If you're guessing Latour's motivation to undermine his own decades-old project, I'm betting you'll guess right.
In a series of controversial books in the 1970s and 1980s, he argued that scientific facts should... be seen as a product of scientific inquiry. Facts, Latour said, were “networked”; they stood or fell not on the strength of their inherent veracity but on the strength of the institutions and practices that produced them and made them intelligible. If this network broke down, the facts would go with them....
The mid-1990s were the years of the so-called science wars, a series of heated public debates between “realists,” who held that facts were objective and free-standing, and “social constructionists,” like Latour....
The past decade has seen a precipitous rise not just in anti-scientific thinking — last year, only 37 percent of conservative Republicans believed in the occurrence of global warming, down from 50 percent in 2008 — but in all manner of reactionary obscurantism, from online conspiracy theories to the much-discussed death of expertise. The election of Donald Trump, a president who invents the facts to suit his mood and goes after the credibility of anyone who contradicts him, would seem to represent the culmination of this epistemic rot.....
“I think we were so happy to develop all this critique because we were so sure of the authority of science,” Latour reflected this spring. “And that the authority of science would be shared because there was a common world.... Now we have people who no longer share the idea that there is a common world. And that of course changes everything.”
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I marvel that post-modernists genuinely seem NOT to have considered the consequences of their work. Did they think they could evolve theories which undermined the institutions and truths they opposed or didn't care about, without those theories eventually undermining the institutions they do care about? Or maybe they never imagined that they would become the authorities who are the targets of post-modern thinking. Short-sighted either way, and I for one am in no mood to acquiesce to their appeals to authority now.
Scientists often claim their authority by threatening and bullying those who do not conform to their views. They are not the anti-Trump, they are quite often the mirror image of Trump.
I told them to burn everything down, but I didn't mean burn down my house and livelihood. I meant everyone else's.
Science is fine.
The scientists, however, also go to church.
Eppur si muove."
Of course it's about global warming, because if several hundred years of the scientific method has taught us anything, it's that we must enforce strict adherence to the current orthodoxy. Apostates must be prevented from publishing, denied tenure, shunned by their colleagues. Skepticism and doubt are all very nice in principle, but the fate of the planet is at stake. Do it for the kids!
Democrats own "science." Like healing crystals. And spellcasting. And vaginal steaming.
On scientific matters, folks often conflate cause with effect or reverse the two (famous Michael Crichton quote about wet sidewalks causing rain).
So, I don't have a real problem with global warming or climate change (the effect). I'm willing to accept these at face value.
But I have mucho skepticism that man-made activities are the cause of this effect.
I'm also fairly skeptical that driving a Prius or getting solar panels or composting will have any impact on the effect.
But I'm totally open to be persuaded on this, none of my opinions are hard.
When you go to war you discover reality exists and you can't de-construct your way to victory. It's the best proof of how empty speech and slogans are.
I'm open to the argument humans misunderstand reality. I get that. I don't believe there is no underlying reality.
Science isn't perfect, it's just the best way we have for getting at what is real.
"Post Truth". Jesus. When are we finally going to just start calling this stuff post-sane.
I love when scientists refuse to use the scientific method and instead resort to name calling, posturing, smugness, and groupthink to get their way. Galileo loved it too.
Actually- no one disputes the climate is changing. Warming. Cooling. Warming. Cooling. What we want to be shown is when it hasn't been.
If you don't endorse my political policy solution you're anti-science. And they thought I wasn't paying attention...
So he admits he spent decades wasting everyone's time?
Is it a fact that Trump won the 2016 election because Russians bought some Facebook ads?
Our country's smartest people say it's a fact.
What do post-truth philosophers say?
I enjoy reading critical works from the 60s and 70s precisely because those authors were completely skeptical of authority. You can read environmentalists from that era who are as dogmatic as any environmentalist today, but with a completely different ethos. They tended toward anarchism and self-sufficiency because they had no trust in authority. That maverick creativity doesn't exist in the smug fanatics of today, whose ideas always slouch toward authority to be born.
When Latour says "we were so sure of the authority of science" he is betraying his own best ideas. He was NOT sure of the authority of science and he's a cowardly suck-up to say he was.
Is it a fact that Trump won the 2016 election because Russians bought some Facebook ads?
Our country's smartest people say it's a fact.
Facts are dependent on how convenient they are to one's political opinion and worldview.
According to some.
Apostates must be prevented from publishing, denied tenure, shunned by their colleagues.
Childhood friend Mish Michels among them
"Mary Kay Letourneau, the her-truth Philosopher has spent decades deconstructing her past to create an academic pathway for female middle and high school gym teachers and trainers to claim their "authority." Can her ideas help them today? If you're guessing Letoruneau's motivation, that of course changes everything."
The past decade has seen a precipitous rise not just in anti-scientific thinking — last year, only 37 percent of conservative Republicans believed in the occurrence of global warming, down from 50 percent in 2008 — but in all manner of reactionary obscurantism
I'm sorry, but just how fucking stupid does someone have to be to write something like this?
All of the "Post-Truth" schools of thought are on the Left. All of them. The quotation above is as far removed from fact as a reporter claiming that American gun culture is Left-wing.
I see this all the time among my Lefty friends. "No one here but us cool & rational chickens", in spite of the fact that Post-Modern categories & epistemological assumptions infect their every thought.
The genteel Left e.g. the readers of the NYT, have yet to even begin to answer for the damage that Lefty Postmodernism has done to the modern world.
Holy shit, is it just me, or is Blogger on the warpath this afternoon?
Save a copy of yer comments before yo post them!
Compost because you want to improve your soil and you have the time and space to do it. Use solar because you did a cost benefit analyses and it is worth it. I can't think or a real good reason to drive a Prius...
Ehh, adolescent rebellion. What a tired trope.
This is why I can't take the left seriously. Rebellion was boring when Eugene O'Neill wrote about it, and it's boring now
From the people who brought you "gender science". No, seriously, believe us...
Trump haters and leftists never seem to want to discuss the fact that there are plenty of anti-vaxx people and anti-GMO people at universities and among those with higher education. Are they by any chance questioning proven facts? I think they are. Same with fear of nuclear reactors, and electro-magnetic radiation. It's apparently becoming common on campus to think that being born with the wrong-gendered body is about as common a being born with the right one; young people should be encouraged to have surgery to make things right. The idea that supermarket food and probably tap water are more or less poison is also common. Government funding helped get some anti-food research (anti-fat, anti-salt, anti-cholesterol) into the world. There are lots of people now reporting on the difficulty in replicating many results from peer-reviewed studies. Those of us who are sceptical about some of the climate dogma can't help thinking that if credentialed people with a lot of funding have been wrong before, they can be wrong again. The subjectivity horse is out of the barn.
A post-truth philosopher is thinking in his office.
Suddenly there is a soft explosion and a flash of light. The room fills with smoke. Then a genie appears.
The genie says: "I will grant you a choice -- either a million dollars or else wisdom."
The post-truth philosopher thinks carefully for a while and then tells the genie his choice.
The genie says: "Your wish is granted."
Then just as suddenly as the genie had appeared, the genie disappears.
Then the philosopher exclaims: "Oh, no, I should have chosen the money!"
The postmodernists just used Latour to bash Western Civilization until they started to worry about their own petard. Hard science and engineering are under full attack on campus, and Latour regrets his part in it.
He was not apparently actually attuned to the grievance studies narrative about hard science. It's all about colonialism and oppression, not a "different way of knowing."
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/77743.Bruno_Latour
“The social sciences are obsessed by epistemological questioning in a way that no science, no real science is. You never have a chemistry class that starts with the methodology of chemistry; you start by doing chemistry. And the problem is that since the social sciences don’t know what it is to be scientific, because they know nothing about the real sciences, they imagine that they have to be listing endless numbers of criteria and precautions before doing anything. And they usually miss precisely what is interesting in natural sciences which is [LAUGHS] a laboratory situation and the experimental protocol!”
― Bruno Latour, The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE
“The various manifestations of socialism destroyed both their peoples and their ecosystems, whereas the powers of the North and the West have been able to save their peoples and some of their countrysides by destroying the rest of the world and reducing it's people to abject poverty.”
― Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
I'm sorry, but just how fucking stupid does someone have to be to write something like this?
It just comes with the territory. "Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them" and all that.
Civilization did not cause global warming, global warming caused civilization.
Republicans read the comments added by the programmer of the EAU global warming computer network.
Remember this ?
From Phil Jones To: Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University). July 8, 2004
"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
The IPCC is the UN body charged with monitoring climate change. The scientists did not want it to consider studies that challenge the view that global warming is genuine and man-made.
From: Kevin Trenberth (US National Center for Atmospheric Research). To: Michael Mann. Oct 12, 2009
"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't... Our observing system is inadequate"
"I think I suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome since Trump has nothing at all to do with authority of science," Latour reflected this spring. "And yet I still mention him for no apparent reason; perhaps I'm just virtue signalling, but there's so much nonsensical signalling going on nowadays that it's just noise, because, hey, associating Trump with, like, the 'authority of science'! WTF is that about, amirite?"
The election of Donald Trump, a president who invents the facts to suit his mood and goes after the credibility of anyone who contradicts him, would seem to represent the culmination of this epistemic rot.....
This is from the NYT where they invent the facts to suit their readers moods and go after the credibility of anyone who contraditcs them....
The whole thing is the result of a misunderstanding of science.
And a misunderstanding of the sources of technology, the development of which has given science its modern prestige and authority.
In a substantial way, that prestige science has acquired from technology is a fraud.
Tech works by making devices, techniques and systems work - that is, to function.
Its a thing, concrete, undeniable. It happens through a process of development and testing.
Most of the modern world, the Industrial Revolution and all, nearly all the tech on which modern life depends, owes little or nothing to science. It is the academic fairy tale that "scientists" "discovered" this or that, but its not true. Very little in the history of technology was created by applying a scientific theory to a mechanism. And a lot of scientists who were involved in creating these systems and mechanisms were acting not as scientists as such, but as engineers, that is in empirical R&D.
Oh, and BTW, those who call people skeptical of CAGW form a large Venn overlap with those insisting there is no biological difference between those with XX chromosomes and those with XY chromosomes. Like Nicolas Matte:
https://otherclub.blogspot.com/2018/03/science-contemptists.html
Things that used to be settled scientific facts. (Many of them in my lifetime.)
Mercury is tide-locked to keep only one face to the Sun
Humans have 48 chromosomes
The continets do not move. They have been fixed at the same locations since the Earth’s formation.
Prehistoric animals migrated from continent across temporary “land bridges.”
Light propagates through an “ether” that permeates space.
The atom resembles a tiny Solar System, with electrons orbiting the nucleus.
The face of the planet Mars is covered by linear features called “canali” or “channels.”
Pluto is the outermost planet of the Solar System.
The genie says: "I will grant you a choice -- either a million dollars or else wisdom."
Wishing Well
A post-truth philosopher walks into a bar and the bartender says "That'll be $8.50" and the philosopher says "I haven't ordered anything yet!" and the bartender says "Circumstances in which objective facts are less influential than appeals to emotion and personal belief are in effect. Now, with the $1 stupidity tax, it'll be $9.50."
YoungHegelian said...
Holy shit, is it just me, or is Blogger on the warpath this afternoon?
Save a copy of yer comments before yo post them!
Just hit reload on the error page and click resubmit when the alert pops.
RNB said...
Pluto is the outermost planet of the Solar System.
Pluto is a planet!
“I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the consensus on climate change and the consensus on witches. At the witch trials in Salem, the judges were educated at Harvard. This was supposedly 100 percent science. The one or two people who said there were no witches were immediately hung. Not much has changed.” - Dr. Will Happer, Princeton University, in “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change”
The election of Donald Trump, a president who invents the facts to suit his mood and goes after the credibility of anyone who contradicts him, would seem to represent the culmination of this epistemic rot.....
This is completely false. The greatest delegitimizer of fact is campus generated propaganda studies. This includes the rape hysteria studies and Elizabeth Warren's medical bankruptcy study among others.
But the original failure began with left activists' insistence that objective fact doesn't exist. They delegitimized reality so they could claim their own value judgements based on their experience could not be challenged by others. Now the left complains the framework for agreement they destroyed no longer exists.
Get back to us when you're ready to support it across the board and not just when doing so supports your argument. Until then piss off.
@Achilles,
Just hit reload on the error page and click resubmit when the alert pops
That's what I do. But I don't want anyone to lose a whopper of a comment assuming that that work-around will function in the future.
So, the post-truth people who wanted to tear down traditional cognitive authority actually assumed the authority of science.
Similarly, the post-morality people who want to tear down traditional moral authority assume the authority of a semi-Christian tradition.
Without it, there goes your civilization.
It's mostly just word-play without much substance to it. It's hard to dispute that language, including the language in which scientific ideas are expressed, is a 'social construct.' Same with the conceptual framework we all use daily. That doesn't mean it's arbitrary or 'subjective' (rather than 'objective') in any significant sense. It certainly isn't a solipsistic denial that there is a world that we all perceive (some more acutely than others). It just means that language captures the society's collective experience and renders it (and our common or differing perceptions of it) comprehensible to ourselves and each other. It also means that, as a group, we sometimes misperceive what's in front of us, and end up describing it incorrectly. That happens at a common level (what I thought was a plane turned out to be a big bird) and fancier levels as well (e.g., when Einstein overturned the Newtonian paradigm, and is still going on with all the super-duper string stuff).
That's a long way of saying that there's not much to the supposed conflict between 'realists' and 'social constructionists', and what differences there are have significance only at the margins that few are likely to care about.
How any of that has a political spin is beyond me. But spinners gotta spin.
Even the difference in IQ between Hillary and Bill Clinton matters. At Hillary and below, people are too uncomfortable with the contingent nature of reality, the provisional nature of all real scientific modeling of reality. They need a religious certainty, a "right side of History," and a non-skeptical "science" of Global Warming.
We don't need philosophy anymore; we have science.
We don't need philosophy anymore; we have science.
That's my philosophy.
The authority of science comes largely from its ability to predict and explain.
When a chemist predicts that mixing an acid with a base will produce a vigorous exothermic reaction and produce a salt, you can be pretty sure that's just what will happen. When an astronomer predicts that a lunar eclipse visible in the USA (weather permitting) will occur on January 21, 2019, you'd be a fool to wager that it won't.
But when sociologists or psychologists make predictions, reasonable people have far less confidence that results will be as predicted. Which is why they rarely do so, and why people question the extent to which these are sciences.
And when climate scientists predict expected climate in 2050, or 2100? Well, sometimes state-of-the-art science will only take one so far before prediction shades into speculation. And when that happens, wisdom consists of separating the science from the speculation.
Of course, one can always assert that what we call a "lunar eclipse" (or other observable phenomena) actually exists only in the observer's brain, and thus can have no objective reality that is not socially created.
But that way lies madness, as at some level we all understand that lunar eclipses (and acids, and bases, etc.) existed long before there were people to observe them (and will continue to exist after we're all dead). And something which exists independent of human perception (or even existence) can not be socially constructed.
Whereas deconstructionism will promptly cease to exist whenever and wherever people stop believing in it
As for "reactionary obsurantism," have you looked in a mirror, Mr Latour? We understand you'd like to arrogate whatever authority science has to yourself, but, scientists often do things that are useful and/or interesting. And you ... don't.
@Richard Dolan
"That's a long way of saying that there's not much to the supposed conflict between 'realists' and 'social constructionists', and what differences there are have significance only at the margins that few are likely to care about."
If you look at the political results following from the neo-Gramscians - a socially constructed attack on Westerns Institutions, reason, and science - the differences could be said to be quite significant, and not at the margins. It's not a word game, it's the imposition of Lysenkoist Newspeak.
You might enjoy a bit of Jordan Peterson on the subject of neo-Marxism.
https://youtu.be/HXBjVau1w7Y
I recently read (sorry can't find it) that Canadian universities are considering scaling back Western culture and science for indigenous knowledge and science.
Michael Mann hardest hit.
@BJM
Not just Canadian Universities. You no longer need to take a course in Shakespeare or Caucer to graduation from Yale with a degree in English.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/yale-decolonizes-english-dept-complaints-studying-white-authors-actively-harms-students/
If Yale will grant a degree to an English major who has never studied Chaucer or Shakespeare, how long will it be before they grant degrees in Mechanical Engineering to students who never took a course in the Behavior of Engineering Materials because Henry Bessemer was white (not to mention English)? Would you want such a graduate designing bridges? Well, that's like an English teacher who doesn't know Shakespeare.
Hilarious! Or as my mother would say "hoisted on his own petard". Somebody else might have said it first
On reflection, the post from which I took the info about English degrees at Yale may be useful to understanding why Latour needs a defense from NYT magazine:
Academiot roundup
https://otherclub.blogspot.com/2017/11/academiot-roundup.html
Hilarious! Or as my mother would say "hoisted on his own petard". Somebody else might have said it first
It’s so odd to read about the death of science from that perspective, because I’m so accustomed to reading about it from the perspective of Jordan Peterson, that science, especially social science, is dying under the weight of political correctness and the obfuscations of intersectionality.
I agree with it all sounds like word players stuff. Meanwhile somewhere out there tonight some guy is climbing a pole in crappy weather to make sure someone else can write words on virtual paper. (Like me right now)
Scenario: the comet is coming. Build Spaceship A with the science and technology that has brought us to here. Build Spaceship B in whatever fashion the leading lights of the other academic disciplines charge it to be. Which Spaceship you going to get on?
Second scenario: ok, both ships are built right. Sort ship crews by those who (1) agree or (2) disagree with the toxic men NYT article Althouse blogged about yesterday. Again, which ship do you want to be on as you past Jupiter?
D Adams analogy works well in reviewing any of this academic says X stuff. Words - the ones we use, the ones we agree on - certainly matter between us, but electricity is not determined by words.
@D 2
Exactly.
What a bleeding crock the "postmodern" science critique is. There is no such thing as the "authority of science".
And there are no such creature as a "scientific fact".
Let's let Feynmann explain it to you French philosophers, their hangers-on, those who take them seriously, and those who are worried about whether they should take them seriously:
“It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.”
That's all there is to it. But there are some consequences to this, most importantly, if you can't do experiments to test your theory, it is not science. That is why "climate science" is not science. There is only one planet and we cannot do controlled experiments on it. It is also why "dietary science" is not science: you cannot do (ethical) dietary experiments on human beings.
People who invoke the "authority of science" are making the old argument from authority that kept us stuck in the Dark Ages for a thousand years. The motivation is invariably political.
Science makes us humble, not arrogant.
@Philippus
+1 for Feynman reference.
OTOH, the climate scientists have run experiments: Their models are experiments at prediction. The models consistently fail even to predict the past.
"The motivation is invariably political."
This. There are approximately zero politicians whose knowledge of climate science (and the scientific method) is worth anything. But they want to run/ruin your life based on their superior understanding of Teh Science.
Maybe this is the guy who thought that voting on the value of pi was a good idea?
He does accurately describe "climate science" where climate models are riddled with shared assumptions and discordant results are assumed to be wrong and discarded.
You remember the old joke: A company is going to retain an accountant. The company asks the first applicant, How much is 2 + 2? The applicant says, 4. The next applicant is asked, How much is 2 + 2? and he says, It approximates 4, more or less. Same question to the third applicant, How much is 2 + 2? and he says, What do you want it to be? You're hired!
How is "climate science" different from that?
That's basically it. They are not testing a hypothesis, because no one can set up and run the experiment. They are testing their computer models, and their tinkering with the parameters that those computer models admit of. They have not done well with this. "Predictions are difficult, especially about the future."
As a former electrical engineer who has been burned by (expensively purchased by my employer) computer models, they are no better than the people who design them. In this context, they have no predictive value in those areas of Nature that we do not understand very well. At most, they can produce interesting results that we may be able to investigate experimentally. Or not.
Let's see, who is it who denies that men and women are different or have any inherent nature? Who insists that a man can become a woman? Who make up most of those who don't get vaccinated, who are afraid of GMOs, who believe Gaia is dying? The Left.
As for global warming as proof of anti-science, there are almost no people on the right who deny that we may have warmed the globe some or that it is warming. Rather the question is future forecasts with models that do not agree with each other and which make a bunch of assumptions that all amplify their warming answer.
Malthus, Marx, and Freud all claimed that they were scientists. Marx claimed he had mastered not just the science of economics but also of history. Progressive and right minded people all admired how these observers of phenomena had mastered the facts and presented unassailable arguments to support their theses. There's considerable evidence that scientists get a lot of things wrong.
The set of people who can live with science (or any way of knowing) as merely provisional and relative, refining an understanding of a predictable (within certain ranges of gross perception) but inherently uncertain arising, a play of light, of quanta that never be absolutely pinned down with a single model, is limited. Most humans need more assurance than rigorous science can ever give them. They need "Science" to be a substitute religion, a source of authority.
Con men, from Marx and Herbert Spencer to Freud and Al Gore, exploit that vulnerability. As we have seen repeatedly in the 20th Century, that fraudulent Science is likely the worst of the Bad Religions.
California’s Feminist Corporate Coup
https://mises.org/wire/california%E2%80%99s-feminist-corporate-coup
That link, from the Mises Institute, provides an example of the ideological commitment Latour laments, because it is mirrored by climate scientists like Mann, Suzuki, Hansen, etc..
When ideology trumps science, we all lose.
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