Hi, JR. First time reader here, but I really had to comment on this.
I come from what might be thought of as a hybrid position on the “science/postmodernism” issue, so-called, though I must say I consider that issue to be rather a tired derangement of sense on important questions facing our society. As with so much public discourse on so many subjects, the so-called science wars are merely intellectual flak expectorated to perpetuate academic and disciplinary turfdom and pettiness to the benefit incumbent power and to the detriment of balanced and civic-minded communitarian discourse.
In the way that climate deniers endlessly hyperventilate and fulminate on the alleged almost always illusory misdeeds of handfuls of climate scientists to distract from their own stilted and vaulting arguments from positions of spectacular ignorance, their endlessly touted so-called scepticism, when merely in actuality their posturing is only the spectacular distraction from and derangement of the reality of the obscenity of global pollution and environmental pillaging for profit by and for a few to the detriment of the incomparably many; so the supposed science wars over so-called postmodernism, whatever that is meant to be, is merely a distraction and derangement from actually vital, actually useful and productive interdisciplinary and cross-campus, cross-cultural dialogue and exchange.
It is always so telling when scientists remove their science hats in the name of science to defend it from thinkers they haven’t read, whose insights they don’t understand, whose language they readily admit to finding quite impenetrable, working in disciplines they have no interest in exploring or participating seriously in, part of a so-called movement they’re confident they can adequately characterise, whose participants and practitioners they self-congratulatorily ridicule when corrected on their bumptious misconceptions. You’d better believe it hasn’t the first or last thing to do with any form of science of any apt definition.
