User talk:GaryFisher

Post Modern References

"Although it is always hazardous to try to summarize any group's principles and purposes, the following are some noteworthy precepts that appear to be widely shared:

• Every aspect of that complex set of enterprises that we call science, including, above all, its contents and results, is shaped by and can be understood only in its local historical and cultural context.

• In particular, the products of scientific inquiry, the so-called laws of nature, must always be viewed as social constructions. Their validity depends on the consensus of "experts" in just the same way as the legitimacy of a pope depends on a council of cardinals.

• Although scientists typically succeed in arrogating special epistemic authority to themselves, scientific knowledge is just "one story among many." The more epistemological authority that science has in a given society, the more important it is to unmask its pretensions to be an enterprise dedicated to the pursuit of objective knowledge. Science must be "humbled."

• Since the quest for objective knowledge is a quixotic one, the best way to appraise scientific claims is through the process of political evaluation. Since the "evidence" for a scientific claim is never conclusive and is always open to negotiation, the best way to evaluate scientific results is to ask who stands to benefit if the claim is taken to be true. Thus, for the citizen the key question about a scientific result should not be how well tested the claim is but, rather, Cui bono?

• "Science is politics by other means": the results of scientific inquiry are profoundly and importantly shaped by the ideological agenda of powerful elites.

• There is no univocal sense in which the science of one society is better than that of another. In particular, Euroscience is not objectively superior to the various ethnosciences and shamanisms described by anthropologists or invented by Afrocentrists.

• Neither is there any clear sense in which we can talk about scientific progress within the European tradition. On the contrary, science is characterized chiefly by its complicity in all the most negative and oppressive aspects of modern history: increasingly destructive warfare, environmental disasters, racism, sexism, eugenics, exploitation, alienation, and imperialism.

• Given the impossibility of scientific objectivity, it is futile to exhort scientists and policymakers to try harder to remove ideological bias from the practice of science. Instead, what we need to do is deliberately introduce "corrective biases" and "progressive political values" into science. There is a call for "emancipatory science" and "advocacy research." "[0]

[0]Noretta Koertge, professor of the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University.

"The argument against theory is by now commonplace in intellectual circles, having been made by countless scholars in undoubtedly every academic discipline:the attempt to devise a theory--a set of universal rules governing a practice--is a futile enterprise, and example of the Enlightenment project par excellence." [1 pg 37]

"In a very real way, then, liberal open mindedness is impossible, in that we are never truly open to beliefs that flow from premises hostile to the premises and beliefs we begin with."[1]

"Consequently, a theory will always fail to make good on its claim to provide a set of rules independent of the practice it describes; and because a theory will always fail in its goal to guide and reform practice, it therefore, by definition, can have no consequence.[1, pg 38]

[1] Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric, Gary A. Olson, State University of New York Press, 2002, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY, 12207. Gary Olson is Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Idaho State University.

"Whether uncovering the gender-laden assumptions built into the Western scientific method, redefining the scientific claim to objectivity, showing the relationship between science's empirical worldview and that of mercantile capitalism, or showing how the powerful language of science exercises its daily cultural authority in our society, the essays in Science Wars announce their own powerful message. Analyzing the antidemocratic tendencies within science and its institutions, they insist on a more accountable relationship between scientists and the communities and environments affected by their research." [2]

[2] Social Text 46/47, Vol. 14, Nos. 1 & 2, 1996), pp 1-13. p 7., Andrew Ross. Andrew Ross is the chair of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.

"One phenomenon feminist historians have focused on is the rape and torture metaphors in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon and others (e.g. Machiavelli) enthusiastic about the new scientific method. Traditional historians and philosophers have said that these metaphors are irrelevant to the real meanings and referents of scientific concepts held by those who used them and by the public for whom they wrote. But when it comes to regarding nature as a machine, they have quite a different analysis: here, we are told, the metaphor provides the interpretations of Newton's mathematical laws: it directs inquirers to fruitful ways to apply his theory and suggests the appropriate methods of inquiry and the kind of metaphysics the new theory supports. But if we are to believe that mechanistic metaphors were a fundamental component of the explanations the new science provided, why should we believe that the gender metaphors were not? A consistent analysis would lead to the conclusion that understanding nature as a woman indifferent to or even welcoming rape was equally fundamental to the interpretations of these new conceptions of nature and inquiry. Presumably these metaphors, too, had fruitful pragmatic, methodological, and metaphysical consequences for science. In that case, why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton's laws as "Newton's rape manual" as it is to call them "Newton's mechanics"? "[3]

[3] Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism. Harding is a professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

"The rise of modern science coincides with the suppression of non-Western tribes by Western invaders. The tribes are not only physically suppressed, they also lose their intellectual independence and are forced to adopt the bloodthirsty religion of brotherly love--Christianity . . . Today this development is gradually reversed . . . But science still reigns supreme . . . Thus, while an American can now choose the religion he likes, he is still not permitted to demand that his children learn magic rather than science at school . . . And yet science has no greater authority than any other form of life." [4]

[4] Paul Karl Feyerabend, Against Method. Feyerabend is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

"The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variability - it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of something - of a center starting from which an observer could master the field - but the very concept of the game ..." [5]

[5] Jacques Derrida, The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man

"Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought." [6]

[6] Martin Heidegger

"Provost Gary Olson fully supports our college in this change saying, 'This is a great opportunity to see what synergies can result from bringing faculty and students in these disciplines closer together. The problems and challenges of today's world are too complex to be solved by any one discipline. Integrating these departments will empower us to solve more complex problems and expand each other's perspectives. " [7]

[7] from Dean Jacobsen's letter to Idaho State University engineering students, May 2009, announcing that the departments of mechanical and nuclear engineering will be combined, as will the departments of electrical engineering and computer science.

" While the drive toward "interdisciplinarity" may sound like a noble endeavor (Fish suggests that at times it is professed with religious fervor), the very distinctiveness of tasks from discipline to discipline will militate against unification. Put simply, disciplinary self-preservation will exert pressure against the discipline's being subsumed in some larger endeavor. A discipline will strive to protect the unique kind of work it does from being appropriated or from being lost forever. Fish firmly believes that an intellectual discipline does not and will not simply choose to be partners in some utopian project that is likely to endanger its well-being. He insists that "whenever there is an apparent rapproachement or relationship of co-operation between projects, it will be the case either that one is anxiously trading on the prestige and vocabulary of the other or that one has swallowed the other; and this will be true not only when one project is academic and the other political, but when both are housed in the academy, perhaps in the same building."[8]

[8] Page 19 of "Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric" by Gary A. Olson

"Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids. . . From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders."[9]

[9]Katherine Hayles, Professor in the Program in Literature at Duke University

Is e=mc2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest. [10]

[10]Luce Irigaray, University of Liverpool

"... As for Einstein, the main question that he raises, in my opinion, is that he does not leave us any other chance than his God, given his interest for accelerations without electromagnetic rebalancing... But, for us, what does this general relativity represent, the one that is the law outside of the nuclear power plants and that questions our bodily inertia, vital necessary condition?"[11]

[11]Irigaray, 1987

"Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom."[12]

[12]Stanley Fish, NYT, May 31, 2005

“The idea that philosophy is rotten to the core because its language is phallocentric still seems to me to be the most important claim French feminists make,…” [13]

[13]Lynn Worsham, Reading Wild, Seriously: Confessions of an Epistemophiliac.

"Irigaray’s work thus remains indifferent to such traditional values as “truth” and “falsity” (where these are conceived as correspondence between propositions and reality), Aristotelian logic (the logic of the syllogism), and accounts of reason based upon them. This does not mean her work could be described as “irrational,” “illogical,” or “false.” On the contrary, her work is quite logical, rational, and true in terms of quite different criteria, perspectives, and values than those dominant now. She both combats and constructs, strategically questioning phallocentric knowledges without trying to replace them with more inclusive or more neutral truths. Instead, she attempts to reveal a politics of truth, logic or reason." [14]

[14]Elizabeth Grosz, professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University.

"The trouble with science and technology from a feminist perspective is that they are integral not only to a system of capitalist domination but also to one of patriarchal domination; yet to discuss science under both these systems of domination is particularly difficult. Historically, it has been women outside science, such as the novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, or the ex-scientist now writer Ruth Wallsgrove , or the sociologist Liliane Stehelin who have dared to speak of science as male, as part of the phallocentric culture." [15]

[15]Hilary Rose

“The new sciences of the text … have offered literary critics the opportunity to demonstrate that the work they do is as manly and aggressive as nuclear physics – not intuitive, expressive, feminine.” [16]

[16]Elaine Showalter, Princeton University

Modernist thought had its origins in the Enlightenment period. This era was a celebration of the liberating potentials of the social sciences, the materialistic gains of capitalism, new forms of rational thought, due process safeguards, abstract rights applicable to all, and the individual it was a time of great optimism. Postmodernists are fundamentally opposed to modernist thought. [17]

[17]Dragan Milovanovic, Department of Criminal Justice, Northeastern Illinois University

"To slow down is to set a limit in chaos to which all speeds are subject, so that they form a variable determined as abscissa, at the same time as the limit forms a universal constant that cannot be gone beyond (for example, a maximum degree of contraction). The first functives are therefore the limit and the variable, and reference is a relationship between values of the variable or, more profoundly, the relationship of the variable, as abscissa of speeds, with the limit" [18]

[18]Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari

"Science is just one of many ways of knowing the world....[The Zunis' worldview is] just as valid as the archeological viewpoint of what prehistory is about." [19]

[19] Roger Anyon, British archeologist

"Provided the two relativities [special and general] are accepted, more frames of reference with less privilege can be accessed, reduced, accumulated and combined, observers can be delegated to a few more places in the infinitely large [the cosmos] and the infinitely small [electrons], and the readings they send will be understandable. His [Einstein's] book could well be titled: "New Instructions for Bringing Back Long-Distance Scientific Travellers." [20]

[20]Bruno Latour, Institut d'etudes politiques de Paris

"...the vast majority of theorists produce "difficult" prose because of the difficult intellectual work they have undertaken." [21]

[21] Gary A. Olson, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Idaho State University, quoted in JAC, vol. 28, numbers 3&4, p. 586.

"We need to resist the notion that science provides a special, infallible objective, static body of knowledge or a precise tool for accurate measurement floating above the mundane world of values, opinions, and agendas -- timeless, acontextual, arhetorical, certain. We need to refuse the distinctly male, imperial project of a unified science that masquerades as the inexorable March of Progress. And we also need to reconstruct and reclaim science and scientific inquiry." [22]

[22] Chris W. Gallagher, University of Nebraska, quoted in JAC, vol. 28, Numbers 3 & 4, p. 693. Editor, Lynn Worsham. Inside front cover states: "JAC is published with generous financial support from Idaho State University."