May 05 2008
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Some people maybe shouldn’t teach
In the maybe-next-time-you-should-actually-interview-people-before-hiring-them scenario, an English lecturer at Dartmouth went ballistic (link goes to the WSJ, ewww, sorry about that) when students questioned her suppositions.
Mind you, we’re only getting one side of the story, and that side is from the Wall Street Journal, which still thinks we’re being too easy on Iraq. Also, it opens with this anti-intellectualism line:
Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world.
Why do neocons hate smart people? Oh, I bet I can venture a guess.
Still and anyway, the story makes a good point. The lecturer appears to be something of a post-modern lunatic. The line of win is:
Ms. Venkatesan’s scholarly specialty is “science studies,” which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, “teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth.” She continues: “Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.”
You can guess how I feel about that. Scientific facts do reflect natural reality. Of course they do! That’s what they are. I’d love to see her scientific background.
Maybe she can get a job with the Disco ‘tute, if they’re not already burgeoning to overflowing with Expelled teachers. But then, she chose to sue Dartmouth, and DI tends to cut and run when faced with actual lawsuits.
If anyone has any more info on this case, please feel free to link to it in the comments. I’d like to know more; she does sound nutty, but I have to also account for the source of this info.
And incidentally, I do get ragged on by commenters who think I am some sort of far-left liberal goofball, but perhaps they should save it for people who really are way over on the rive gauche.
Tip o’ the deconstructionist hegemonistic mortarboard to Fark. Typical childish taunts ensue in that link, duh, but some funny ones too.
Dear BadAstronomer
You shouldn’t disparage a whole academic discipline so easily. Science studies have many things to say and your easy dismissal does not help cover its depths. Maybe this specific person is wrong (at least it seems to be wrong) but the whole ’scientific facts are absolute representations of reality’ argument has sparked many many arguments over the last century. Maybe you should read more philosophy of science and science studies books before making such a broad statement.
And all science studies are not about deconstruction and post-modernism.
Keep up the good work
Respectfully
Ambu aka Physicist and PhD candidate
If Ms. Venkatesan is being accurately quoted in that article, I wonder how she got that far in her academic career. Was she really so insulated and protected from people daring to ask her questions?
Admittedly, we don’t know just what was said by her students. They might have gotten very nasty indeed. But I would think that a teacher and lecturer would be better prepared, emotionally and academically, to have their views challenged.
Well this is her background appearantly:
http://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/summer07/html/bio_venkatesan.php
Here are the e-mails she sent to the students and college and more background info. (gossip site warning)
http://gawker.com/385255/ivy-league-prof-sues-students-for-being-mean-to-her
And according to this article she has dropped the lawsuit(gossip site warning)
http://gawker.com/385785/ivy-league-lawsuit-update
I just love to google when I read something hilarious…
Ambu, I don’t think it takes much thought to dismiss the idea that scientific facts are social constructs. If that were true, our space probes wouldn’t work. Neither would cars, buildings, disk drives, light switches, remote-controlled toys, cameras, tools, flashlights, glue, calendars, DVDs, magnets, airplanes, beds, staircases, screws, medicine, eyeglasses, Guitar Hero, telescopes, lighters, generators, nuclear power, keyboards, rockets, weather satellites, solar power, wind farms, cell phones, and, oh yeah, the computer networks upon which this story and my blog were distributed.
So forgive me for poopooing the idea that scientific facts don’t reflect natural reality.
As much as I hate to defend someone who sounds antiscience, sometimes accepted scientific “knowledge” *doesn’t* conform to reality, and social pressures *can* influence which questions scientists choose to ask and how they interpret the data they get.
It used to be an accepted medical “fact” that women were prone to hysteria, which was caused by their wombs. Subject groups for psychological research that was supposed to apply to the human brain in general were often exclusively male, and the results of that research provided the “facts” about what was “normal” for human brains and behavior, ignoring differences in male and female brains.
Now, I’m not saying that Ms. Venkatesan isn’t hysterical (in the non-medical sense) and out of line, and I believe that science is always improving, but that doesn’t mean that science doesn’t suffer the same sort of societal pressures and prejudices as anything else in shaping what it chooses to research and which questions it tries to answer.
Ambu writes
“Maybe this specific person is wrong (at least it seems to be wrong) but the whole ’scientific facts are absolute representations of reality’ argument has sparked many many arguments over the last century. Maybe you should read more philosophy of science and science studies books before making such a broad statement.”
Could you please explain why you did not go into detail about any of these “many arguments”? Are they of real substance or are they post-modern drivel also and how can one evaluate the claim without examples to be examined?
Phil,
It’s only an opinion piece; just because it’s published in the WSJ doesn’t make it better journalism or any more well-researched than an opinion piece in any other newspaper. Which is to say, everyone’s entitled to their opinion. In the end, some people’s opinions simply don’t matter.
You’re doing a good job of reminding them that when your opinion runs counter to the facts, the facts win, and that’s when your opinion doesn’t matter anymore.
Ethan
Reading the description of her book, I couldn’t help but laugh.
Molecular Biology in Narrative Form is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study that shows a connection between molecular biology and French narrative theory, and, from a unique perspective, bridges the gap between two disciplines that seem mutually exclusive. With many new insights on the link between science (in the form of DNA, a set of codes) and literature (in the form of language, another set of codes), this book looks at modern experimental science within the framework of semiotics. Priya Venkatesan reveals the extraordinary parallel between the work of scientists and the work of narratologists who develop narrative paradigms and analyze literary texts. Molecular Biology in Narrative Form will be a useful resource for scientists and literary theorists interested in the epistemological workings of science, as well as, anyone that desires to explore the linkages between scientific theory and literary analysis.
I mean seriously, molecular biology and French narrative theory? I thought I was reading an Onion story.
O.K. but besides “cars, buildings, disk drives, light switches, remote-controlled toys, cameras, tools, flashlights, glue, calendars, DVDs, magnets, airplanes, beds, staircases, screws, medicine, eyeglasses, Guitar Hero, telescopes, lighters, generators, nuclear power, keyboards, rockets, weather satellites, solar power, wind farms, cell phones, and, oh yeah, the computer networks upon which this story and my blog were distributed” what have the Romans, er scientists, ever done for us?
Dennis: Breakfast cereals?
Well, I could give many examples of the debates of the field. Suffice is to say that the fact that cars etc etc work is significant, but what happened when the theories behind them were proposed is also significant. Things are not always so clear cut as they seem.
However, I do not feel I am eloquent enough to defend a whole philosophical field now over two thousand years old. A good introduction would be “What is this thing called science?” by Chalmers. Another one is Hacking’s “Representing and intervening”.
An excellent introduction to science studies (in my humble opinion) would be “Science Studies: An advanced introduction” by Hess.
Unfortunately, many science studies papers are riddled with postmodernism and other such theories. Fortunately, not all.
Respectfully (again)
Ambu
P.P., I like making fun of neocons as much as the next guy, but the author’s attitude towards higher education in the US isn’t necessarily anti-intellectualism, and there wasn’t really anything to indicate whether Rago is actually a neocon or not. Of course, I don’t read the WSJ so maybe you know more about him than I do, but I think you’re seeing things that aren’t really there.
For those that have access to the Chronicle of Higher Education you can read about it here : http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/04/2674n.htm
Though it’s really short on the details of what’s behind all of this.
I wonder what her natural reality is like if it is not consisted of facts.
And well, I think that Gawker article proves it very clearly: she’s indeed one heck of a qwack (If I dare be so polite.).
I’m sure everyone is familiar with the Sokol hoax. If not, check out “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.”
So, what exactly does this have to do with the neocons? This deconstructionist style of teaching has little or nothing to do with the VRWC. It almost entirely inhabits the rarefied spheres of left-wing academia.
Shockingly, not everything is W’s fault. Disappointing, I know.
“Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world.”
Why do neocons hate smart people? Oh, I bet I can venture a guess.
There are entire departments dedicated to the proposition that there is no truth, scientific or otherwise. What’s so smart about that?
And yes, you are a far-left-liberal goofball.
I am a big fan of indoor plumbing, so I’d add that to the list.
The WSJ has been anti-intellectual for a long time, long before the neo-cons. I don’t read it often, usually only when a friend sends me a science or space article, and it seems to consistently refer to scientists as Mr. or Ms. rather than Dr. or Prof. This has been going on since at least the 70s when they quoted “Mr. Sagan.”
BA,
I agree with Ambu that you are much too quick here. Just because a theory makes correct predictions, it doesn’t show that it ‘reflects reality’. Newtonian physics was extremely successful, but in terms of today’s physics, it involves some major misconceptions. So why assume that the physics of the future won’t judge similarly about the physics of today? Another well-known argument: For any given body of observational data, one can in principle construct infinitely many different theories which satisfy this data.
I do not want to imply that the kind of realism you endorse is wrong. Nor do I like the kind of postmodernist criticism as put forth by this teacher. I just want to support Ambu’s point.
More of her writings:
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/53665/
which still thinks we’re being too easy on Iraq.
Too easy how? I haven’t been to the WSJ much since I realized I’m better at investing than most of their folks. And was it just one editor? The “Wall Street Journal” is a whole bunch of folks.
Jessica,
People are capable of intellectual weakness and wishfulness. That’s why science was arrived at to begin with. It’s why scientific hygiene includes checks & balances such as blind study methods and the independent reproducibility of results.
On the other hand, it’s on historical record that when this discipline is carelessly abandoned, failure follows. An infamous example: Lysenkoism. Stalinist Soviet doctrine chose to back a theory of genetics on no better basis than that it seemed to be in tune with… Stalinist Soviet doctrine. A lot of people in the Soviet Union went hungry for years because of this. Eventually the Soviet Union, in order to just feed its people, had necessarily to adopt empirically successful principles of genetics.
Fake science fails. Real science succeeds.
So, what exactly does this have to do with the neocons? This deconstructionist style of teaching has little or nothing to do with the VRWC.
It’s not the teacher, it’s the paper: the Wall Street Journal is an extremely conservative newspaper, apologetic for some of the worst excesses of the right, and as such, they do not get the benefit of the doubt when reporting on ’stoopid librul academia’.
I blame post-modernism (whatever that is) and cultural relativism. The west is rapidly becoming a place where nobody can ever be wrong and every opinion must be respected.
However, science isn’t an opinion. It’s a model of reality that is getting more and more accurate over time. Not because some scientist says so, but because it can be tested against nature.
Of course, funding is influenced by non-scientific opinion so some aspects of reality are less explored, but that doesn’t mean that the data we have is itself subject to the ideas of french philosophers or small tribes in Borneo which count 1,2,3,4,many.
Despite the anti-intellectualism that starts out the article, he does make a few good points at the end.
“far-left liberal goofball” is redundant
Using the term ‘ neocon’ to refer to conservatives in general is strong indicator that one is a ‘far-left liberal goofball’ .
The business of science is to suspect the “access to truth” of claims made about the world. We are influenced by culture, cognitive biases and all sorts of failings, but we work to overcome them, via ceaseless skepticism and mutual cross-criticism. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s worked well enough to revolutionize the human condition.
The hubris of “science studies” is to claim that one can undercut the discoveries of science, dismissing them as just another tribal narrative, while blissfully ignoring that this very maxim demands that our knowledge of human history, our diverse cultures and our divisions into those very tribes is equally suspect. It’s a self-defeating attitude. Honesty would suggest that the mascot for the profession be a snake swallowing its own tail.
BA, I think you’d like Alan Sokal’s new book, Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture (Oxford UP, 2008). It’s not just about pulling a prank on a journal with slipshod editorial practices, although the annotations he provides to his famous hoax article are pretty darn funny.
“And incidentally, I do get ragged on by commenters who think I am some sort of far-left liberal goofball, but perhaps they should save it for people who really are way over on the rive gauche.”
There’s a good reason for that.
“Why do neocons hate smart people? Oh, I bet I can venture a guess.”
I’m not sure what the word neocon means to everyone, it seems to change depending on who uses it, but we don’t hate smart people. We just think we’re smarter than liberals, which we are.
A definition of “right” and “left” also needs to be supplied and stuck to in order for this conversation to make sense.
The WSJ has been anti-intellectual for a long time, long before the neo-cons.
It was a very good paper until the 1990s or so. I cut my investing teeth as a child in the 1970s/1980s by reading the WSJ. Along with their free market slant, they used to be very pro individual rights. It was more of a classic conservatism that, while valuing business and markets, valued the individual first.
This is the reason we use the term “neocon” these days. The neocons have little resemblance to classical conservatives (classicons? retrocons?)
There have been some notable bright spots, like a win of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting about AIDS. Their business contacts in the Arab world has led to some excellent investigative reporting on the problems and cultural forces in play there. Sadly, those efforts led to the kidnapping and murder of WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl. I have to think that event has colored their subsequent coverage a bit.
But Murdoch/NewsCorp owns it now, so all bets are off.
The WSJ is not a neocon newspaper–if it is, back it up with some facts. Conservative does not equate with neocons.
This post is about the teacher, and antiscience, and not about the WSJ, whether you like that paper or not. But you can choose to focus on the messenger rather than the message if you want.
@Jessica:
“It used to be an accepted medical “fact” that women were prone to hysteria, which was caused by their wombs.”
Then what causes it?
I kid! I kid!!
Ah, I see. OK. I will certainly say that some scientific hypotheses fail to live up to reality, of course. But they are replaced by hypotheses that are closer to reality. That’s how science works. It’s no linear, and it doesn’t always approach the direction of truth (look up random walk if anyone cares) but over time it does.
And when evidence piles up, those hypotheses become theories, which are in many cases indistinguishable from fact (evolution, gravity, etc).
But to state that scientific facts aren’t reflecting reality is so silly it’s — to quote Wolfgang Pauli — is not even wrong. It way way beyond wrong.
As far as the WSJ goes, they were very strongly behind the Iraq invasion and occupation, even long long after it was clear to everyone else that it was and will continue to be a disaster.
I did not use the word “neocon” to refer to conservatives in general. I was making a specific case here. I have very good friends who are conservative, and surprise, many ideas I have would be classified as such as well.
Quiet_Desperation: “But Murdoch/NewsCorp owns it now, so all bets are off.”
It’s readership will probably go up.
Just between you and me and the rest of the galaxy, Rago’s “Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world…” line didn’t seem so much anti-science as a critique of our poor educational standards. Granted, the worst of our system tends to manifest at lower educational levels, but to tell the truth, I’ve known plenty of BA-level grads (no relation to a BA-blogger) that had no clue why water is blue.
It’s also worth noting that Rago ragged on a Dartmouth English teacher. Why’s that interesting? Because he’s a recent graduate from Dartmouth (apparently a former “Dartmouth Review” editor). I have no evidence that Rago ever crossed paths with Venkatesan, but the proximity of his history and her story have me a bit… skeptical.
Pirx,
There’s no pretense that science tells us what’s really happening when we aren’t looking. Of course you can contrive any number of models which accurately connect the dots. It’s also possible to contrive any number which connect few of the dots, or even none of them. Which models connect the most dots without “inserting miracle here?” And which ones get up and show us where there’s more treasure that we haven’t even seen before? The criterion for a good theory is open-ended empirical success. It doesn’t count when all the theory does is give us back the data upon which it was built. It must work hard for a living.
I’m not sure what the word neocon means to everyone,
Well, like I implied above, a neocon is a conservative that has broken from classical conservative traditions. One big change is allowing the extremely religious to worm their way into positions of power in conservative circles. Someone like Barry Goldwater (who had heavy libertarian leanings) would never have bowed to these loons.
“When you say “radical right” today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.” — Barry Goldwater in a 1994 Washington Post interview.
However, there are those whop use the term neoconservative to represent the resurgent conservatism of the Goldwater era, so maybe we need a new term for the Bush style conservatives. Bushcons?
@Mark Martin,
Yeah, I get that.
I’m just saying that as residents of our time period, we don’t have the benefit of future advanced science and cultural debate to suggest questions we may not think to be asking at the moment, and help us distinguish erroneous conclusions that are largely accepted as “fact” from solid conclusions.
It sounds silly to us today that doctors once thought it was a fact that hysteria was a disorder of the womb, and it’s easy to dismiss it as “fake science.”
But what are we accepting today that’s going to look silly in 200 years?
I read accounts of studies all the time where the data seems to support the conclusions the scientists draw, but I have a nagging sense of “I’m not sure they asked the right questions here.”
Not to get all lit-major-y on you (and yes, I am one of those useless liberal arts types *wry*), but as I said before, where, metaphorically, we choose to cast our gaze — what questions we ask, what subjects we choose to pursue, what conclusions we draw from data — are all subject to the same human creativity, genius, and fallibility as any other pursuit.
The data may be cold, hard, facts but what we make of it isn’t always so rock solid.
I loves me some postmodernism.
Sounds like a good idea to me. Get that started.
I think part of the problem is people view the Religious Right as the “far right.” I disagree with that. My political line goes from the left starts with the most government control to the right with none.
What was the subject of this blog post again?
@ Pirx
I tend to disagree. I hate how so many people use the limitiations of Newtonian physics as some sort of blemish on science and its interpretation of nature. Sure Newton’s theories contain some misconceptions… but they certainly accurately describe just about every one of our every day experiences and are hence a rather accurate representation of reality. Now, if we want to look into space or the quantum world, yes, our interpretation of reality must be more stringent instead of the usual extremely good approximations of Newton.
So what will the scientists of the future think when they look back on our knowledge of today? They will most likely say that we were mostly correct for the scenarios being considered at the time. Its similar for the evolution debate. Do we have a complete grasp on every nuance of evolution at this very moment? No… but we are far more right than we are wrong.
As for the infinite explanations of a data set argument… this is why scientists attack problems from many different angles and with many different experiments. One data set may be pretty weak at explaining a phenomena… but when you have multiple different methods that support the same conclusion, it is safe to say that the possibilities are at least narrowed down.
I guess I am just so tired of philosophers pondering about whether the reality we experience is in fact reality… if this reality is the only one we can experience… what is the point in wondering if we have some sort of wool pulled over our eyes… we will never see anything more than the wool and our scientific methods and theories (and every day experiences for this matter) for how this wool works IS reality for us and our understanding of it is just getting better and better. Sure it is fun to ponder about the nature of reality… but to say it takes away from the reliability of science just seems wrong to me.
As stated previously, science is an model of reality, not reality itself. Whether it is becoming more accurate over time depends on what reality actually is, which seems forever beyond reach and may be more in the domain of philosophy, consciousness, etc. Phil’s random walk analogy is a good one. But consider this: if Einstein had not been born, would we still have General Relativity? Maybe we would, but in another form. Our perspective on that scientific reality might be quite different. So in a sense, what we call “scientific facts” do depend on the social environment that gave us awareness of them, and to a large extent on the perspectives of the individual personalities involved. As much as I hate to admit it, there is a postmodern element involved.
Quiet_Desperation
This is the reason we use the term “neocon” these days. The neocons have little resemblance to classical conservatives (classicons? retrocons?)
When I first used the term ‘neocon’ (new ‘conservative’) or the alternate ‘pseudocon’, I also used “paleocon” for the ”old style” Conservative. Now I tend toward “Goldwater Conservative”. (Suggest reading carefully his books - notably Conscience of a Conservative before pigeonholing the views… e.g. Unions)
J/P=?
ambu, rereading my original response, I realize it sounds snotty. Sorry about that. I meant it to be mildly snarky, but not unctuous.
@ potterbro (and also BA, Mark Martin)
Newtonian physics: I don’t want to argue about whether it is fundamentally wrong from our point of view or not - it depends on which parts of it you consider essential. But all you say that it makes a lot of correct predictions. As I already argued before, this is compatible with being wrong.
Different bodies of data: Take every set of data you can think of and make a new set which contains all these sets. Again, it can be proven that there is an infinity of ways to satisfy this data by scientific theories. It’s really a principled problem.
“we will never see anything more than the wool and our scientific methods and theories (and every day experiences for this matter) for how this wool works IS reality for us”
Your own analogy suggests that there is some reality beyond the wool that we see, but which we cannot uncover. This is basically what many anti-realists say, the only difference is that you say you don’t care.
Again, I should stress that I agree that science is overwhelmingly successful, and that the best explanation for this is that it gets many things about reality right. But: Many philosophers of science are anything but stupid or pigheaded. And they often have an excellent background in the natural sciences themselves (unlike me).
I’m sorry BA, but I don’t see much difference in the drivel of say, the ID/creationists, and the drivel of the POMO deconstructionists. So I’m not sure why you feel obliged to apologize for your supposedly unctuous remarks (which I felt didn’t even rise to the “mildly” snarky level). You certainly haven’t before.
Anti-science is anti-science, no matter what side of the political aisle it arises from. Call it as you see it; don’t back down.
BA, thanks for recognizing that those on the left can be anti-science too. Don’t forget, the anti-science type of are enemy of a free society, whether they be on the left or right. Currently, the have found safe harbor on the right.
Which while not making them any less of a danger to society, does make them the right’s worst enemy. Who can defend those who are behind a crackpot like Ben Stein.
There are those on the right who would like to purge themselves of this disease, but there are so many people who accepting something just because it supports their religion.
Ambu: Remove humans from the planet and Earth would be bereft of philosophy. But, reality would continue unchanged and unabated. The Sun would continue to fuse atoms, the Moon would continue to raise tides, and radioactive elements would continue to decay at the same rate as always. Exactly like they did before we showed up.
Science’s explanations for how and why these thing, and everything else, happen may be imperfect, but an imperfect explanation of reaity does not negate reality.
If you stand under a heavy falling object, gravity will do its thing, as if you weren’t there.
Speaking of Sokal, he writes well about the difference between ontology (”What objects exist in the world? What statements about these objects are true?”) and epistemology (”How can human beings obtain knowledge of truths about the world? How can they assess the reliability of that knowledge?”) here: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/afterword_v1a/afterword_v1a_singlefile.html
Certainly our knowledge of the universe is partly influenced by culture; after all, we’re only human, and some bias is inevitable. But that knowledge has to correspond to the underlying reality in at least some fashion, or else it wouldn’t work at all. And, of course, that underlying reality itself is completely independent of human social conventions.
Man, I had no idea science could be a religion.
Ambu, Pirx, and maybe others:
It may or may not be the case that modern science correctly describes reality. That’s not the point. The point is, that it is tested by whether or not it conforms to reality.
You’re not alone. Creationists think that reality is defined by who wins a debate. (or more accurately, who claims to have won a debate) Journalists think there are always two sides to a story, and that both are valid. Postmodernists apparently believe that sufficiently dense terminology renders any point of view worthy of respect.
Denniso
O.K. but besides [long list deleted]” what have the Romans, er scientists, ever done for us?
Inflatable girlfriends?
… okay, I’m going to my room…..
J/P=?
What is really WTF is: What are some of you doing on BA? Spying? It’s pretty obvious you know ‘zero gee’ about science and reality. Way to call it Phil!
Post modernism… that’s not named right. More like pre-historic modernism. If I just will it that way, it is.
This is just another case in a long list of cases where freedom of speech on campus in the USA is MIA. Especially anything that challenges liberals or pre-historic modernism.
Phil people in academia reap what they sow and for years they have stifled dissent against leftist causes.
And yes you are way too far left for me, but science and skepticism are not ‘left or right’ (when you stick to them as subject matter).Which is why I chose both above all my ‘right-wing leanings’ as my religion and philosophy. YMMV
Matt Garrett, science can be a religion. Everyone needs religion, but not all religion is just a steaming pile of dogma. But what is science? Is physics science? Is chemistry science? How about geology, or astronomy? Is any one of these *a* science?
No.
Things such as physics, etc., are classes of questions which some people ask. If you treat them in a scientific manner, then you make progress toward successful answers, answers which reliably deliver the goods.
Science is a discipline. It is NOT a model of how the world itself is put together. It’s a view that the questions should come before the answers, and that the answers are never the final answers. Science is following the trail where IT leads, not to where your great, great, great, great,… great grandparents figured out where it leads via their comparatively minuscule experience. In the future everything which today is understood may be even better understood by generations with their much broader spectrum of experience than we have today. It just keeps going. Contrast this with dogmatic religions, which cannot even stomach the idea of being errant. It’s pathetic.
Is Priya Venkatesan any relation to Peter Venkman?
If Ambu wanted to help out, he could propose some alternate theories of physical laws that predict reality better than those which now exist. If Ambu cannot do that, Ambu need sit down.
The “Newtonian physics is not perfectly correct so therefore all science is as hokum as Huck Finn and a stump of rainwater” is very Ben Steinish of Ambu and his Pirxish acquaintance.
This somehow smells like the Zeno-esque strawman of the lack of “intermediate fossils” in the geologic record.
Pathetic.
Try again.
This story reminds me a bit of a Human-Computer Interaction course I once took, where I spent the entire semester arguing with the lecturer and TA, and generally being disagreeable about and disrespectful of almost everything they threw at is. The only difference was that instead of suing me, they gave me top marks
Incidentally, if anybody wants another good recommendation for an introductory text in science studies I would suggest Bowler & Morus “Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey”. Since this is an introductory textbook, they work enormously hard to present a balanced view between the mainstream of scientific historians and the more outre and outlandish views.
@ BaldApe, Douglas Watts
So your comments are addressed to me? Did you actually read what I wrote? It’s just a few lines, so it shouldn’t be that difficult.
To repeat: I do believe that scientific theories purport to correctly describe reality, and that some of them do. I certainly believe that these theories mostly make true predictions. I also think that postmodernist criticism and constructivism is completely flawed. One really has to be incredibly ignorant to compare what I said with some creationists.
To repeat the argument against scientific realism: Take all the observational data that exists. You can satisfy this data with infinitely many different theories. Which of them is correct? Like I said, I don’t take this to refute realism. But it is certainly a serious problem. I know you are not able to solve it, and thus your reaction will be to say that you don’t care or whatever. But please, in light of this, don’t say that the argument is ridiculous and that reason is on your side.
Pirx, it’s not as serious as you’ve led yourself to believe. If Sherlock Holmes is hot on the case, is it really a problem that an infinity of hypothetical scenarios are, in principle, consistent with the clues? Fretting over an infinity of “maybes” is a recipe for making no progress at all. Science doesn’t tell anyone the absolute truth about what’s happening when we aren’t looking. If we knew all that, we wouldn’t need theories. But empirical facts are empirical facts, and those facts do categorically *exclude* whole classes of theories. It scrapes those barnacles right off the hull.
I thought the article’s (editorial’s?) author did a very good job of making his point. In case you missed it, he summed it up here:
“Such conduct is hardly representative of the professoriate at Dartmouth, my alma mater. Faculty members tend to be professional. They also tend to be sane.”
Jonah Johansen: “Using the term ‘ neocon’ to refer to conservatives in general is strong indicator that one is a ‘far-left liberal goofball’ .”
Nice try, but the neocons currently control the Republican party. If you don’t like that (and you shouldn’t) then work to change it.
Denying reality makes one a “far-right conservative goofball,” perhaps?
There are two equally weak statements: 1) â??Science is only a social constructâ?? and 2)â??Science is not a social construct.â?? A lot of this goes back to a misreading of Kuhn. Kuhn did not argue that science was not empirical. To the contrary, his hypothesis only makes sense if science is empirical, for he argues that established scientific ideas break down *when they no longer conform to observed data.* Whatever other flaws one may find in his work, he never suggested that science was â??only a social construct.â?? But while science is empirical, it most certainly is also a social construct, given that it is conducted by human beings. Why do scientists study what they study, and in the manner that the do so? Their love of the subject? Well, of course. But also because they want grants, a post-doc, a tenure-track, and tenure itself. This shapes the questions they ask, the way they go about answering them, and the ways they interpret observed data. To note that science is an empirical endeavor within a social construct is in fact a trivial observation. This doesnâ??t mean that the ID people or the anti-vaccinationists have a leg to stand on, nor does it mean that reality itself is a social constuct. But a defense of science should not rest on the assertion that scientists are not human beings.
There are two equally weak statements: 1) â??Science is only a social constructâ?? and 2)â??Science is not a social construct.â?? A lot of this goes back to a misreading of Kuhn. Kuhn did not argue that science was not empirical. To the contrary, his hypothesis only makes sense if science is empirical, for he argues that established scientific ideas break down *when they no longer conform to observed data.* Whatever other flaws one may find in his work, he never suggested that science was â??only a social construct.â?? But while science is empirical, it most certainly is also a social construct, given that it is conducted by human beings. Why do scientists study what they study, and in the manner that the do so? Their love of the subject? Well, of course. But also because they want grants, a post-doc, a tenure-track, and tenure itself. This shapes the questions they ask, the way they go about answering them, and the ways they interpret observed data. To note that science is an empirical endeavor within a social construct is in fact a trivial observation. This doesnâ??t mean that the ID people or the anti-vaccinationists have a leg to stand on, nor does it mean that reality itself is a social constuct. But a defense of science should not rest on the assertion that scientists are not human beings.
To: Buzz Parsecon:
Is Priya Venkatesan any relation to Peter Venkman?
Of course she is related to Venkman….. she is another University Researcher in an arcane, pseudo-science pursuit (Although Dr.Venkman was proven right about the spirit-world).
The real questions are: Who is funding her work & who is reviewing her work? Somehow this “teacher” got off the rails.
I love the BA blog….. Great info followed by huge energy about the strange, weird and ridiculous. Keep up the good work Phil, there is a huge reward in the afterworld (72 knowledgable PhD candidates).
Phil,
If you’ve read the links provided, you will see that the story has nothing to do with the professors teaching about science, but rather with the fact that she has class room management skills similar to those exhibited here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXhbf9gf1KA
Now, turning to your reaction, you know (if you have ever read my comments here and at Meyer’s Journal and elsewhere), that I support you personally (I’ve been with since you were a yahoo group or however it was you started out so many years ago one ahs difficulty remembering the details) and of the skeptical movement. Probably you will not believe me, but sometimes, your understanding of the humanities reminds me of the bible-thumper’s understanding of physics. You know you are an expert, so you assume you know all about whatever it is you are talking about, even outside of astronomy. A very common error, one I probably commit myself when I talk about physics (I’m a classicist).
The scientific method and the discoveries of science are indubitably the products of specific Western social constructs. Otherwise how could you explain the fact that science arose at one particular time and one particular place, the west? Scientific facts certainly are social constructs—that is why people who do not participate in Western culture often reject science (fundamentalists being a case in point—they reject the development of western culture during and after the scientific revolutions and the Enlightenment). While science aims, more successfully than any other world view, to approximate itself to reality, it is still shaped by political and social factors—that is what she meat by declaring it suspect (not a word I would use, but it is defensible). Expelled aside, you know as well as I do that science, for example, has often been used to support racist ideology—you must be aware that Gould wrote extensively refuting such older scientific ideas and writings. So science sometimes produces result that suit the political and social location of the scientist rather than nature.
Wall Street Journal isn’t any worse then any other major newspaper, say the New York times. O.o
Still just as legitimate of a news source as the rest of them.
Personally I read the BBC site.
Pirx and Ambu,
As one of the guys I work with is fond of saying, “all models are wrong - some are useful.”
It makes no difference to science if there are an infinite number of (other) possible theories that fit the facts. I disagree with you - its *not* a serious problem. Because scientists will use whichever of those infinite theories they find most useful at the time, until they find a more useful one. Problem solved. Example #1: Heisenberg and Shroedinger originally came up with different mathematical formulations of QM. After a couple of months, they figured out they were mathematically equivalent, but most people think Heisenberg’s matrix description is harder to work with so we generally use and teach Shroedinger’s. Nobody suffered major angst over the choice and science as a discipline dealt with the issue quite easily. Second example: in nuclear physics we use both fermi gas models (unstructured) and shell models of the nucleus. These two models are philosophically incompatable, but each is useful for solving (different) sets of problems. So we use both, or rather, each where it is most useful, and sometimes a combination of the two. No problem. Science doesn’t come to a grinding halt just because we have no perfect theory on the nucleus. Will we be happy when we have a better explanation? Yes! Does that mean that nuclei are socially constructed? No! It means our understanding of them is incomplete. Again: All models are wrong - some are useful.
Its also not a new or revolutionary idea that aspects of science are socially constructed. We know that. To be useful, Science Studies has to offer a fix to that problem, not just point it out. To paraphrase Sokal, Science Studies observations tend to fall into two categories - observations that are true but boring (The NASA budget is decided by politics! Scientists suffer from the confirmation bias!), and observations that are interesting but wrong (Physical laws can be influenced by human opinion!), but there are very few or no observations coming out of the subject that are both interesting and true. Now, if you science studies guys can come up with a way to *stop* NASA budgets from being decided by politics, we hard scientists will be all ears.
Eric
Peter Backus wrote:
It’s difficult to conclude too much from that (as much as I hate to defend the WSJ). The Chronicle of Higher Education also follows this policy. Data which would aid in deciding the reason for the policy could include how the WSJ titles other professionals, if that helps any.
I also hasten to add (belated though this is) that “scientific facts” had better mean “data” and never “theory”. No theory is a fact — although some are pretty well-supported — and anyone who conflates the two shouldn’t be teaching philosophy of science for the simple reason that they don’t understand science well enough to analyze it. (I’ve met science philosophers who do understand plenty about science and have some interesting thoughts on the process. I won’t dismiss the whole field because it has its merits.)
Helena Constantine, can you elaborate on “Scientific facts certainly are social constructs” a little more? Can you give us examples? Because I think people have different ideas on what this means when they’re debating from different sides. What is a scientific fact?
I am not Helena Constantine, but I think we all need to clarify what we mean by “facts” and what that means vs “scientific facts”. For instance:
In the recent ID debates in Kansas and Florida, the definition of “theory” has been bandied about to support and refute evolution. I have seen PZ and BA and other refer to evolution as “fact” and not a theory in the way that word is popularlyunderstood. And rightly so, the mispurposed use of “theory” by ID is a propogandist move.
But is it a “fact” of the same quality and notion as Maxwell’s formulas? I think they are in fact different. And I think it is appropriate to consider their usage as a defining characteristic of the theories and implementations that they serve.
Emprical data points do not define science or scientific theories. Purely empirical endeavors have a name: engineering (my field).
So, the idea of studing science and the scientific method and questioning it in an effort to improve by improving our understanding of how it works is not only valid: it is scientists eating their own dog food because that is the very foundation of the scientific method.
The fact that some academics and lay people do not understand what philosophy of science says or that they may misapply it does not mean that it is wrong or below scientific interest. It means that there are misguided people. Science, which has seen technology used in ways not intended by the framers of the science that drove it, should understand that better than any other field.
Science, as it is *practiced* is definitely a social construct. The construct defines what questions are asked and what problems are solved. That statement is not anti-emprical, indeed it *is* empirical and materialistic. The physical truths that are uncovered by that construct are not defined by science nor do they define science. But how we interpret them and what we do with them is social -just consider Kaluza-Klein and its rejection for years until suddenly in the late 80’s it made sense again. If it turns out to be “fact”, why was the study of higher dimensions ignored and considered a career killer for so long?
You can’t dismiss the notion that easily. If someone like Priya Venkatesan doesn’t understand it, that doesn’t mean that you should not either.
This is Helena.
When the tribsemen in New Guinea who spread kreutsfeld-jacobs disease through ritual cannibalism, were told the scientific fact that they wree killing themselves by eating their relatives’ brains, they had never heard anything so ridiculous in their lives. They knew that their ritual actions were both good and necessary and therefore could not harm them. For them the scientific fact had no meaning, did not exist.
Another example are the German scientists who engineered the Holocuast–mostly Medical doctors. In their minds they were working on the basis of scientifically proven facts of eugenics.
One accepts the world view in which one participates. Whether one accepts science as a valid explanation of the world, and what version of science one accepts, is culturally determined.
Well, I expected some feedback but this is somewhat…unnerving. The Bad Astronomer, awesome guy that he is, just said the obvious in his third comment (As I understand it): One should not disparage a whole academic field. That’s it.
But of course, some people said I should propose alternate theories etc etc. You know guys, these arguments (If you fell of the flour yoy would see if gravity is true eyc) are not very original, and within the field I am humbly besieging you to spend some of your time before passing judgement, have been dealt with, one way or another.
And I should clarify again that personally I am not that great a fan of either postmodernism or relativism. But some of the opinions formed here are just way to simplistic. And I tried in good faith to propose some books that may clarify the issue (books well established and generally respected). But after all, everything is OK. The point is to discuss such things before forming opinions.
Thanks for your time
I’m a bit late to the party, so someone may have already mentioned this: When you use words like “truth” and “reality” in a philosophical context, you’re in for a world of pain. There are so many complications with these terms, it is not even funny anymore. The simple picture of “experimental data leads to increasingly accurate description of the universe” is completely untenable. Every observation is theory-laden, and theories are social constructs, if only for the fact that they are constructed by people.
It is unfortunate that the postmodern social constructivists have perverted a perfectly sound intellectual discipline like Philosophy of Science. But that does not mean we can just ignore the problematic relationship between science and “reality”. Our most successful theory, quantum mechanics (in all its forms), does not have a generally accepted realist interpretation. More than 70 years after the birth of the theory, and we don’t seem to converge on what it really means. Stick that in your philosophical pipe and smoke it!
Helena,
The New Guineans didn’t arrive at their rejection of the disease theory scientifically. They did so in a most unscientific manner: dogma. The Nazi doctors? You’ve got to be kidding. They weren’t being scientific. They weren’t even in a position to be scientific. Under such conditions, being freely scientific about the issue would’ve been an act of suicide.
Mark,
Exactly the point. In their society science either does not exist or is construed differntly than you and I understand it, demosntrating that science is a social construct.
Pieter Kok above said it much better than me, look at his psot jsut above yours.
Incidnetly, the nazi doctors didn’t go along with genocide out of fear, they were the one who started pushing for it on their own initiative, begining with euthanizing (as they saw it) the hanicapped.
Helena,
Pieter hasn’t said anything to illuminate science as *merely* effectively a political party. Notice how he pointed out that decades post-discovery, no one has figured out what quantum mechanics “really is”. This is because it’s not just a political device. The theory of QM is extremely successful experimentally. It’s possible to falsify it. That’s scientific. If someone is uncomfortable not knowing what QM “really is”, then it’s that individual’s own problem. There are several common *interpretations* of QM. But interpretation of theory is not the theory itself. The theory says what it says, but offers no opinions about itself. Interpretations are offered as brainstorms, to assist in thinking about it in new ways which may or may not bear fruit in the form of a further generalization of the theory. Philosophers are welcome to debate the metaphysical meaning of a scientifically arrived at theory all day long. The theory in the mean time will have spent that day delivering the goods.
Now, as for the New Guineans, their lack of insight into scientific practice isn’t my problem. Lack of science isn’t an invalidation of science, nor does it make science into a political phantom. One may as well point out that ants don’t think scientifically. They’re certainly socially oriented creatures. They also lack scientific thought. How ants think doesn’t relegate science to the heap. It’s science which will allow us some understanding of both real ants and the metaphorical ant within each of us.
And even if you wish to naively insist that every doctor in Nazi Germany was giddy with childlike delight to be of service to the Party’s eugenics policies, this also bears no weight. Eugenics per se is not an invalid principle. Anyone who’s bred cattle or flowers knows that eugenics works. People are at this very moment practicing eugenics, as they choose with whom they will and will not procreate. It certainly is possible to execute a eugenics program scientifically. Science is like a box of tools. There’s more than one task which can be done with those tools. If the Nazis used scientific methodology in studying eugenics, then that’s how they did it. What questions people ask and tackle scientifically isn’t the issue. Elsewhere in Germany during the war von Braun was busy engineering the A-4 rocket. I challenge anyone to show that all the physics, chemistry, metallurgy, etc employed in that project were pretty much just the fashion of the day.
I actually teach astronomy — at Dartmouth! — and from what I can see in the press, it looks as if this instructor suffered from some kind of psychosis that evidently developed between the time she was hired and the time the course was taught. It’s very rare that college teachers go off the rails like this, but I think a similar breakdown could have happened anywhere, in any subject, even a hard science. The debates about post-modernism and such are all very interesting, but I think the subject matter has very little to do with what happened with this unfortunate instructor and her even more unfortunate students. In my experience, by the way, Dartmouth students are almost all very nice and very smart — it’s hard to imagine them actually being abusive to an instructor, especially one who is assigning them grades.
A word about the source. The WSJ article was written by an alum who was a former Dartmouth Review staffer. The DR is a right-wing paper that is funded heavily by outside money and which has, for more than two decades, been a reactionary voice on campus. The right-wing “noise machine” has for many years had it in for academia, about the only place on the cultural spectrum where the left has any voice remaining, and it feels as if Dartmouth has been a particularly juicy target, despite it being arguably the most conservative school in the Ivy League. This is a very, very long story, and a huge topic, but — I have science to do, classes to teach, and so on.
“[Nice try, but the neocons currently control the Republican party. If you don’t like that (and you shouldn’t) then work to change it.
Denying reality makes one a “far-right conservative goofball,” perhaps?]”
_________________________________________
Correct me if I am wrong
[Very roughly] There are several uses for the term neo-con.
Original meaning referred to a small group of mainly liberal New York city Jews who broke with the left primarily over foreign policy in particular what they saw as the lefts inadequate support of Israel and its sympathy with Marxist’s revolutionaries and the Soviet Union. Norman Podoritz Irving Kristol, their sons and Commentary Magazine. They identified more with the strong anti-communism of the pre-McGovern Democratic party.
Later technical meaning Conservatives who shared the Hawkishness of the above and in particular a belief that US Military Force should be used to reshape the middle east in a way more favorable to Us and Israeli interests. For Ex: Pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Current misuse- A general pejorative for Conservatives who support President Bush or a strong forceful US military foreign policy or exercise of force to further perceived US interests.
The term neo-con is used mostly by individuals on the left who are convinced their ideological opponents are stupid and evil.
I think the equivalent terminology the right uses would be “a bunch of Moveon.org types” “Marxists” .