Back to Enlightenment Rationality:  Or the Roots of Postmodernist *Ignes
Fatui*


Penultimately, I would like to address the woolly and fallacious argument
for antirealism and the (alleged) Social Construction of Reality given by
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar.  Their argument, I believe, runs something
like this:  "If there were an independent material world, it would have to
be directly knowable though nonlinguistic, nonconceptual means.  But the
second we start to talk about what we claim to know of such a world, we are
helping ourselves to socially constructed concepts; and, if the concepts are
socially constructed, so also are what they are concepts about."
[Introduction to the Philosophy of Science:  Cutting Nature at its Seams, by
Robert Klee, Oxford, 1997, page 174.]

"The last clause in this argument is the sort of mistake that ought to
remind the reader of one of Bishop Berkeley's more embarrassing moments:
Because you can't think that trees exist independently of being thought
about without, like, *thinking* about them, there are no such trees – there
are only thoughts about trees; or rather, trees "just are" nothing but
thoughts of trees.  The way out from under this woolly argument of Latour
and Woolgar's is surely pretty obvious:  The first sentence of the argument
is just plain false.   WHO says that IF there is an independent material
world it MUST be knowable directly by nonlinguistic, nonconceptual means?
Certainly no realist would make such an implausible demand.  Only a Kantian
Idealist would think up such a self-defeating and question-begging
requirement.  But Latour and Woolgar, if they are anything philosophical at
all, are *true to their Kantian (hence, to their Idealist) roots*:  For them
what exists collapses into what is knowable – in good Kantian Idealist
fashion – precisely because for them what exists collapses into what is
investigatable, and what is investigatable collapses into what is
describable, and what is describable collapses into what is knowable.  In
this tortuous way, Latour and Woolgar lead the sociology of knowledge up a
dead-end alley into full-blooded antirealism, an antirealism that comes
perilously close to what Bloor said the sociology of knowledge must avoid:
an idealist model of science." [Introduction to the Philosophy of Science,
Robert Klee, page 174.]



Caveat to Postmodernists

The infamous issue of Social Text (i.e., Transgressing the Boundaries:
Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, Social Text #46/47,
spring/summer 1996, pages 217 – 252, Duke University Press)

>>> …erupts into view right now because, after years of relative immunity,
the *science studies racket* is under scrutiny by intellectuals in and out
of science who won't be put off by the usual line of patter or soothed by
the standard aphorisms.  Like any Mafia family when the indictments come
down, science studies gets in touch with its lawyers and protestations of
affronted virtue pour forth.  Sorry.  I don't think that sort of thing will
work here.  These days, the Tree of the Hesperides does not thrive in the
Groves of Academe, for they ar choked by postmodernist smog; such pomology
brings forth apples not golden, but variously crab, sour, and just plain
rotten.  The word is out and it's getting hard to unload the crop at any
price.

Face it, guys [and gals], the jig is up.<<<
[from More Higher Superstitions:  Knowledge, Knowingness, and Reality, by
Norman Levitt, Skeptic, Vol. 4, No.4 1996, pages 82.]


Regards Folks,

CS.