http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/03/06/help-us-fix-the-blog-ii/

Yes, Dr Dawkins is a supreme egotist, he has that repellent superiority complex that gives some scientists a bad name. He’d be better off writing about science, a topic he knows about. He gives atheism a bad name too!

Happy Easter.

cheerio

PS: was it in a Douglas Addams book? :: “Jesus told people they should be nice to each other so they nailed him to a tree.”

[it’s the word “so” there which is the killer, IMHO]

Who said John Cleese can’t write punchlines, eh Katzi?

I’m not at all convinced that, say, deconstruction was ever supposed to be a ‘critical avant-garde’ or ‘iconoclastic’ type of gesture, but I know that that is what it turns out to be in some of the ways it is practiced. To the extent that critical gestures take on the moral economy and structure of iconoclasm I agree with Latour: we can probably do without them.

BTW ‘Iconoclash’ has a great introductory essay by Latour, and is a fascinating book.

I thought his agonising and self-flagellating were pretty convincing! Do you think his call to action in respect of examining the entire project is worthy, or just a personal ‘middle of the night’ existential freakout.

I’m specifically asking about the blowback as Latour describes, not in respect of the ‘exhaustion of critique’ as an analytic/philosophic proposition only, if indeed, that is what you were referring to previously.

btw. have enjoyed reading your’s & adrien’s postings (and others) in this discussion – mostly snark-free too - bonus.

Haven’t been to France, so I couldn’t say for sure

If there is something definitively wrong with the way that mid-C20th French thought was taken up in the US academy (before being circulated to the rest of us) it is in the tendency to abstract these kinds of positions from their native debates, which had a very particular style, without doing the work of recontextualising them.

Or just take ‘em literally. There’s also the famous Francophile’s cultural cringe. It’s like Foucault. Foucault has some interesting notion re modern history and the way we think. But instead of going mmm let’s investigate this further we say: FOUCAULT IS GOD AND EVERYTHING I WILL WRITE EVER WILL BE DONE IN THE SHADOW OF FOUCAULT.
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I mean c’mon. These people go to the toilet like everyone else.

Zurbrugg (author of ‘Critical Vices’?) is correct, and it becomes clear how much it is a hyperbolic statement of an otherwise important point when looked at in context.

If there is something definitively wrong with the way that mid-C20th French thought was taken up in the US academy (before being circulated to the rest of us) it is in the tendency to abstract these kinds of positions from their native debates, which had a very particular style, without doing the work of recontextualising them.

In some ways it is better to read good secondary texts, like ‘Barthes’ by Jonathan Culler, then to actually read a few bits of Barthes in isolation.

Rolling rocks!

Barthes doesn’t help us because it’s somewhat polemical in tone (much like ‘Critique et verité’). I understand it as being an argument about authority in interpretation.

Nicholas Zurbrugg put it right. Barthes says ‘the Author is dead’ but its just typical French hyperbole. What he means is: we’re talking about literature in entirely in terms of the individuals who write it, let’s talk about something else.
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RIP Nick. You were great fun if a little odd.

Ah yes, ‘The Death of the Author’ is one of the most misread but influential pieces he wrote, and it is misread by its critics and its proponents alike. Most of that, I think, is due to neglect of context, and Barthes doesn’t help us because it’s somewhat polemical in tone (much like ‘Critique et verité’). I understand it as being an argument about authority in interpretation.

Since you’re not really trying to pull that manoeuvre, ours probably isn’t that important a disagreement on reflection. We both have a commitment to the reality of that which science creates (my term)/ discovers (your term): I guess my position is somewhere between a very weak anti-realism and a weak realism, whereas yours is more like a weak realism.

I really don’t have the time to summarise this all for you, because I would have to assume too much knowledge or define too many terms.

But surely you would be able to explain how we created facts like the electron or the planet Venus? I’m sorry if I was condescending but being decried for my lack of curiosity is a little mean isn’t it? Questions are good things.

but wasn’t pluto considered a planet just a short while ago, and now it’s not?

I thought Klaus would bring this up as I think it’s the real meat of the matter. Venus is a planet, fact. Well Venus is a body of mass encircling the Sun like the Earth. However not all such bodies are classified as planets. The classifications are certainly something that we have created. But we don’t create the phenomena. So I think here we have something to look into. Astrologers I believe defined the astronomers and persist in asserting Pluto’s planetary status. So for them the fact is that Pluto is a planet. For the Flat Earth society the fact is that Antarctica is an ice wall not a continent. If we created facts these claims would be able to compete with scientific facts. But they don’t. They are not reliable.
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Pluto’s declassifaction as a planet occured for two reason. Firstly the International Astronomical Union defined planets for the first time about a year and a half ago. Pluto was excluded from the category. Also in the early 90s a collection of objects in the outer solar system similar to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter was discovered. This phenomena, known as the Kuiper belt, includes Pluto. Classifications are human constructs. But the methodology of science demands that these classifications are developed pertinent to natural phenomena.
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Naturally this doesn’t always happen. Medical science defined homosexuality and masturbation as abnormal pathologies 50 years ago. But this is evidence of social prejudice mascarading as science. It is not science. There is also, I’ve read, a dispute about the genus classification of humans, bonobos and chimpanzees. According to those advocating erasing the distinction between the genus Pan and the genus Homo there are species collectively classified under the same genus head that bear less genetic similarity than we share with bonobos and chimps. Therefore someone interested in the subjectivity of scientific classifactions might point to this as an example of the limits of objectivity. I don’t believe however that it’s a good idea to extend this to say that ‘all facts are created’.
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To wit:

the electron is real because human beings use it to make things happen

Electrons existed before we were around. Fact.

One thing I like about Latour’s sociology in general is that he likes his humans and non-humans to be obstinate: he respects constructions rather than implying that they have no basis and talking past them. I’ve found that orientation to be very useful in my own work, which would otherwise have little to do with the sociology of science.

This theme of the exhaustion of critique is well explained in ‘We Have Never Been Modern’ which offers an unorthodox account of modern philosophy. For me it’s a little too convenient, but otherwise quite convincing. He offers a middle road between the continental and analytic philosophical traditions.

“Sociology of science is something I haven’t really ever had time to explore”

It’s good fun [but when do you get the time].

Adrien, I note that Latour talks about the “construction of facts”, and this:

…entire Ph.D programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always the prisoner of language, that we always speak from one standpoint, and so on…

That’s in part what I was trying to say. But it doesn’t imply that the process is arbitrary or that the phenomena under examination are not accorded the respect they deserve.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hacking

Going back to Klaus’ example of the electron, Hacking has an interesting view:

Hacking defends a realism about science, “entity realism”, albeit only on pragmatic grounds: the electron is real because human beings use it to make things happen. This form of realism encourages a realistic stance towards the entities postulated by mature sciences but skepticism towards scientific laws.