Did the Sokal affair "destroy postmodernism"? 

Good one :)

critical theory is not that complicated, maybe the reason people always say "is not that simple" to you is becouse you're a simpleton

@@mine1231939 Nice - every time a postmodernist (or CT-er) has no more arguments (which happens quite quickly and often), they start insulting and attacking people. And they always move the goalpost, denying what they've said before. They do indeed claim that it's complicated and "complex".

Ironic that you would use this example: because the post-modenists and critical theorists exemplify the child in the story who exclaimed “But he hasn't got anything on!" The nuance comes in explaining why everyone else appealed to the kings vanity and why, even after the child’s exclamation, the emperor continued the procession, pretending nothing was wrong.

@@tomspaghetti The child sees that truth exists. It's not a product of culture. We'll not agree, but I do think you're wrong about the strength of my anomaly/joke.

Yes, exactly. Was kinda my point. Post modernism was itself a reaction against socialism and Marxist philosophy. The best contemporary critics of post modernism are Marxist: Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Calinicos to name a few.

In our lifetime, we’re probably going to find out that postmodernist philosophy and ‘theory’ more generally are a CIA psy op designed to cripple and discredit the left.

@300bpm youre wrong.

@300bpm CIA is on the public record talking how the postmodernist philosophers in France (which they refer to as Anti-Marxist) were instrumental in dismantling the Marxist movement and removing the influence of Marxism from academia and how that furthered American interests. www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86S00588R000300380001-5.PDF

“According to the spy agency itself,” Rockhill observed, “post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism…” Here the professor was making particular reference to a recently declassified CIA report, authored in 1985, that focuses on the intellectual milieu around Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan.

Damn! I thought I was going crazy

@@dmichael2097 I still see it to this day when people speak of the Sokal Affair, this is so just weird to me.

Why is Bruno Latour in the thumbnail? Can u explain? Did they get it wrong? Confused between Bruno Latour and Sokal?

@@giuseppe5686 someone please answer this I need to know

@@patricktan7120 i think it’s because Latour was (and is) gaining fame in the „political ecology“ discussions and the „new green“ movement, afaik he also claimed that law of physics etc are socially constructed therefore not necessarily universal truth. And I think he was a pretty hard defender of shitting on sciences that claim such universal truths, thus getting hate from conservative believers of the god called ‚true science‘. He opened a totally new ontological discussion and asked critical questions about the role of science(s). He was great, may he rest in peace.

How about Cars 2. Cars 1 will obviously be required reading.

Hnas: I don't know if you are joking or not, but one of the videos in my suggestion bar is "Shrek: a Marxist analysis."

@Agora1, that's my favorite movie!

"Socialists are like onions" - Leonid Sherksky

jorney: Socialism is like onions. Some of it makes everything better. However, you can't have a meal with nothing but onions.

i dont give a hoot!

Pointlessly banal as it posits nothing useful, nothing testable and nothing worthy of consideration

Pretentious academia? I’ve never heard of such a thing!

Postmodernism is a rejection of the central tenet of modernism, which is that human beings through sensory perception and rationality can access capital-t Truths about the universe. The value is that you don't ever get to a point where beliefs become dogmatic orthodoxies.

One difficulty is that postmodern philosophy is not unitary. The philosophers often had different interests and ideas. "Postmodern" is more an umbrella term. The same goes for modern philosophy, which includes Marx, Hume, Freud, and many others. It's better to look at the benefits of one particular think or tradition within the postmodern.

Aaand that's where it goes wrong. In fact, the whole postmodern project is a mistake.

That is like saying Language was a mistake. Or Hunting.

@@pietzsche i.e., knowing the impossibility of ever really knowing.

Exactly. A good analogy I've heard to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus is that it's like a jazz record - you don't have to listen to it chronologically, and you can skip the "tracks" as you wish. Each concept is introduced as a general "theme" that is then unfolded like a jazz improvisation. And this style of writing reflects Deleuze's ontological views. I agree that he's needlessly difficult to read too. Manuel Delanda is able to introduce Deleuzian thought way more clearly and without trivializing it either.

Voltairine Kropotkin look you can do a response to Saad in this video in 2:24:28 he is talking about french postmodernist ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-NAalq9lrjQA.html

But chewing tinfoil is actually alot of fun..?

@300bpm Which means you're probably an idiot who can't comprehend nuance.

@@voltairinekropotkin5581 He's been all over this thread today, and yeah, that's it.

I'd say there is a difference in quality between these incidents. Jan Schön and other scientific fraudsters are actual scientists who use their knowledge and status to commit fraud. They succeed to varying extents because peer review is not actually very good at detecting fraud, nor is it intended to be. The purpose of peer review is mostly to point out honest mistakes and sloppyness. To detect actual, competent fraud would often require trying to replicate the findings of the fraudster. This would be a lot of work and not always possible because most labs use specialized, or even custom-made equipment. That said, journals should at least require the raw data to be submitted. Hoax articles in the social sciences try to expose something else. If editors and reviewers are incapable of telling the difference between actual research and complete gibberish, this does point at one out of three things: - Said editors and reviewers are incompetent. - They are lazy. - The field as a whole is utter nonsense. The latter option would be a sound conclusion if such hoaxes succeeded in a variety of peer reviewed journals in a given field.

I.N.F. L.X. I was looking for this comment. And if there is a connection between Sokal and Latour. Latour did call the affair a “tempest in a teacup” according the Wikipedia page on the Sokal Affair.

Did they get confused between Latour and Sokal?

Maybe it's a meta-joke. Associating one face with another's work, a slight of hand to test you in the way Sokal tested the editors.

Well, of course it wasn't. To have things peer reviewed would be hierarchical, and Postmodernists hate hierarchy.

@@infinitum8558 I can't tell which you misunderstand the most between peer review, hierarchy, and postmodernism.

@@kyyowa129 now now, let's not get persnickety.

lol the truth in the last sentence... i was just thinking that i gotta brush up cos vultures are hollowing out every thing

Lol, good luck making sense of them. I think Deleuze and Baudrillard are probably more important in todays cultural context. At least I find them more interesting.

oaxacachaka Your comment just makes me realize that Peterson might just be a Francophobe. I hope somebody could explore that especially considering the context of Canadian political culture and how you can make a division between the Quebecois left and Anglo-Saxon Ontario.

Daniel Alveo I’m not really sure but maybe. I think it probably has to do with the fact that he works in the liberal arts and that’s where political correctness seems to have its stronghold.

You think that Peterson's opposition to compelled speech is just cover for anti-French bigotry? Really?

Postmodernism is a catch-all term. It encompasses so much that it is practically nonsensical to talk about one's feelings *of* it. No doubt you can be generally sceptical: I agree, for instance, that Deleuze is a bit of maverick; stylistically provocative and experimental, he is very difficult to understand at the best of times. But making claims for postmodernism *as a whole* based on arguments such as this is a bit like dismissing all avant-gard art on the basis of disliking the works of a select few painters from the tradition. Take Foucault, for instance. He writes in a far more lucid style, and (to me at least) offers insights which are manifestly true and pertinent. In their application to neoliberal governmentality, human capital and the entrepreneur(ship) of the self -- for starters.

As a humanities student who has had to dabble in nearly all these postmodern theorists I can say I also share your frustration. People can accuse them of writing so obscurely out of pretentiousness. But really I think it’s also the fact that these are such linguistically skilled academics (Baudrillard for example) who spent their entire lives retreating into academia, that when putting their thoughts into writing and specifically translating them from other languages into English, it becomes very hard for a moderately educated english speaker to read and understand their words. Maybe Baudrillard was covering up his a fraudulence with complicated writing. but looking at this work now and at least guessing what he might have meant by all his jargon he still seems to have been right in his predictions about the mass media.

@@superstar082100 agreed. his ideas on hyperreality seem especially prescient in these isolated times

@@superstar082100 as a Frenchman I can assure you that many of these authors are extraordinarily difficult to make sense of even in French. Some authors, like the Freud-inspired Kristeva and Lacan are largely regarded as complete charlatans, when others are taken very seriously, even though you still need interpreters to tell you what the texts really are about...

You can't be an expert on something, that doesn't exist 😅

Badiou Studies is not Post Modern. Alain Badiou, the philosopher the review is based on, is actually one of the biggest and more sophisticated critics of post-structuralism and the great intellectual rival of Gilles Deleuze btw (although both liked each other personally). He's actually known for trying to rethink an objective conception of truth and give an new account of the Hegelian philosophy, also being inspired by Althusser and Lacan

Mad Blender yall been missing out

Are you pre-op?

Yes please!!!!! Especially since it forms a large part of the recent anti-science & wokeism campaign of conflicts & is conflated with capture of Academia etc…

What if that was his plan all along?!🤔

Dorian sapiens then he's running one hell of a psychology experiment that will be talked about for a long time.

I actually think Peterson has some interesting things to say about myth and religion but when it comes to postmodernism and cultural Marxism he’s basically a conspiracy theorist.

Nathan Dyck if he was in literature he'd be following in the acclaimed footsteps of people like Northrop Frye and be pretty well regarded, I'm sure. I like archetypal theory in literature, it's fun but that's about the extent of it for me.

Dorian sapiens : "What if that was his plan all along?!" Are you serious? In other words everything about him is a lie and he is an actor with pure intentions to bring out serious discussion? Come on man. How could anyone pull that off? And in what way does he seriously engage with any serious thinker? RU-vid celebrities are not serious thinkers! They are the Kardashians of the intellect! Far more plausible is that he is frustrated with not understanding the world and wants black and white explanations which simply cannot be offered. And so he comes out like this angry white male and countless others feeling equally frustrated "find" themselves in him and a glorious sense of bonding is experienced. But when you look for what he offers its scarcely anything. "Clean your room first," he says. Oh come on man. What next? Climb the corporate ladder?

Yeah. Terms like "the marketplace of ideas" kind of give away the game. I think a lot of conservative criticism of what they understand to be postmodernism is really projection of their own modes of thought. Certainly true with the moral panics over things like moral relativism or "cancel culture." As for gender, what precisely it "is" is kind of undecidable from this point. I mean, how exactly would you even go about extricating the social and cultural from the biological in something as diffuse and ubiquitous as gender? It seems very likely that a whole lot of it is cultural. We know that gender has varied tremendously between cultures, and subcultures and individuals. That may not be all that gender is, but it's certainly a huge chunk of what it is. Since you brought up TERFs, I think it's important to be clear that someone else's right to live in a way that feels right to them shouldn't hinge on my (or anyone's) ability to fully understand their inner life or history, or fit them neatly in some framework, scientific or not. Conservatives and TERFs often appropriate scientific terminology to attack the rights of trans people to live their lives, in the same way they've attacked gays, blacks, etc. That's a much more worrying, and much more influential sort of illogic than anything Sokal gestured at.

​@@DavidLessemRight the earth is flat and Jesus created the earth

"Some marxists criticize postmodernism" ?? All Marxists (people who actually study Marxism, not declarative Marxists) have huge problems with postmodernism.

1. It's true that the statements made by Social Text after the fact aren't necessarily accurate, but it IS true that they asked Sokal to excise most of the philosophical speculation and footnotes in his paper. It's also true that the journal had big names, but they were big names in philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, etc. not in physics. So although they did show a lack of rigour, the lack of rigour was in physics, not in their own field of expertise. 2. I mention Derrida because I have seen the Sokal affair being mentioned to "debunk" a wide range of philosophers, including Derrida. I speak here of not just the intentions and actions of Sokal, but the affair as an event, which includes also how it was reported, and how it is viewed to this day. I don't think Derrida's reaction is sad, his reaction is correct as far as I can see. He himself has never abused scientific terminology. 3. I focus on Sokal's acknowledgment of the limits of his hoax, because that's what most pertains to the affair. It's definitely true that he has great suspicions of the field as a whole, and sees postmodernism as a fraud, but that's not what he proves, or even tries to prove, neither with his hoax nor his more extensive work in Fashionable Nonsense, and demonstrating that sociology or cultural studies has fallen prey to "meaningless statements, name-dropping, displays of false erudition, ... sloppy thinking, poor philosophy [conflating ethics and epistemology], and glib relativism." would require a lot more than the Sokal affair did. Of course, the Sokal affair could be covered a lot more extensively, and with different angles too, but as you say, I had smaller fish to fry. This video was meant to be less a defence of the theory under attack, but just pointing out that the hoax never closed the debate. I don't see how this makes me fall into "Science Wars" thinking, I just merely tried to break down an obstacle to considering postmodern theory, which is the mis-use of Sokal's hoax. Thank you for the well thought out comment, I appreciate it

And thank you for your thoughtful response. Not sure if "I just subscribed" means a lot, but... "I just subscribed!" I'm not going to take up a bunch of your time with a continued bite-by-bite rejoinder, but I do want to wonder aloud about your claim that the SOCIAL TEXT editors' lack of rigor was in physics, but not in their own field. Here's why I don't think that works. The article was accepted _within_ their own field, according to their own rules and standards (even if those standards were relaxed to let in this apparently fannish physicist). To be sure, they didn't understand the physics, but they _did_ understand the references to and the application of Arnowitz, Latour, Irigaray, Lyotard, and (of course) Derrida. And the editors were, apparently, just fine enough with this part of the argument that the physics hardly mattered. (And those parts of the essay were just as bad, just as "silly" a mishmash of names and Theories, weren't they?) I am a longtime fan of many of these authors, including the ST editors, but I think that the "Hoax" exposed a lack of rigor on both sides of the equation. And it did change the way I thought about critical theory and the academy for a long time. Take care, and thanks for the conversation

Thanks for the comment; It really helpful me now

could you write in a sentence what have you learned about postmodernistic theory based on this video and why it has not been destroyed?

You could say he was giving them a taste of their own medicine.

Well, I think his effective use of postmodernist performance validates postmodernism to a certain extent, and undermines his attack of it. It's also important to note that this was an attack on postmodernism coming from a hard scientist, and not an attack on hard science coming from a postmodernist. That is to say, the hostilities have been generated more on the side of science here than on the side of postmodernist theory.

I don't think the two are equivalent. Scientists have successfully posed as humanities scholars on several occasions just by dialing down on clarity and saying what they correctly assumed their audience wanted to hear. Now try to imagine the reverse, a humanities scholar trying to publish a fake paper in a physics journal. The idea makes me giggle. As to who started hostilities, I disagree. Humanities scholars, especially the activist types, have been accusing people who prefer their statements backed by evidence of "scientism", "reductionism" etc. since long before the Sokal hoax.

I'm not saying the two are equivalent, but I would not put the humanities below the hard sciences on a hierarchy. Didn't the publishers of the Sokal paper admit they couldn't understand what he'd written? That seems significant. What is wrong with criticizing the hard sciences for trying to subsume the humanities?

The hard sciences aren't trying to subsume the humanities. However, it may happen that, through new methods and technological progress, questions that were once the domain of speculative deliberation in the humanities become accessible to evidence-based research. Famous historical examples include the shape of the universe and the origin of species, while the current battleground appears to be certain key aspects of the human condition. In each case, claims that humanities scholars have been making (motivated by religion, political ideology, or some other type of Weltanschauung) eventually became testable and were found to be false. In each case, the response was an attack on the sciences by the humanities - ultimately futile, but quite destructive nonetheless.

*early 60s*

It's almost as if people are deliberately missing the point when they criticize Jordan Peterson. Postmodernism evolved into applied postmodernism in the fields of Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Gender Studies, Queer Theory etc. While not postmodernists in the purist sense, the founders of those fields explicitly draw from postmodern theory and place it in the foundations of their ideology. What Jordan Peterson is criticizing is the use of postmodernist tools by activists scholars that have reasoned their way into believing that free speech is bad that that all white people are racists. And all of those fields are alive and well today.

@@thenormalyears Post-modernism began with Protagoras, who had been dead for almost 2000 years by the 1960s.

Ixian Technocrat Hopefully not in the wrong way.

Yeah you do know that most of science right now actually supports gays being normal, races being equals, transexuality being a natural phenomena, unfair working conditions being the cause of serious health problems, wealth accumulation being an addiction, an anual salary of more than $100000 bringing no additional happiness, men and women being able of the same feats, traditions being full of bull, etc, etc... What was that thing again about science being the tool of the capital and the majority?

You did see that I said "historically" and then listed a few outlying contemporaneous examples right? Also, while scientists may have those beliefs, the perception of science shaped by the pop-scientists I listed is being deliberately warped and there are whole fields of contemporary science with a particularly rightward trend politically like Evo-psych. Also a lot what you listed is sociology or more generally in the domain of the humanities except in regards to certain genetic arguments in between like in regards to the proclamations about racism and sexism. As was already outlined in the video above given the Sokal example... In the US the humanities are constantly demonized and delegitimized as a source of knowledge and the "hard" sciences are used as a cudgel to try to destroy critiques and knowledge from these areas of inquiry. Which means that a lot of this knowledge and findings listed are apriori disregarded by younger right wingers because their heroes assure them constantly that the humanities are just the domain of crazy left wingers. Part of the reason people in the "hard" sciences get to do this is a lot of them hide behind a shield of pretend "neutrality" science gives them in regartds to political issues when in reality a lot of these practitioners are hiding agendas of their own which are usually tied directly to their own corruption and political leanings. Which is what i was alluding to in my earlier post. I was also alluding to the fact that historically science was used as a way to denigrate minorities and protect the status quo. The US and European history of eugenics support being the largest and most important ongoing example I can think of. I know you will probably jump to saying this wasn't "legitimate" science, but that was not what people including educated professionals and scientists at the time thought. Supreme court justices, US presidents and even Winston Churchill made decisions with the scientific framework and justification of Eugenics in mind. Look up the Buck V. Bell supreme court decision which I consider to be the second worst SC decision in history after Dred Scott. Eugenics also helped with the genocide of the native Americans and a little known event called the Holocaust. Derrida has listed the certainty of the people who committed the Holocaust and his own experiences growing up as a Jew in France as a reason why he wanted philosophy to be more trepidatious and skeptical than it had previously been in regards to scientific and logical certainty. This is also not an abstract example as with the already mentioned Charles Murray eugenics and scientific racism arguments are coming back in style and a lot of prominent people are willing to host shows and entertain these peoples ideas and unfortunately not a lot of pop-scientists are out debunking these people, probably because they aren't being paid by a right wing think tank to do so. As per your own listed examples, Trans people and gays were considered abnormal aberrations and mental disorders and deviants before societies attitudes changed about these things and subsequently so did the science. Women's orgasms were considered a doctor prescribed cure for their "hysteria" and "wandering wombs." We did this amazing technique because there is still a widely held belief then backed up by science that women were more emotional than men. Which shows that science is not an invariant abstract neutral activity but is in part a reflection of the users of science and what they're trying to prove in the first place. The use of POC's as lab rats and "test bodies" as in the case of Tuskegee experiment and involuntary radiation experiments are another key example. I can go on for days though, I'm sure you get the belabored point.

I am not saying scientists have those beliefs, in fact it doesn't matter if they do, I'm saying the modern scientific method (as in the one in place since the middle of the 20th century) brings about those conclusions. Most pop-scientist do not represent science as a whole and the fact that it does feel like they reinforce the system is normal as they are the one that the system lets talk. Evo-psych is mostly unfalsifiable so it's not a really respected field (I'll give you that it's used by right leaning idiots), scientific racism findings don't get reproduced even though a lot of scientists are conservatives, what is happening? Is there a filter for racists at the entry of the university? No, it's just that the political leaning of scientists doesn't matter. Humanities are not demonized as a source of knowledge, they're are rightly put in their place when they venture outside their realm of competence, they have nothing to say about falsifiable facts and reproducible experiments, and when they pretend that science is no better than indigenous knowledge that can be SHOWN to be wrong in a double blind study, there is a problem. The other edge of that sword is that science has nothing to say of epistemology (of which it depends) or ethics, and the humanities should put them in their place when they do go there. Like Sam Harris (which is a hack by the way) does. Sociology is science not humanities (I won't go in the whole Critical Theory shting), also all of what I listed is actually psychology (money, homosexuality, sexism), biology (health and working conditions, racism) and neuroscience (transexuality), nothing in genetics actually (seriously dude, do you even know what you're talking about?) You seem to live in a world where scientists are right wing assholes trying to influence the debate, I think you don't really know how the scientific consensus is reached (experiments have to work everytime and all that, it's kind of impossible to impose your fake results, just look at the Lysenko debacle) also the crazy left-wingers use science at every occasion they have, everybody wants to have science on their side, because it works, so if it's on your side you must be right (the catch being you follow science where it leads you, not the other way around). I wont comment on the quote marks on hard and neutral, you kind of exposed yourself as a cognitive relativist on this one. Then there is the old eugenics canard, eugenics are not science, they are an application of science, it's based on the assumed superiority of certain traits, science cannot determine superiority, as it is not measurable, you can't do an experiment on it. Also, stupid argument, it would be like blaming modern day Germans for the Holocaust. The Genocide of the Native Americans happened mostly because of religious fervor, the Nazis were notoriously anti-intellectual and didn't apply the scientific method, like at all, rejecting relativity and natural selection, both of which are better model for predicting reality, also it's not because Derrida said it (he said a lot of smart stuff, but still) that it's true. So you're telling me that people in the humanities were fighting for gay rights then? No way, nobody was. In fact the classification of mental pathologies is always a delicate matter which relies more on moral preconceptions inherent in society than in the scientific method, and the fact that homosexuality was seen as one has more to do with the philosophy of the time (ergo the humanities, kidding it was religion). Society changed attitudes way after science did, in fact most people don't agree with the science on trans people, and gays are still getting shit all the time. The fact that women were hysterical was not backed up by facts, it was simply assumed, the fact that POC were used as lab rats was not justified by science but by society's racist biases. Scientists don't try to prove anything, I don't know where you get this idea but it's not really well seen in research to start with the end already written, you seem to conflate a lot of things and well, I already spent too much time adressing your misconceptions. Kisses on your right cheek and a slap on the left one. Sorry for the repetitive style, I'm kinda tired.

You have misread or are reading things into my post. I'm not under the impression that scientists are mostly right wingers. Most academics in study after study lean at least slightly left. I find your original comment a mostly uncontroversial one in regards to it describing the beliefs of most scientists, I was more trying to elaborate on my intentions with my own first comment. The problem is again that the "mainstream" of most academic scientists is not represented well by self appointed popularizers of science and I think it's evident I don't mean most scientists when I say this as i am bringing up specific examples over and over again. Humanities can mean different things depending on the specific college or region you're from. For the sake of moving forward though I'll drop the term and say I'm referring to the "soft sciences." Which should clear up some of the confusion. you might have about my prior post. I'll only add that there are a lot of people even just on this website that constantly dispute the legitimacy and usefulness of these fields. I'm surprised you dispute the fact that genetics is often the source of a lot of race and sex arguments. Also the primary argument for the "legitimacy" of homosexuality from a scientific standpoint and the one that was used the most as I was growing up was that being gay has a genetic basis. I put quotes around legitimacy because I don't think we should need arguments like this to justify people's lives, but unfortunately we did. Genetics is also the back bone of biology along with evolution, seriously dude do you know what you're talking about? Speaking of quotes, I wouldn't describe myself as a cognitive relativist. I quoted those sarcastically because I'm against the idea that people can be unbiased or neutral or at the very least the specific examples I gave. The method of science is the best one we have so far to gain incremental inductive knowledge. The problem is as humans we taint the process and bring in individual and cultural biases, but some of these biases are so deeply rooted and sometimes based on ideology so pervasive we need larger more systematic criticisms to counter the bias. Of which I have already previously alluded to. I'm aware of how peer-review is supposed to work in an ideal world, you're aware that you're bringing up this ideal scenario on a video where the maker already gave a specific example (the Midi Chlorian one) that showed this doesn't always work as intended? I think you should calm down a bit and actually read and try to take in people's arguments before commenting. You seem to think I'm under the impression the soft sciences and/or the humanities were always angels or that I was making the argument they were better on social issues in the past than other scientific fields which I was not and am not. They are just biased and susceptible to corruption as other fields. Assuming that was my position for a second though, I think "two wrongs make a right" is a poor defense of anything and I certainly won't accept it here. I think it's an almost ahistorical interpretation to say the Native American genocide was mostly due to "religious fervor." I would say racial superiority, economic concerns and unintentional and intentional biological germ warfare would come long before we consider religion. I lump everything you said in regards to the nazi's here and just say, you're aware that bad people can still do science right? Just because you don't like the way something is applied doesn't mean it wasn't applied right and as the rest of my argument was establishing this was a widely held belief of the broader scientific community and one that was held by the wider culture. Calling it "bad science" is a lame excuse because most of the things we believe scientifically are based on incremental inductive knowledge subject to constant scrutiny. In this imperfect world with the imperfect half knowledge we have, people can still use scientific knowledge in isolated ways and means to justify ideas they have. If the wider culture believes these things it also wont matter that it's not true in an ideal world where everything is peer reviewed perfectly and numerous times to enumerate it's correctness. Which ironically as studies show often doesn't happen anyway since science journals and monetary funding favor innovation and novelty in covering experiments rather than in people reaffirming past ones which has led to a lack of peer review study for a lot of experiments. I don't know what you're referring to with this, maybe instead of calling people stupid, you should flesh out your sentence fragments so a person can know what you're talking about: "Also, stupid argument, it would be like blaming modern day Germans for the Holocaust." If I try to interpret this I think you seem to be under the impression throughout both of your posts that I'm some kind of science hater trying to tear it down in favor of something else. I'm not, I'm just skeptical of it and it's application and I don't brush aside past misuses of it as aberrations especially when these arguments are coming back en vogue. I listed practices done by doctors (which are practicing biologists doing applied work) and discovered by the science at the time to treat "hysteria." You might not think of it as science now, but you would be laughed out of the medical journals if you disputed the reality of "hysteria" at the time. In regards to homosexuality and trans, people actually did have to fight the idea that these were abnormalities or mental disorders. In fact the DSM's listing of these up until the late 70's as a negative was often cited as a reason for the necessity of LGBT activism at the time. Science doesn't rarely gives us 2 + 2 = 4 deductive truths, (I would argue this never happens but that is a much bigger philosophical argument) so people have to apply their own knowledge and interpretation to the process even when they might not necessarily want to. Biases seep in, where interpretation starts. This was especially true in the past which again I' said "historically" in my first post.

Hot damn I had a response ready but it went away. Short one: Yeah I was tired, misread a lot of your points and might have given you intentions that weren't there, didn't call you stupid, called the conflating of application of science and science itself stupid, agree with you on most issues (when you put them in nuanced terms I actually arrived to the same conclusions on my own), you're still wrong here and there (nazis, genetics for gays and sex, bad science staying longer than it actually does) but I don't want to expose why as it would be pointless, didn't talk about the same thing when saying "humanities" (I was talking about non-scientific academia, history, philosophy, cultural studies, etc...) so that explains a lot. There you go, I was wrong to comment as soon as you answered, I should have waited now, you would't had to write another short story to counter me.

Professor Hamamoto - That's an important last sentence. MSM does the same - "Oh, look, Rosie O'Donnell's tweets!", "Oh, look, whom XYZ had sex with!", "Oh, look, Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein are very naughty boys!"... while millions of innocents are being killed, millions more made homeless, millions of children are scarred for life with PTSD in the Middle East so that we may make the world safe for privately-held central banks who conjure money out of thin air and lend it to governments at interest, for the powers-that-be to change democratically-elected governments at will in order to control pipelines, oil fields, and through MSM control people's mind... More wars = more debt = more profits = more control = more passive zombie workers... It's trickle-down ideology: either teach and internalise our values or we turn off the money faucet to institutions, professors and students... It's the same people left and right, neo-conservatives and neo-liberals, it's a biological survival strategy and a means to extract revenge... Just argue about irrelevancies and you'll be fine... Discuss getting off the Petrodollar or expelling privately-held central banks are you and your country will be bombed to smithereens... And fuck the innocent children. Who cares? We are living in a far from optimal world - equal opportunity for all, a safe and encouraging environment to raise a family, free thinking and speaking without fear or favour - as vested interests create false flags around the world - including 9/11 - to divide and to keep us distracted and frightened and hating each other in order to continuously take away freedoms and tighten control. Population numbers in the West are falling due to the financial stress of providing for children and due to a materialistic, rat-race ideology, and the population that is left over is progressively being dumbed down, distracted by baubles, frightened by taboos.

There's huge difference between mass-produced articles without much content, and articles that are a clear sham. Or maybe there isn't in postmodernist academia, and that's why you go off on this tangent about polished versions of doctoral dissertations? Surely that's not what you're saying?

I completely agree

haha, very true. Lots of atheists are like this too. Their devotion to pragmatism is pretty impressive though.

I would rather say that people who put their faith in hard sciences are suspicious of people who claim to have qualitative knowledge, especially when they start telling you how to live your life, or that you are evil, an infidel, or philistine.

You're talking about a different topic. I'm referring to the STEM circlejerk and the common dismissal of the humanities that is so prevalent today.

No - same topic. Humanities are dismissed by many because they have contained so much utter dross responsible for vast amounts of human misery, even as they claim to be guides to living the good life, individually or collectively: just like religions. By contrast, people see that their TV works, so they know that scientists are good for something, even if they do not get it right all the time. If you tell people that they are intellectually philistine because they mistrust your particular brand of qualitative "knowledge", you should expect to be dismissed, since the term "Philistine" has no real determinate content: it is just being used as an insult meaning something like "not as cool as me". Anyway, a post-modernist (which you may or may not be) has no "real" basis to say what constitutes "real knowledge" if knowledge is no more than an extension of power. The rejoinder "He would say that wouldn't he" apples to post-modernists just as well as to anyone else.

The fact that not only Sokal affair, but also you, instead of directly interacting with the text, rather construct quasi-conspiracy theories, about entire fields of knowledge, actually shows how your point in the one not based in rational values and scientifical and critical groundings. To vaguely claim that a lot of different authors and an entire section of social sciences are charlatans are an empty attack, but nothing rather than that. If you want to engage critically, what you totally can and should if you think you disagree, instead of appealing to vague and generic bold claims about an strawman, directly engage and criticize these authors. The funniest part about your claim, is that if we are strictly and scientifical in our approach, this study doesn't mean nothing at all. Just that one specifical review failed one time at peew reviewing. This is what both Derrida, and Sokal himseld, stated. The curious part about the vague statements that "postmodernists" (i do hardly believe that something as "postmodernism" exists, and i am convinced that is a pseud-concept) are vague and not scientifically strict, is that these claims are vague and lack scientifical strictness.

What is true isn't necessarily "useful" for generating a profit. If profit were the only concern for academic researchers, do you think we'd have telescopes taking extremely high quality images of galaxies that we couldn't get to even in millions of years of travelling just below the speed of light? Or do you think we would be seeing people doing research on when and why dinosaurs evolved winged feathers? A lot of research doesn't usually start becoming applicable in areas of economic importance until literally decades, or even centuries after it first becomes formulated and incorporated into a theory. Perhaps post-modern philosophy will not have much of a strong positive impact on society any time soon, but I don't think it should be totally excluded from academic environments, since many post-modern philosophers and social scientists' ideas may be of interest to academics, if only in a "negative" way (that is to say, for reminding them that all institutions and systems can and should become subject to criticism).

how postmodernism prooved that science is not science???? plz plz explain

It's funny how people often name "science" in singular as if it were only one discipline with a defined set of knowledge and principles, but then name the "Humanities" in plural as some odd category of several dozens of disciplines that are supposed to have nothing in common except for a concern with what is "human".

He definitely had suspicions about the entire field, he doesn't hide that, but by his own admission, neither his hoax nor his book proved that the entire field is corrupt

No scientific experiment ever proves a conclusion, all they ever prove is that there was occurrence X under these specific conditions in this one instance in time.... however we use a collection of such instances to infer broader conclusions about reality as a whole. His paper has the same effect.

Sure, but discrediting postmodern theorists would have to involve discrediting their theoretical premises, concepts, frameworks, etc. Not just attacking their use of scientific terminology, which is a small aspect of any of these thinkers' thought

True, but in order to discredit their theoretical frameworks you first have to be able to understand it, and the point Sokal was making was that a great deal of post modern publication is complete gibberish making in unfalsifiable and therefore useless... this is the primary argument made against post modernists such as Derrida, Foucault etc.

That same criticism could be put against a huge number of influential philosophers, rather than just postmodern theorists. If I had read Kant without having any help from secondary literature, I wouldn't have understood it, maybe even thought it's gibberish, yet he's one of the most influential philosophers of all time. It seems to me like people are just upset about difficult texts that take patience to understand

Oh shiet!!!11111!!1!!

From the little I've read of it, it doesn't seem very accurate. I'm considering reading the whole book to then make a video response to it, but I'm not sure yet, I don't want my reading material to be determined entirely by the videos I make for the channel

That has been suggested several times so I might do it. I'm just a bit conflicted right now between the viewers who want to see more content about postmodernism, and those who think I should focus more on other fields of philosophy

True that.

Shubham Bhushan Peterson is a clinical psychologist. Sounds pretty science-y to me

Finn Reisner oh, fancy words.

INSTALL GENTOO well afaik you have to study medicine with psychology, to understand medical and biological aspects of "the mind", like how a braincell works etc. So yes fancy words, only they genuinely mean something in academia. Unlike postmodernism I think, which sort of relativises alot of meanings. Basically only a pleb, or postmodernists, would consider "clinical psychology" to be just "fancy words".

Who is Sokol?

CountFenrir Appeal to authority.

Not all philosophy has to be collectivist.

"Collectivist" is a term that's so vague that it's almost meaningless. There is no field of philosophy simply called "collectivism". The problem with PhilosophyInsights isn't that it's not "collectivist" (whatever that would mean), it's that it barely contains any philosophy at all.

NathansHVAC philosophy is a broad term for all of academic thought, ideology, intellectualism, politics, history, and I think even the sciences regardless of how scientists feel is philosophy, education is all philosophy, if the channel was into philosophy itself they would explore it from a frame of trying to get deeper into philosophy, instead the point is that they are trying to capitalize on rightwing philosophy while selling the channel under that name as unbiased and into philosophy, which they are not

I'm sold and subscribed to this channel. I"m definitely waiting for the right to get "rekt". I am on a life long quest to be convinced that merit has no place in society. The only ones that try to argue that point are the left. The left getting "rekt" videos are becoming boring. They all pretend to defend special privileges without ever truthfully saying they are defending special privileges. It is pretty easy to show the immorality of that argument.

@ippos_khloros i want you to think about.the multifaceted concept of literacy for a second. The first of literacy as an individual capacity to read and write, two literacy as a census measurement (literacy rates), three literacy as a form of human capital. Would the concept of literacy exist if we did not have written language? Would we measure it at an individual level if it werent a socially necessary requirement for an individual to be literate to partake in economic activity? Would states measure literacy rates if they had no impact on public goals and economic outcomes? What economic and social transformations made governments go from being indifferent to, and even suppressing, general literacy, to pursuing it as an end goal? Literacy is the perfect illustration of a social and psychological construct deeply rooted in the exercise of power of the state through educational institutions in the service of economic goals, the individual psychological tests and braoder census instruments reflect the circulation of knowledge through power. Literacy, not the act of being literate, but literacy as a measurement and qualifier and category, is a social construct, a good one, a desirable one, but one that only exists in the realm of power and economic activity.

I've seen this label applied to Dugin and De Benoist before, but what about their theory is post-modern specifically? I know they borrowed from a number of different schools of thought and adopted a lot of the language of the post-1968 left, but I'm curious what you mean.

​@@yep9462 I wrote this comment a year ago and my positions have changed since. However I do think that you could vaguely consider both Dugin and De Benoist as "postmodernists" since both of them elaborate a critique of modernity and base their works in Heidegger.