When a critical theorist chastised Critical Theory 

This response gave me a hearty laugh! This take is outstanding.

Well, isn't this was meta-modernism answers? We are now responsible for choosing, with the acknowledgement of everything. If everything can be boiled down to "social conditioning" and no viable alternative is offered by Post-Modernism, then we are to choose for ourselves.

Deleuze is the metaphysical thinker who elucidates these concepts best. In my humble opinion. Nice comment, kipwonder.

Totally agree with the fact that our values influence the hypothesis scientists investigate but then, once the direction is set, what the scientific method uncovers is one of the closest things to truth we have. Here we could get into a long discussion on theories of truth (since everything hinges on the definition of truth). In any case, I think you might be a social constructionist instead of a social constructivist (yes it's kinda memey how close the words are).

@@MrLcowles In what way does it not make sense to you? Do you think it's self-contradictory? Am I using terms you aren't familiar with? Do you think the conclusions don't follow from the premises? Something else?...

@@Mon000 I’m both, but constructionism has a bunch of different meanings in different disciplines so for the sake of clarity I stick to social constructivism. Two main reasons why I’m a social constructivist: For one I don't think there is *one* scientific method but rather scientific methods (plural), and they sometimes diverge. Whenever I bring up examples from the social sciences (which I'm more well versed in) people dismiss them as not really being true sciences anyway, so let me bring up an example in the hard sciences. You are a statistician so I'm sure you're familiar with the debate between statisticians and data-scientists. Both value predictive scope and parsimony in their methodology, but (on average) statisticians value parsimony more while data-scientists value predictive scope more. This is really a philosophical disagreement and I'm working on a way that aims to tackle these kinds of disputes, but while I'm confident I can ameliorate them, I don't think I can resolve them completely. More importantly, scientific realist want to discover "natural kinds” and I just don't think they exist, I think all classifications need some type of value judgement. Again, I'll take an example from the hard sciences to preempt a social science snipe (not saying you would dismiss me, just that you would be a good bayesian if you took my example of why social science undermines scientific realism, and updated not only towards scientific realism being false, but also towards social science not really being science). When we look at the stars we can see there is a continuum of stars being brighter, or hotter, or bluer and we need to draw a boundary between them to have different kinds of stars. But this is kind of arbitrary and we need to be actively constructing a classification system just to get different kinds of stars. Now once we have committed to a classification system (e.g. the Morgan Keenan system that uses F,G,K,M types of stars) then it becomes very difficult to say that our star does not belong to the G-type (not impossible, but you would need to throw out a boatload of other beliefs), but the classification itself is not the discovery of natural kinds, but rather a social construct.

Fair enough, this doesn't sound like nonsense to me. But aren't you also kind of attacking a position so strong nobody actually holds it? I'm not sure how many educated people are still alive who believe science can answer every question. Perhaps I'm naive but I feel like not many prominent people are still saying anything like that except maybe Neil deGrasse Tyson.

@@roundninja I'm not sure if you're replying to the first comment or the second comment. If it's the first comment then it wasn't an attack, just an explanation of what the constructivist project is. I think most professional scientists (at the very least in the social sciences) understand this dynamic, and it's mostly the people who have some knowledge (e.g. people who aren't researchers but have maybe a bachelors or masters) that get this wrong. If it's a reply to the second comment then I think much fewer people have thought about this. And I'm not just talking about the people who visit sites like "science is awesome", but professional researchers too. This is not very surprising since they're philosophical problems not scientific ones. The researchers who were tasked with constructing a taxonomy or a brand new paradigm of research methodology have certainly thought about it, but most of science is just collecting and analyzing data within existing paradigms, so that doesn't give much reason for philosophical reflection.

The universal ideological solvent! We have the solution to radically changing the social, political and geophysical landscape! ... uh... your solvent is dribbling all over the floor; good sir... ooh that's a serious mess; did you intend for it to do that?

Ok but you just proved nothing of objective 😂. So you agree that sophistry is correct? Or do you think the Socratic method is still a good way to get to some universal truth?

Agreed. Maybe Hegel with his idealism could be compared, but Marx took the materialist and dialectic approach which could hardly be called post modern as defined by this video.

Enantiodromia. Post-modernism is like a synecdoche - a part for the whole. It's become a living symbol but the actual meanings of both are different in pop culture and I'm ones own actuality. Post modernism even as it's used in pop was a necessary evil , albeit many post-modernists got completely lost in their own abstractions , imo and forgot that there still is reference to something in the world and the "the" world is our common ground. But not all post-modernism did that. So it's synecdoche - part for the whole. Relativism holds up to some scrutiny for sure, but still requires grounding to something in the world else if another wants to listen to what one is abstracting and how one structures their representations in their order to communicate.

It's because it's just right-wing rubbish.

How? The ideas come from the same people from the same theorists and from the same crock pot of anti-intellectualism

@@VolkColopatrion that's just it... They don't actually. That's how, not quite sure how you expect this to be answered?

Ironically, I just read the abstract of an article that describes constructivism and socio-constructionism in the opposite way lol.

@@lucasrinaldi9909 doesn't surprise me. Think of it like this: Piaget and Vygotsky are social constructivists interested in the specific social structures that engage cognitive development and learning. Foucault, on the other hand, is a social constructionist interested in the social and historical conditions of identity formation with no reference to any cognitive or learning mechanism whatsoever. Indeed, it's because the social constructionists ultimately rely on a tacitly behaviourist (non-cognitive) theory of learning that made me abandon it as a waste of time.

Exactly, and he isn't a climatologist, meteologist, geophysicist or anything that would give him expertise in any small way about global warming. He just has faith in it.

@@loulasher wrong, my friend, he has develop a social sci approach with does pretty god job in disinguish whats good sci and whats bad sci, i was never the absolute relativist you imagine. He in facts help every of us to have more clear image of what sci is

@@Fernando-nz2ks interesting. I don't know that what I replied and what you offered as a counter are incompatible. It seems like he has created a kind of model of what legit science can look like so as to differentiate it from its opposites, is that what you are saying? Most new ideas in science, including ones that gain legitimate consensus like the periodic table, start as hunches, isolated observations, even dreams (why I chose periodic table). I don't trust modeling in general, and try to always remember when something is directly observed and measured vs implied. I worked with a range of geophysical modeling (such as gpr) and the "ground truth" very often was nothing in spite of the equipment seeing all sorts of things. I would not trust a social scientist or someone in the humanities to come up with anything worth taking seriously that sorted good science from bad. We'd still be teaching geosyncline theory and far worse ideas.

Latour acknowledges influence from Dewey. U think Honneth, a habermasianan dialectican as far as i know, offer a similar model of critique, and where?

@@Fernando-nz2ks Honneth has emphasized Dewey's role in his theory of recognition, which is a constructive project. You don't necessarily need Honneth for that - Dewey has a theory of recognition in his Lectures in China. Honneth has only deepened Dewey and Hegel's account. It is also worth noting that Honneth disagrees with Habermas on several crucial points, including the universality of speech-act theory as sufficient for social critique.

@@draw4everyone quite interesting, only one more question, do u know if honneth have explicit position throught Peter Sloterdijks works? (Sloterdijks have had strong disagremments with Habermas and his works and Laoturs are pretty interwined)

@@Fernando-nz2ks That I don't know!

A lot of what could reasonably be said within Postmodernism was said decades ago. Once the field was matured and running out of interesting ground to cover, a race to be the edgiest intellectual took over. It became vogue among some scholars to make radical claims while shying away from empirical analysis. Hence why it became cool for an activist academic to claim that empiricism is a neocolonial tool of Western Patriarchy whenever they were asked to provide evidence for their thesis.

Foucault was a pedophile and child-rapist who advocated the abolition of the age of consent, and who said the Marquis de Sade "didn't go far enough."' I'm not sure any insights he could have provided are really valuable. The entirety of PoMo is non-conformist idiocy _as_ philosophy, dressed up in logorrhea.

look at the long threat above i think you will find a fair accaount of what this field is really about xd (i would agree on your points but this has most to do with derrida, and missundestood of them by so-call social movements; and with Bourdieu who is far worse than Derrida xd almost a conspiracy theoristh at his worst stages)

Postmodernism isn't even a field. It's a term used in two ways to describe phenomena. In one way as to describe architecture that is inspired by more than one style and the other in denoting the point in history when modernity has been shown to be an insufficient way of understanding our contemporary epoch, post modernity. The question as to whether words and things are coextensive is probably the longest standing question in the history of Western philosophy, as is the status of truth. It is not in anyway unique to continental philosophy. An honest analysis would show that analytic philosophy effectively abandoned traditional philosophy and continental philosophy is the only place that maintains continuation with the traditional cannon of Western thought. Interestingly and tellingly, analytic philosophy tends to just assume Aristotelian logic and ignore everything else. I'm not sure what any of this does apart from try and set up some dumb death match between philosophy proper and science. The fact that the book basis most of its argument on the fact that these philosophers "misuse" scientific words when in fact they use philosophical terms that science took from philosophy. It's absolutely blind to the historical relation science has to philosophy. It actually proves how ideological science is and certainly the defense of science of these authors who even at one point talk about protecting the "power and glory" of science. Any one with a Humanities degree will note that "power and glory" is a Christian term... Along with the New Atheists, this sort of analysis actually proves Nietzsche's point that science is the continuation of Western Christian mortality and this nihilism, which is also why science is currently the right-hand in man's destruction of the planet earth. It is no coincidence that Sokal defends the power and glory of science whilst the new atheists defend a new crusade against Islam. This is not a defense of the scientific method that has a greater relationship with error than with truth, this is a defense of the power and glory of a modernist concept of science that is tied in to all the problems of Western culture and politics, we have to be aware that, as with the teachings of Christ, science can be hijacked, can play the role of a political theology. Latour is interesting but unless you are familiar with the work of the French History of Science school it comes without roots. Always good to go back to people like George Canguilhem, Gaston Bachelard and Jean Cavalier, not least for their role in the French Resistance.

Hmmm - in the land of the Postmodern, the one eyed man/woman/zee/zer/zippitydoodah is king

Yes, the Germanic reaction contra French Atomism.

The mechanical association between romanticism and fascism betrays in itself a typically postmodernist forma mentis, whose internal logic boils down to the most shameless free association.

Think you're missing the point of postmodernism completely, the point is not 'everything is a social contruct', it's that we are subjects who project a social construct onto everything we do. That doesn't mean there isn't a needle or your eye because they're social constructs, but that when you engage in reality you're constantly applying your social contruct to everything, that doesn't make the construct true nor does it make the needle false, it just informs your opinion of the needle, and what would drive you to stab yourself in the eye with it. I find many people make this mistake when viewing postmodernism.

@@beggerinohio2200 This has absolutely nothing to do with postmodernism.