Errol Morris accuses Kuhn of being a bad philosopher and bad person | Hacker News Reader

Errol Morris accuses Kuhn of being a bad philosopher and bad person

blogs.scientificamerican.com

27 pointspseudolus12 comments

Previous discussions of the review:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18049515

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17238765

> Previous discussions of the review:

That's incorrect. Those are all different reviews of the same work by different people that (likely [1]) make different points.

[1] per general knowledge of reviews, I've only read the present one.

Fair point. However, they're prior discussions of Morris' campaign against Kuhn (I think it's fair to call it a campaign, since he's been doing it for years), so relevant links in this context.

Whether Kuhn’s ideas support “far-right authoritarian” politics is an interesting question. As the author here points out, postmodernism is typically thought of as progressive. It’s interesting to think about the alternative; perhaps the “might makes right” aspects of fascism that Morris sees as the result of Kuhn’s paradigms.

Postmodernism is a toolset, and the thinkers who are bunched together under its umbrella, frequently unwillingly, point out the issues with late rationalist epistemology.

That is, the postmodernists are responsible for attempting to show the rest of the people that the boat has severe cracks. Fascists and right wing authoritarianism has already been exploiting the cracks forever.

Blaming postmodernism for anything is laughable. It’s not a cause, it’s a series of well informed observations.

https://reallifemag.com/faked-out/

“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.” ― Roger Scruton

Because epistemology is simple. /facepalm

Postmodernism posits a plurality of truths, as well as underscores the demarcation problem.

Originally it was mostly progressive, but the toolset of postmodernism, particularly the whole "science is just a social construct no better than other social constructs" is also very useful for the right wing when science doesn't support their conclusions either. For instance, the creationists in the 2005 Dover trial brought in Steve Fuller, a postmodern philosopher, to testify on their behalf.

So there’s Foucault, Dellueze, Derrida and a bunch of other icons of the left. Who are the famous far-right authoritarian postmodernist thinkers? I’m drawing a blank.

I don't know about "famous" but people like Steve Fuller. Wiliam Dembski and David Berlinski are people with philosophical training who use arguments from postmodernism in order to claim that evolutionary biology is just a social construct and not the only way to understand biology. They are pretty well known to people who follow the attempts of creationists to convince the public that evolutionary biology is somehow in crisis.

It's used for many types of political propaganda. Originally indeed it was for more progressive notions, in the last decade or so; more used to justify authoritarian assault on truth, facts etc. Climate change becomes "just an opinion" etc.

> postmodernism is typically thought of as progressive.

Postmodernism is neither progressive nor conservative, neither libertarian nor authoritarian. Postmodernism is neither an ideology nor particularly friendly to any ideology. (There're ideologies it's particularly unfriendly to for epistemological reasons, but they don't cluster in any one area of any of the traditional political axes.)

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