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jbash comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
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I do wish that you would say "relativists" or the like here. Many of your readers will know the word "postmodernist" solely as a slur against a rival tribe.
Actually, "relativist" isn't a lot better, because it's still pretty clear who's meant, and it's a very charged term in some political discussions.
I think it's a bad rhetorical strategy to mock the cognitive style of a particular academic discipline, or of a particular school within a discipline, even if you know all about that discipline. That's not because you'll convert people who are steeped in the way of thinking you're trying to counter, but because you can end up pushing the "undecided" to their side.
Let's say we have a bright young student who is, to oversimplify, on the cusp of going down either the path of Good ("parsimony counts", "there's an objective way to determine what hypothesis is simpler", "it looks like there's an exterior, shared reality", "we can improve our maps"...) or the path of Evil ("all concepts start out equal", "we can make arbitrary maps", "truth is determined by politics" ...). Well, that bright young student isn't a perfectly rational being. If the advocates for Good look like they're being jerks and mocking the advocates for Evil, that may be enough to push that person down the path of Evil.
Wulky Wilkinson is the mind killer. Or so it seems to me.
I agree with your point about rhetoric, but I think you give post-modern thought too little credit. First of all, Sturgeon's law says 90% of everything is crap.
I can't understand why you think this statement is post-modern - or why you think it is wrong. Luminiferous Aether was possibly correct - until we tested the proposition, what basis did we have to say that ~P was better than P?
This has clear flavors of post-modernism - and is false as stated. But I think someone like Foucault would want the adjective social thrown in there a bit. Given that, the diversity of cultures throughout history is some evidence that the proposition could be true - depending on what caveats we place on / how we define "arbitrary."
Kuhn and Feyerabend have not always been clear on how anti-scientific realist they intended to be, but I think a proposition like "Scientific models are socially mediated" is plausible - unless Kuhn and Feyerabend totally screwed up their history.
Again, post-modern flavored. And again, if we add the word "social" to the front, the statement is likely true. For example, people once thought social class (nobility, peasant, merchant) was very morally relevant. Now, not so much.
With the first item, "all concepts start out equal", consider that Occam's Razor says we should prefer simpler concepts.
With "we can make arbitrary maps", I don't see how adding the word "social" in there anywhere makes it any better. Although there are many different cultures, the space of possible culture-models or culture-maps is much larger still, and so if we're trying to model how a culture works we can't just pick a map arbitrarily.
Same issue applies to "truth is determined by politics". A political theory is a hypothesis about what conditions will create a given sort of society. Some political theories are better than others at such predictions.
I presume that the point with "social" is that, even if some political theories are better than others, the extent to which different theories are accepted or believed by the population at large is also strongly affected by social factors. Which, again, is an idea that has been discussed on LW a lot, and is generally accepted here...
Also, (guessing from my discussions with smart humanities people) it's saying that supposedly neutral and impartial research by scientists will be affected by a large number of (social) biases, some of them conscious, some of them unconscious, and this can have a big impact on which theory is accepted as the best and the most "experimentally tested" one. Again, not exactly a heretical belief on LW.
Ironically, I always thought that many of the posts on LW were using scientific data to show what my various humanities friends had been saying all along.