I Dream Awake

The scientific method requires observation of natural phenomena, the formation of hypotheses about their nature, the testing of those hypotheses through experiment, and the evaluation of the hypotheses in light of the experimental results. Science seeks “elegant” explanations which will account for the observed phenomena without unnecessary complications, and it seeks general laws that will explain phenomena in terms of simpler phenomena. In this way, it builds what Richard Feynman called a “hierarchy of ideas,” which tries to begin with “the fundamental laws of physics,” and lead “up in this hierarchy of complexity” towards “words and concepts like ‘man,’ and ‘history,’ or ‘political expediency,’ and so forth.” This step-by-step understanding is built by forming “invisible-hand explanations” which will seek to describe the explanandum in terms other than that which is being explained—just as a dictionary will avoid using a word in its own definition. The ultimate goal is a unified and empirically sound understanding of the world.

This understanding of the scientific enterprise flies in the face of the Postmodernist theories underlying Trask’s thesis. According to Postmodernism, there is no reality to be understood, or, if there is, it cannot be understood in an objective sense. Instead, what we think of as understanding is really the construction of “narratives”—socially created worldviews which we adopt as “true,” but whose truth value runs no deeper than the language in which they are expressed. Man cannot really connect to nature; he is separated from reality by a kind of invisible and impenetrable bubble of language. And these narratives, or paradigms, are tools or weapons that are manipulated in a struggle for power between populations. The “truth” these narratives allegedly describe is really a trick for controlling people and obtaining resources for the privileged elites who are most responsible for constructing and maintaining our social structures.

If nothing else, Postmodernism represents a direct attack on the Enlightenment legacy, and particularly on science. The entire idea of formulating a unified, reliable, objectively true description of the nature of the universe clashes with the postmodern vision that there are different “ways of knowing” that are equally valid—women’s ways of knowing, Eastern ways of knowing, and so forth. Science’s dream of discovering laws that can be understood by all humanity regardless of their various cultures is therefore doomed. “If, as postmodernists would have it, meaning and truth are inexorably bound to context and historical setting, then the whole point of scientific theorizing would vanish, and science itself would have to be abandoned.”

Timothy Sandefur, Reason and Common Ground: A Response to the Creationists’ ‘Neutrality’ Argument, Chapman Law Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2008

Via: Glenn Reynolds