https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism
"...postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony or rejection toward grand narratives, ideologies and various tenets of universalism, including objective notions of reason, human nature, social progress, moral universalism, absolute truth, and objective reality. Instead, it asserts to varying degrees that claims to knowledge and truth are products of social, historical or political discourses or interpretations, and are therefore contextual or socially constructed."
When Richard Feynman talks about cargo cult science [1], everyone agrees that he has made a deep point about the process by which science is done and is clearly in favor of science. All the same, it is possible to criticize science as a contextual, social construct in order to find the ways it can fail while still being in favor of science. A great deal of postmodern philosophy falls into this camp, but you won't learn that by cherry-picking summaries from wikipedia that say less than you think they say.
Aside below
In mathematics, the fact that there is no absolute truth is merely a technical fact. Tarski's undefinability theorem [2] says that arithmetic truth cannot be defined in arithmetic. This is easy to see: Arithmetic makes use of arbitrarily nested quantifiers. If arithmetic truth were an arithmetic statement, then it would necessarily have some finite number of alternating quantifiers (forall A. exists B. forall C. ...), but the truth of a formula with a greater number of alternations can't be defined by such a truth formula of lesser complexity. Like all results of this sort, they are just an application of the diagonalization argument.
This result is the same for all theories of non-trivial expressivity. There is no way around this, you cannot formalize truth. You can only push the notion of truth out into a meta-level, which again has an unformalizable notion of truth. This is not a deep philosophical failure, it's just a technical aspect of mathematics.
If mathematics cannot pin down absolute truth, what hope does the concept have in far more complicated situations? It's a useful heuristic but when you look at it closely enough, you see its incoherence. I'm glad that there are philosophers out there who critically engage with the social implications of this incoherence.
[1] http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theo...
It needs a concept of objective reality, but it doesn't require belief that concept is true, or anything more than a foundational element of a pragmatically useful contingent model.
What? No, it's not. Your attempt to justify this with the statement that "arithmetic truth cannot be defined in arithmetic" fails, because that's not the same thing as a there being "no absolute truth" in mathematics.
what else is this going to mean? "absolute truth" in mathematics should be a mathematical concept. Is that not the definition of "in mathematics"? I don't think you should accuse me of moving the goalposts when they aren't clearly... posted.
> For example, there are no round squares. There are also no square circles. The angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees.
Abstract:
In this paper, I argue that those of us who have left the Sciences proper and moved to feminist studies spaces have continued to do science through our teaching. In a moment when the impulse to do real science is palpitating in our feminist hearts, I suggest that we critically examine the political stakes of our affective attachments and detachments from s/Science(s). I consider what it means to be attached to a Science that earned its epistemic authority through its co-constitution with colonization and slavery. I argue that passion for science may act to strengthen the relationship between Science and Truth and conversely, willful refusal and failure may be used to break the bond. I offer critical science literacy as a practice that can directly challenge the epistemic authority of Science and be read as "doing science" or more broadly as "rewriting knowledge."
Honestly, sounds nothing like the original link which is a poorly written polemic that is obviously done in bad faith (at least to me). I think the abstract is interesting enough that I'll read the paper myself and come to my own conclusions once I have spare time.
Out perhaps just industrial revolution, which is just a tiny chunk of whole science?
I suspect this is some form of argument from ignorance or cherry picking.
The argument "comes from slavery" can be applied to everything. If it is about science fuelling colonialism, perhaps, but the same thing can be said about both capitalism, feudalism and more. People have often used gains of all kinds to further selfish agenda at the cost of others.
The proposed antidote is exactly the solution supposed by the scientific method: the intersubjective corroboration of individual observations, evidence, reasoning. However, this plainly reveals where truth, science, can fail: It is in this corroboration where atrocities in the name of some transparent, universally available truth are smuggled into society. That is why postmodern thinkers take the footing that they do.
Especially when in the post-war period it was more and more obvious how massive the contradictions were within both liberalism and marxism as they were idealized, and the world as it actually was.
The Bogdanov affair [1] should be noted as a scandal in physics, one similar to the Sokal affair, though it wasn't a deliberate attempt to discredit the academic rigor of the physics community.
There are extremely good criticisms of postmodern scholarship. For example, criticizing the impenetrability of pomo jargon which is optimized for communication between experts is perfectly legitimate. It's also true that at times when authors are being sloppy it is misconstrued as an attempt to be provocative. On the other hand, authors like Deleuze were trying to be provocative.
The Foucault/Chompsky debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8
The Heidegger/Cassirer debate: https://newrepublic.com/article/81380/heidegger-cassirer-dav...
For the most part (though extremes that go beyond this can be found) this isn't an attack on science and empiricism as useful techniques, but more a cautionary critique that it is impossible to completely avoid subjectivity and cultural influence, and that that cannot, in the general case, be safely ignored.
Not being constructive is the major failing of the whole postmodernist philosophy.
Which postmodern authors eschew science and evidence-based reasoning?