From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Aug 29 2002 - 17:38:26 MDT
At 03:37 PM 8/29/02 -0700, Dan Fabulich wrote:
>Nobody, not even the postmoderists, wants engineers to be ambivalent
>between medieval and Netwonian physics when bridges are built. That
>should be your take-away from this message, especially if it helps you to
>appreciate that a lot of smart people in academia are working on some very
>cool stuff.
William Calvin's THE CEREBRAL CODE, a brilliantly inventive scientific book
Eliezer admires, cites at least part of the following (I don't have a copy
of Calvin's book to hand), which offers at least one cheer for
postmodernism/ poststructuralism:
============
The crucial postulate of "postmodernism" is that our certainties -
artistic, and in ordinary daily life as
well - have been steadily undermined since, say, the fifties. Remorseless
change affects everything.
Virtual replaces "real". But "real" was always a construct, so this
earthquake is more a shift in
understanding than a change in the world. If so, we live postmodernism.
Therefore we always already
have a theory of it, structuring our daily experience, just as your cat has
a brain-wired theory of birds as it
prowls the garden.
On the other hand, theories running on auto-pilot deserve mistrust, even if
they're zany and pomo. We're
well advised to dredge them up into full view, shove them through some
logical sieves (themselves
theories, yes), put their predictions to the test.
"Theory" - or metatheory - is a strange and wonderful concept. For at least
20 years it's been central to
sophisticated cultural analysis, but people still get stirred up about its
pretensions.[...]
It used to be supposed that the world is just out there, on the other side
of a clear sensory window pane.
Now we're sure that the experienced world is itself a construct, a somewhat
unstable patchwork of mental
models driven partly by what's outside, partly by genetically ordained
internal grammars, partly by the
local cultural templates we imbibe from childhood on (including the
language we use to categorize and
communicate our grasp of the world). It's naive to suppose that culture and
language capture "just how
things are", and hence to fear and hate anyone whose inner maps conflict
with our own, but still it takes
quite an effort to see that our worlds are built-up in accord with these
internal maps or theories.
Education helps; it's easier to reach such counter-intuitive insights with
the aid of difficult books, and
dialogue with other people who've been down the same path.
================
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:32 MST