid. As a pomo might say, effective field theory is the opposite of a hegemonic, totalizing discourse.

So no, we have absolutely nothing to learn from the wacky postmodernists about such things, b/c ultimately physics is supposed to be ‘language’ invariant (hence the strong reliance on mathematics and the drive to remove all human ‘presence’ or residuals from the laws that govern the world).

On a related note, I find it sad that intellectuals can’t simply call a spade for what it is. The entire postmodernist, constructionist endeavour has been perhaps one of the greatest embarrasments in the history of philosophy, and it would be nice if it would just go away.

Sean is sympathetic to the pomos in the same way that some liberals say nice things about Islam: they don’t really believe this crap but they want to distinguish themselves from horrible right-wing people who are so mean and nasty to people who basically hate everything they believe in. Let somebody else do the dirty work.

Hyperrationalist scientists and their followers dismissing the social construction of subjective, internal reality are exactly as ridiculous as PoMoLitCrit professors and pompous sophomores are when they claim the social construction of the laws of physics.

There’s no point in arguing with either side, or trying to point out the massive and incontrivertible evidence accumulated on both subjects. It’s an absolute joke to deny either form of truth in its own context and doing so reveals nothing but the rather narrow or parochial qualities of the mind of the one that does so.

What we’re left with is a situation that’s analogous, or maybe metaphorically related, to the quantum gravity situation in physics. We all know they’re both essentially correct when applied in the appropriate context. Each gives nonsensical results when misapplied outside its appropriate context. And the debate over how to reconcile them, or synthesize a superstructure which includes them both, or otherwise somehow create a picture of reality which resolves the contradictions, is a tense, sometimes vituperative, and often very silly one. They’re also the most interesting and important ongoing debates in the current noosphere.

Hm, a self-similar analogy. My work here is done.

But there is probably an objective reality of right and wrong with respect to a particular goal. What goals should we pick? Survival of the species, the happiness of the greatest number, the maximum personal happiness?

Anyway, one should also realize that religion and in particular God was invented to make the goals to pick and right and wrong non-subjective.

“Richard Rorty has passed away.”

Do you mean to say that he *died*?

Myself, I don’t buy this, and still think that scientific truths respond to something “out there” in a way that moral/political truths do not. But Rorty’s pressing criticism of this viewpoint is more difficult to answer than it seems. He was a fascinating writer and thinker, and philosophy wil miss him.

“We Are the Prisoners”

We are the prisoners

the prisoners of description

chained to our metaphors analogies

the limiting structures

of our languages

attempting to swim to one another

through the liquid of our verbal worlds

accomplishing approximations with

music poetry imagery

evoking empathy

from our individual experiences

our sensations

separate and similar

we are the prisoners

the prisoners of self-deception

tied to our evolutionary gifts of

hippocampal basal ganglia cortical circuitry

value-ladened logic filtered by our

recursive reentry neural loops

the punctuated continuum of primary consciousness

self-awareness wrought with secondary consciousness

the symbiotic dance of subjective and objective

coexisting

we are the prisoners

the prisoners of perception

isolated by experiencing unique sensations

neurosynaptic circuits all different

a Hieronymous Bosch landscape

yet connected through common emotions

a gift from life’s experiences

simultaneously separate and similar

the world knot slightly unraveling

touching one another

from our wells of limbic ground water

common ground of emotions

of qualities and values largely shared

separate and similar

a conundrum for the ages

© Ed Matheson, 2002