>>And
>>Feyerabend is a true post-modern.
>>
Justin S. replies to my daily one act of on-list bravado with this:
>Oh, no. He's a hard boiled realist (for a >relativist), really serious
about
>science, about which he knows a lot--he'd >have utter contempt for the
Social
>Text crowd and would never have fallen for a >second for the Sokol hoax;
he's
>serious about politics; he writes gorgeously; >and while capable of
brilliant
>sarcarism, he has no irony at all.
I didn't say he was a stupid post-modern, nor a post-structuralist, nor a deconstructionist, just a post-modern. Quine comes pretty close, too (something Rorty saw full well and was willing to make the leap).
And I highly doubt anyone at the Sorbonne would have fallen for the the Sokol hoax either--they take their cross-disciplinarity very seriously in France.
Feyerabend (another Austrian by the way)basically argued for the abolition of his profession (like Wittgenstein, though his direct influence is supposed to be Popper). And his stance on the relativity of all knowledge claims puts him in line with other post-modern epistemological relativists like Lyotard or Foucault (neither of them dimwits I might add). He also argued that scientists' professional success is largely achieved through rhetoric and even propagandist use of language. Moreover not all post-modernists abandon some form of realism or a physicalist/materialist ontology. Realism is actually a very good path to get to the sort of imposible scepticism and relativism that so characterizes the post-modern (though idealism and pragmatism can get you there, too).
And then there is this loose end:
>>When Russell and Wittgenstein were hot on >>the topic, the term 'logical
atomism' was used >>a lot Russell (though not an empirical >>scientist) made
appeal to 'direct
>>acquaintance' for getting at the 'atomic units' >>of meaning.
>Whatever made anything that acquaibtance >has anything to do with empirical
>science?
I don't know, who thought this? I didn't. Perhaps when terms like 'logical atomism' and 'logical positivism' get associated with one's name, people start to think this. And 'logical empiricism' got equated with 'logical positivism'.
Charles Jannuzi