I ran across an amazingly well written and interesting series of articles in the New York Times Opinionator blog. Errol Morris is a filmmaker, who originally was a grad student at Princeton in the history and philosophy of science program under Dr. Thomas Kuhn.
It seems to me to be an account of the word ‘incommensurable’, and Thomas Kuhn, the author of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and the father of the paradigm shift. At least with its perspectives about science (how Kuhn saw science), this book could almost be considered a foundational article about how post modernism works, and what it means…to the sciences.
Much of this devolves around the post modern notion that there are no absolutes, and that while the sciences purport to deal with absolutes, they (the practitioners of science, e.g. scientists) are in reality as deeply immersed in the subjective, venal world as the rest of us…
These are fighting words…amongst academics, and the title of the series (e.g. the Ashtray) is named so because Kuhn threw it at the author (many years ago). This is such a brilliantly written piece that I am suggest that the best way to get a sense of what this is all about, is to read it!
The Ashtray
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/errol-morris/
As a rather strange perspective to take on this series of articles, I can say that I understand Ayn Rand a lot better now…
On a more serious tack, I often wonder about much of the post modernism: which seems to reside in, and seems to be so enmeshed with the social sciences and the humanities in academia… If you consider that much of this can be seen as mere backbiting and academic squabbling written large…you may have a point. There is a sense that the outcome of this is to bring the natural sciences under the sway of these post modern intellectuals… Ironically, there are some absolutes being bandied about in these ivied halls…
You can now see how important such modern terms, such as ‘controlling the narrative’ really are in the power politics of ideas.
