tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6245381193993153721.post3831659754147099315..comments2024-03-17T00:23:24.896-07:00Comments on Social Democracy for the 21st Century: A Realist Alternative to the Modern Left: Foucault’s View of Truth leads directly to Conspiracy TheoriesLord Keyneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06556863604205200159noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6245381193993153721.post-22557946947356272722016-11-07T23:18:49.923-08:002016-11-07T23:18:49.923-08:00Agreed, relativism is self-defeating.
But maybe h...Agreed, relativism is self-defeating.<br /><br />But maybe he meant something else, akin to "the discovery of (objective) truths is always embedded in historical contexts which enable some discoveries and preclude others".<br />Take just one example. Euclide stated that "the whole is larger than its proper part". And for a long time everyone agreed and took that for granted. Then Galileo noticed that if we assumed infinitely large sets or collections then this would no more be true. But he saw it as a reason to reject infinite sets. And then came Cantor who took the negation of Euclide's axiom as the very definition of an infinite set(one that is of the same size as one of its proper parts).<br />A charitable way of understanding F's statement is that we shall inquire into the (social, historical) deep causes of discoveries and scientific breakthroughs.<br />No big deal.GLhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04372485857847843352noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6245381193993153721.post-85041483871686104732016-11-03T12:43:30.096-07:002016-11-03T12:43:30.096-07:00Foucault is at least partly right when discussing ...Foucault is at least partly right when discussing normative ideals of the social sciences (including psychiatry).<br /><br />There are only 2 hard sciences: physics and chemistry. Mathematics is not a science on ist own right, it is only the methodology of natural sciences. Biology is not a hard science, because natural laws as such do not evolve. Medicine is not a hard science because it is both descriptive-prognostic and prescriptive-diagnostic i.E. normative. That makes the concepts of „health“ and „disease“ ambigious and subject to all kinds of manipulation. Have you studied post-Fukushima cancer statistics in Japan and the controversy about how much radioactivity poses an "immediate health threat" to humans?<br /><br />Due to Humes induction problem, empirism is not a solid base for the descriptive-prognostic sciences. Hegels solution, I assume, ist the claim that everything is contradictions, which leads to a totalization of sufficient reason generating a perfectly deterministic universe. Contradictions paradoxically stabilize natural laws. I have found quiet an elegant and simple way to demonstrate this, but I won’t go into technical details here.<br /><br />Fort he human and social sciences (prescriptive-diagnostic) that are concerned, not with theoretically modellizing the universe, but with incitating everyday practics, on the other hand, radical constructivism ist the right approach, which makes it open to conspiracy theory to some degree.The only law for sound reasoning in those sciences is strict obedience to the law of contradiction, whereas the law of sufficient reason doesn’t count. Think about this: Whenever you think about how to act, you already have acted, and probably without sufficient reason. For instance, you should not both claim that economics is about decision making processes and then interpreting those decisions as predetermined by economic laws, that would contradict what we mean by the expression „decision“.<br /><br />i assume Noam Chomsky had something similar in mind, when he wrote the following lines: „ Don’t forget, part oft he whole intellectual vocation is creating a niche for yourself, and if everybody can understand what you’re talking about, you’ve sort of lost, because then, what makes you special? What makes you special has got to be something that you had to work really hard to understand, and you mastered it, and all those guys out there don’t understand it, and then that becomes the basis for your privilege and your power (...) On the other hand, If you want to mingle in the same room with that physicist over there who’s talking about quarks, you’d better have a complicated theory that nobody can understand, why shouldn’t I have a complicated theory nobody can understand? If someone came along with a theory of history, it would be the same: either it would be truisms, or maybe some smart ideas, like somebody could say „Why not look at economic factors lying behind the constitution?“ or something like that – but there’d be nothing there that couldn’t be said in monosyllables. In fact, it’s extremely rare, outside the natural sciences, to find things that can’t be said in monosylllables: there are just interestsing, simple ideas, which are often extremly difficult to come up with and hard to work out. Like, if you want to try to understand how the modern industrial economy developed, let’s say, that can take a lot of work. But the „theory“ will be extremly thin, if by „theory“ we mean something with principles which are not obvious when you first look at them, and from which you can deduce surprising consequences and try to confirm the principles – you’re not going to fin anything like that in the social world.“ (Noam Chomsky, Unerstanding Power, p. 228f, Vintage, London 2003)Dr. Wintermutehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04145660657433770971noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6245381193993153721.post-12838375631874142972016-11-03T07:14:23.416-07:002016-11-03T07:14:23.416-07:00Post modern medicine lives!
https://twitter.com/R...Post modern medicine lives! <br />https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/793846129448353793<br /><br />The link to Foucault's kind of nonsense is clear. This is an actual, published, peer reviewed academic paper. <br />Ken Bhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08207803092348071005noreply@blogger.com