Postmodern Woo | The Science Wars

We will resume our exploration of the epistemologies of radical constructivists with a primer on postmodern critiques of science. This episode was particularly difficult to make due to the sheer amount of reading that had to be done to acclimatize to the postmodern way of thinking, and the attendant difficulties of compressing a tremendous amount of information into a reasonable time frame. Be sure to hit that like button, ring the bell, and share on your social media to spread this series far and wide; it’s among my most important work on this platform, and it must not be in vain.

Note 1: Jacques Derrida, who was born in the French colony of Algeria, developed the techniques of deconstruction, which are broadly synonymous with applied poststructuralism. He authored such foundational texts to the postmodern program as “Of Grammatology,” which focuses on the application of deconstruction to literary and historical texts rather than scientific ones. As an introduction to his ideas, I didn’t find it particularly helpful (not least because of the atrocious manner in which he writes,) but the Online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy filled in many blanks for me and I so recommend it instead of Derrida’s originals to those who are more interested, as I am, in the postmodern critiques of science rather than its more general deconstructionist program for other kinds of “texts.”

Note 2: another postmodern trope not directly covered here is differance, which entails the direct mechanisms by which signs acquire meaning. One mechanism is the relation of signs to one another via the discourse in which they are situated, the consequence of which is the infinite deferral of meaning. The other mechanism is the means by which signs differ from one another, which differance, as a concept deployed by deconstructionists, attempts to capture. Its relevance to postmodern thought is absolutely central, and hints of it will appear later in the video when talk of “boundary-drawing exercises” is encountered. For the purposes of understanding postmodern epistemology, however, differance is not terribly important; it is much more important to postmodern methodology, which is not our chief concern here, rather than epistemology- hence its omission from the video. I acknowledge it here only for the sake of completeness.

Note 3: One nuance that is worth expanding upon is the fact that waves will superpose if and only if they occupy the same plane. A surface wave and a transverse wave are not subject to the principle of superposition as described here. This is relevant to the present context because there exist multiple types of seismic waves, some of which vibrate orthogonally to one another. The type of analysis I’ve suggested is limited to scenarios that resemble the following: fault A and fault B rupture simultaneously, producing surface waves with amplitudes a and b respectively. At the points of maximum constructive interference, the resulting surface wave will have amplitude a + b. In a very literal sense, the strength of this component of the earthquake is literally the sum of its parts, and civil engineers who forgo linearity in the course of their professional duties, as recommended by “Engineering and Social Justice: in the University and Beyond,” would endanger everyone in the vicinity of the structures they’d create.

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Видео Postmodern Woo | The Science Wars канала King Crocoduck