[lbo-talk] Texas school board drops Jefferson, adds Calvin

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Sun Mar 21 10:19:23 PDT 2010


Doug Henwood wrote:


> Given the horrified reactions of so many to "postmodernism" - which I thought had been getting obsolete, but evidently not - I don't get this claim. It seems to make lots of people, mainstream and Marxist, very uncomfortable. And I'm not really sure to whom this vague word is supposed to apply - Foucault? He certainly didn't avoid dangerous questions about madness, incarceration, sex. Butler? Ditto. Etc.

But they rule out any possibility of true answers to these questions, though this doesn't stop them from treating their own answers as true in a sense inconsistent with this.

Here's Stanley Fish in a recent New York Times column trying unsuccessfully to avoid this absurd implication of "constructivism," namely, that if, for instance, "prevailing paradigms" make ritual murder and cannibalism "rigorous" ways of dealing with the "reality" they "construct," there's no way of judging the practices "unrealistic" because any such judgment would have to be based on different "paradigms" and, on these assumptions, there's no rational basis on which to prefer one set of "paradigms" to any other.

This is apart from the fact that he makes claims about reality, e.g. about "the content of realism," that he implicitly and self-contradictoriy treats as claims independent of any particular set of "paradigms."

“the content of realism — of what the best up-to-date accounts of the world tell us — is constructively determined by the workings of a culture-bound process of hypothesis, experiment, test and calculation that is itself a constructed artifact and as such can change even as it guides and assesses research. In the absence of the alternative pragmatism rejects — something called Mind equipped with something called reason which enables it to describe accurately something called the World (Bacon’s dream) — ‘realism cannot fail to be constructivist, though reality is not itself … constructed’ (Margolis).

“A constructive realism will still make use of words like ‘true’ and ‘better,’ but these are judgments that a proposition is or is not warranted — has sufficient evidence backing it up — within the prevailing paradigms. (What higher judgment could here be? Kuhn asks.) In the event of a paradigm change — not an event that can be predicted or planned; it takes the form of conversion not demonstration — there will be new canons of evidence and new measures of warrant. Notice how far this is from saying that ‘anything goes.’ At any moment the protocols and procedures in place will enforce a rigor of method and interpretation; it is just that the rigor lives and has its shape entirely within ‘the existential and historical contingencies of the human situation’ and not in a realm of extra-human verification and validation, whether that realm be theological, philosophical or empirical.”

Ted



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