Postmodernism gone mad!

[David Colquhoun]

Here is a paper that will make any reasonable rational person blow a gasket.
“Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism” Dave Holmes RN PhD, Stuart J Murray PhD, Amélie Perron RN PhD(cand) and Geneviève Rail PhD, Int J Evid Based Health 2006; 4: 180–1.

It starts
"Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena."

More at
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Pharmacology/dc-bits/quack.html#holmes1
and at Ben Goldacre's site http://www.badscience.net/?p=277

[CplFerro]

What is Postmodernism's moral basis to be outraged at anything?

[fribble]

...the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge.

Yeah, damn scientists demanding evidence so we can't sell any old snake oil! How outrageously unfair! :rolleyes:

[Dark Jaguar]

Evidence is VERY exclusionary! There are a LOT more things that aren't true than those that are! :D

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

"Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, ..."


We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence
between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author,
and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The
symmetry of scale, the transversality: all these dimensions remove us from
the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the
ontological binarism we criticised previously.
---Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis


Such a hegemony makes inevitable the further ‘segmentation’ of
knowledge (i.e. disallowing multiple epistemologies), and further
marginalise many forms of knowing/knowledge.
I knew they would use the word hegemony.

~~ Paul

[Wowbagger]

These guys should read "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". That paper clearly proves otherwise. ;)

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

May I suggest the following? It is quite a good read, if somewhat controversial.

http://www.geocities.com/Krishna_kunchith/dcs/popper/popper.html

~~ Paul

[Jeff Corey]

Anyone smell a spoof, parody, satire, lampoon, chain jerking, frottage or blanc mange tennis player in there?
"Micro fascists"?
Gimme a friggin' break.

[Schneibster]

Ummm, "evidence-based?" Is that like, the opposite of "fantasy-based?"

Deconstruct deconstructionism.

[Yahzi]

What is Postmodernism's moral basis to be outraged at anything?
:D

Hey, that's my line!

[Yahzi]

May I suggest the following? It is quite a good read, if somewhat controversial.
Ah, yes, telling people they are full of nonsense immediately after they have just declared themselves full of nonsense, is about as controversial as you can get.

It's like asking a Pro-Lifer why they're for the the death penalty. :D

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Perhaps it's not as controversial as I imagine. At least he's a bit nicer to Popper than he is to the rest of the postmodernists.

~~ Paul

[hgc]

I thought Sokal nailed the coffin shut on postmodernist critique of science. Dracula rises!*

*With a hat-tip to Wowbagger

[Schneibster]

Unfortunately, Sokal didn't convince any more postmodernists than JR has convinced psychics.

[Yahzi]

Nothing fatal to empiricist philosophy of science, in other words, follows from the admission that arguments from the observed to the unobserved are not the best; unless this assumption was combined, as it was with Hume, with the fatal assumption that only the best will do.
In other words, Godel's theorem: all formal systems (including Deductive logic) will contain truths that are not provable from within the formal system.

If I have, as Popper says I should not have, a positive degree of belief in some scientific theory, what can Popper urge against me? Why, nothing at all, in the end, except this: that despite all the actual or possible empirical evidence in its favor, the theory might be false. But this is nothing but a harmless necessary truth; and to make it as a reason for not believing scientific theories is simply a frivolous species of irrationality.
The flip-side of "if you can't prove it false, I can believe it:" if you can't prove it false, that's no reason to disbelieve it.

Just because something may be false is not a compelling reason to assume it is false.

For the cruellest fate which can overtake enfants-terribles is to awake and find that their avowed opinions have swept the suburbs
Just because it is a brilliant sentence. :D He spanks Popper, Feyerabend, and Lakatos pretty soundly; but he grants Kuhn at least the courage of his convictions. Kuhn alone really believes there has been no scientific progress in 400 years, and wants others to believe it; the previous fellows are constantly aghast when people take their irrationalism seriously.


So how do we know something is true, if we can't prove it? Stove seems to imply that mere observation (as J.S. Mill argued) or assumptions about the consistency of the universe (Hume's "cement in the universe") isn't adequate, but I can't see where he provided any alternative.

My summation of his article: there are two kinds of people - those that think the world derives from truth, and those that think truth derives from the world.

:D

[Yahzi]

Perhaps it's not as controversial as I imagine. At least he's a bit nicer to Popper than he is to the rest of the postmodernists.

I didn't get that impression. In the last part, he stomps Popper for failures of deductive logic. And then accuses him of "levity:" meaning, saying stuff that's wrong because it's better than being silent or uninteresting.

:D

The only one he was actually nice to was Hume; pointing out that Hume had moved beyond this simplistic skepticism after college.

P.S. - Thanks for the link, it was great!

[Mojo]

It starts
"Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari..."These people are obviously Deleuzional.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I didn't get that impression. In the last part, he stomps Popper for failures of deductive logic. And then accuses him of "levity:" meaning, saying stuff that's wrong because it's better than being silent or uninteresting.
I had only read chapters I and II when I posted the link. Last night I read chapter III, where he blames Popper for the whole mess. I'm taking chapter IV on vacation. It is really quite an interesting read.

~~ Paul

[hgc]

Kuhn alone really believes there has been no scientific progress in 400 years, and wants others to believe it; the previous fellows are constantly aghast when people take their irrationalism seriously.Having read Kuhn backwards and forwards, I am continually mystified how anyone comes to this conclusion. Assuming he never says this explicitly, how does his line of reasoning lead to this?

[Yahzi]

Having read Kuhn backwards and forwards, I am continually mystified how anyone comes to this conclusion. Assuming he never says this explicitly, how does his line of reasoning lead to this?

Here is Stove's citation:

"He actually believes, what the others only imply and pretend to believe, that there has been no accumulation of knowledge in the last four centuries."

T.S.Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 1962, 2nd edition, enlarged, 1970. pp.206--7.

If you have the volume at hand, could you look at pages 206-7 and tell us what they say?

[Cynric]

Such a ‘lovable’ fascism requires little more than the promise of success (grants, publications, awards, recognition, etc.) within its system to get us to participate wholeheartedly. Perhaps it is time to think about governing structures that impose their imperatives (academic, scientific, political, economic) on academics and researchers, and to ask ourselves what drives us to love fascist and exclusionary structures.

Is it me, or do you think these chaps had their last grant rejected?

[Kaarjuus]

“Narrativity is impossible,” says Derrida; however, according to la Tournier[1] , it is not so much narrativity that is impossible, but rather the defining characteristic, and hence the stasis, of narrativity. The subject is interpolated into a dialectic precapitalist theory that includes language as a totality. Thus, semantic Marxism holds that truth is used to reinforce capitalism, but only if the premise of the textual paradigm of consensus is invalid; otherwise, we can assume that class, somewhat paradoxically, has objective value.


:) (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo)

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

OK. I've just read that paper. I have to admit it was a quick read, but amongst all that pretentious bleating I don't think I saw at any point an answer to the question, "If not evidence-based medicine, what do alternative is there?"

Whereas, it seems to be an apologia for the world of sCAM, but our complaints against sCAMmers do not intersect with they critique of EBM.

1. sCAMmers actually do claim to practise according to the principles of EBM. Their problem is that they rely on crap evidence, but they most certainly do rely on evidence.

2. But, sCAMmers also depend on the fairy stories of authority figures. Holmes et al. would remove from us any ability to judge those claims. Some CAM claims might be true, but if I maliciously invented an entirely false mode of CAM you would have to accept my word for it unless you could make some appeal to evidence.

Beyond making my brain boil with frustration that peple can be so deluded as to write a paper like this one, we might also take it as a sign that EBM is winning: "outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge". Damn right, it is dangerously normative. That's the whole point. It is highly dangerous to lunatics and frauds.

Are we sure the paper is not a joke? If it is intended to be serious, and at the risk of revealing my hegemonic and paternalistic motivations, I'd say it is yet another example of the huge resentment some nurses seem to bear against those who are their professional and intellectual betters. A bit like our little friend NHCoraHSarah-I: couldn't get into medical school so find an alternative way to play at being doctor.

There is nothing so self-righteous as the indignation of the stupid.

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

Is it me, or do you think these chaps had their last grant rejected?

Possibly that, but certainly envious.

[Ririon]

Now you've done it! You've made me try to find out what the Flaming Heck postmodernism really means. :mad: I have been avoiding doing that for years. Hope you are all proud of yourselves! Go to your rooms and think about what you have done. And NO DESSERT!

*Ririon reluctantly opens a new browser tab to google*

[homer]

We have a saying over here in the UK . Bulls*** baffles Brains .

[Beerina]

Such a ‘lovable’ fascism requires little more than the promise of success (grants, publications, awards, recognition, etc.) within its system to get us to participate wholeheartedly.


Ironically, the postmodernists completely ignore their own little mutual backpatting society as a system of rewards generating a form of success pleasing enough to drive the construction of goofy, meaningless papers. This anti-establishment, micro-clownism overlain with the Emperor's New Clothes creates a disturbing enabling of hucksterism and fraud.

[hgc]

Here is Stove's citation:

"He actually believes, what the others only imply and pretend to believe, that there has been no accumulation of knowledge in the last four centuries."

T.S.Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 1962, 2nd edition, enlarged, 1970. pp.206--7.

If you have the volume at hand, could you look at pages 206-7 and tell us what they say?Nah, I lent it out. I'll see if I can retrieve it later this week.

It just urks me to see Kuhn lumped in with the epistemological relativists when what he was really saying was that our understaning of reality improves periodically in sometimes stunning ways. He always gives primacy to how well prevailing theories explain the observed data.

[Cynric]

Ironically, the postmodernists completely ignore their own little mutual backpatting society as a system of rewards generating a form of success pleasing enough to drive the construction of goofy, meaningless papers. This anti-establishment, micro-clownism overlain with the Emperor's New Clothes creates a disturbing enabling of hucksterism and fraud.

This point always gets me too. The CAM lobby deploy it regularly - doctors only practice conventional medicine in order to enrich themselves and boost pharmaceutical companies' profits. It's such a facile argument. Anyone in employment has a vested interest in remaining employed, including CAM merchants; hardly a revelation. Quite why the doctors decided on conventional medicine as their strategy seems to elude them completely, as does the fact that doctors could get exactly the same income by prescribing useless remedies (and did exactly that until EBM took off).

That the postmodernists are the extreme example of self-reverential propagation of substance-free rhetoric is supremely ironic.

[Cuddles]

I always wonder about the term "postmodern". Since modern refers to the time we are currently living in, surely postmodern means they are living in the future?

[Mojo]

This point always gets me too. The CAM lobby deploy it regularly - doctors only practice conventional medicine in order to enrich themselves and boost pharmaceutical companies' profits. It's such a facile argument. Anyone in employment has a vested interest in remaining employed, including CAM merchants; hardly a revelation. Quite why the doctors decided on conventional medicine as their strategy seems to elude them completely, as does the fact that doctors could get exactly the same income by prescribing useless remedies (and did exactly that until EBM took off). And if they practice SCAM, they might even be able to make money without having to spend half their twenties working insane hours as a houseman. This always seemed to me to be a major flaw in medicine as a get-rich-quick scheme...

[Kaarjuus]

I always wonder about the term "postmodern". Since modern refers to the time we are currently living in, surely postmodern means they are living in the future?

Does it mean that this is what our future is like? Noooooooooooo.....

[Meffy]

:) (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo)

Methinks someone has been playing with one of the Postmodernism (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo) Generators (http://www.gingko.ch/cdrom/jwrandom/postmodernism/index.html).

[JamesDillon]

In other words, Godel's theorem: all formal systems (including Deductive logic) will contain truths that are not provable from within the formal system.


The flip-side of "if you can't prove it false, I can believe it:" if you can't prove it false, that's no reason to disbelieve it.

Just because something may be false is not a compelling reason to assume it is false.


Just because it is a brilliant sentence. :D He spanks Popper, Feyerabend, and Lakatos pretty soundly; but he grants Kuhn at least the courage of his convictions. Kuhn alone really believes there has been no scientific progress in 400 years, and wants others to believe it; the previous fellows are constantly aghast when people take their irrationalism seriously.


So how do we know something is true, if we can't prove it? Stove seems to imply that mere observation (as J.S. Mill argued) or assumptions about the consistency of the universe (Hume's "cement in the universe") isn't adequate, but I can't see where he provided any alternative.

My summation of his article: there are two kinds of people - those that think the world derives from truth, and those that think truth derives from the world.

:D
I have not read the Stove link, but from the quotes provided it sounds like he mischaracterizes Hume and Popper. Hume's criticism of induction was not that it can lead to false conclusions, but that there is no logically valid basis for believing that any inductive conclusion is true. There's a world of difference there. Although I've frequently seen Hume given the former interpretation, I don't think that gives appropriate force to his position.

[drkitten]

Hume's criticism of induction was not that it can lead to false conclusions, but that there is no logically valid basis for believing that any inductive conclusion is true. There's a world of difference there.

That's a -- subtle -- distinction you're trying to draw there, and one that I'm not sure I follow. (I'm reminded of Diane Keaton's line from Love and Death : "I'm not scared of death -- I'm frightened of it.")

Consider yourself invited to amplify.....

[JamesDillon]

That's a -- subtle -- distinction you're trying to draw there, and one that I'm not sure I follow. (I'm reminded of Diane Keaton's line from Love and Death : "I'm not scared of death -- I'm frightened of it.")

Consider yourself invited to amplify.....
It's not subtle at all-- it's the difference between holding a justified (if uncertain) belief and an unjustified one. We've discussed this before, several months ago. I was smarter then than I am now, so if you don't mind I'll quote myself:
As I recall from my grad school days, Hume argued that inductive reasoning cannot be justified by non-circular logic. Induction is the process of deriving a general conclusion from a series of individual experiences (e.g., every time I drop a ball, it falls to the floor, so I can infer that if I drop this ball, it will also fall to the floor.) Hume pointed out that inductive reasoning assumes the principle of the uniformity of nature-- i.e., that "nature" (including but not limited to the laws of physics) will behave in the future in the same way it has behaved in the past. However, this is not a logically necessary principle-- we can imagine a world in which the laws of nature changed over time. The best reason we can offer for believing the principle of the uniformity of nature is an inductive one: nature always has behaved in a uniform manner. However, Hume points out, this justification is circular because it attempts to justify by induction the very principle on which the justification for inductive reasoning rests. Thus, concludes Hume, we have no non-circular reason to believe that nature will continue to behave in a uniform manner, and the fact that it has always done so is irrelevant. Therefore, inductive reasoning, and all knowledge based on empirical observation (including science), is logically invalid.

Hume's point, as I understand it, was not only that we can't be certain that our inductive conclusions are true; it was that induction gives us no logically valid basis to assign any weight at all to predictions based on prior experience. I have no logically defensible reason to believe that the ball is any more likely to fall to the floor when I let go of it than it is to fly to the ceiling, or remain suspended in mid-air, or anything else, despite the fact that it has fallen to the floor each of the hundred times I've performed the experiment.

Edit: Actually it must have been another thread in which you and I discussed this, because I don't see anything from you in the one I linked to. But I recall that we have, and that Ian took my side of the discussion. That unfortunate fact notwithstanding, I still think I'm right.

[drkitten]

It's not subtle at all-- it's the difference between holding a justified (if uncertain) belief and an unjustified one.

That's, um, a different difference than the one that you outlined earlier.

To quote your discussion from way back, "Thus, concludes Hume, we have no non-circular reason to believe that nature will continue to behave in a uniform manner, and the fact that it has always done so is irrelevant. Therefore, inductive reasoning, and all knowledge based on empirical observation (including science), is logically invalid."

That makes sense, except that it the term "logically invalid" is not self-defining.

The standard definition for "valid," in logic, is that an argument is valid if it cannot give you a false conclusion from true premises -- so an argument that is "logically invalid" is simply one that can.

Using this definition, your distinction upthread :


Hume's criticism of induction was not that it can lead to false conclusions, but that there is no logically valid basis for believing that any inductive conclusion is true.

... appears to be somewhat confused, since the only way that an argument can fail to have a logically valid basis is, by definition, by the underlying argument to possibly lead to false conclusions.

You may be confusing the concepts of "justification" and "logically valid basis." I can certainly have a logically invalid argument that is nevertheless justifiable.

Or, to re-quote you :


Hume's point, as I understand it, was not only that we can't be certain that our inductive conclusions are true; it was that induction gives us no logically valid basis to assign any weight at all to predictions based on prior experience.

That's a distinction without a difference -- we can only have a "logically valid basis" for a statement of which we are certain of its truth (by definition), and vice versa.

What we can have is a "justification" for belief in a statement of uncertain truth. And inductive truths -- as well as probabilistic ones -- are of that sort.

Or else I'm still not understanding the subtlety of the distinction you're trying to draw.

[JamesDillon]

Interesting points; I'm going to have to go back and refresh my recollection of Hume's discussion, and particularly his distinction between knowledge and probability, before I can respond, as it's been a few years and you're quite right that my memory is a bit muddled on this point. I'm pretty certain, though, that Hume's concern after articulating his criticism of induction was not merely that we can't be absolutely certain about the truth of our inductive conclusions (he took that as a given from the start), but that inductive reasoning provides no basis whatsoever for making true (or probable) predictions about the future. I don't see that as a subtle distinction at all,* but perhaps I'll be able to articulate it better after a reread of the Treatise and a couple of my old papers.

* [Edit]: It's the difference between saying, "I'm 99% certain that this ball will fall to the floor when I let go of it," and saying, "I have absolutely no idea what will happen when I let go of this ball."

[drkitten]

* [Edit]: It's the difference between saying, "I'm 99% certain that this ball will fall to the floor when I let go of it," and saying, "I have absolutely no idea what will happen when I let go of this ball."

That difference I understand; it's the difference between logical validity and "mere" justification.

I don't think I've seen any commentator suggest that Hume didn't believe that dropping a plate is likely to break it. Hume wasn't an idiot, after all.... Hume simply suggested that there was no basis for proving that the plate would break -- his main point (as I recall) was that even explicitly assuming that the structure of induction was logically justifiable still hinged on a deeper assumption about the constency of the universe's laws.

[JamesDillon]

That difference I understand; it's the difference between logical validity and "mere" justification.

I don't think I've seen any commentator suggest that Hume didn't believe that dropping a plate is likely to break it. Hume wasn't an idiot, after all....
Of course he believed it, but he did seem to say that the belief couldn't be justified by anything more than the brute force of psychological habit.

Hume simply suggested that there was no basis for proving that the plate would break -- his main point (as I recall) was that even explicitly assuming that the structure of induction was logically justifiable still hinged on a deeper assumption about the constency of the universe's laws.
If by "proving" you mean "establishing with absolute certainty," I think he meant more than that. Hume took for granted that inductive arguments (which he frequently referred to as "probability," as distinct from deductive "knowledge") were incapable of reaching a point of absolute certainty at the beginning of his discussion of induction. By the end of his discussion, he believed he had shown that inductive reasoning is not even valid as to determining the probability of a future outcome, because the principle of consistency on which the inductive process rests cannot be justified by non-circular means. When I get home tonight (or maybe over the weekend) I'll dust off my copy of the Treatise (I realize that the Enquiry is generally the preferred text, but my Hume course in grad school didn't use it, and I've never gotten around to reading it) and offer some citations to support my interpretation.

[Yahzi]

I have not read the Stove link, but from the quotes provided it sounds like he mischaracterizes Hume and Popper.
I think it would be safe to assume the confusion is my fault, and not Stove's.

Hume's criticism of induction was not that it can lead to false conclusions, but that there is no logically valid basis for believing that any inductive conclusion is true.
I agree, and I don't think Stove argued otherwise. Assuming that by "logically valid" you mean "deductive." Stove agrees with Hume that induction can never be turned into deduction by any logical sleight-of-hand (indeed, he spends many turgid pages proving this).

His point, which he claimed Hume agreed with, was that accepting deduction as the only method of truth was unjustifiable. A result that I think anticipates Godel.

[Yahzi]

his main point (as I recall) was that even explicitly assuming that the structure of induction was logically justifiable still hinged on a deeper assumption about the constency of the universe's laws.
I think - but am not sure (Stove can be terribly technical) - that Stove actually rejects that, and argues that even assuming the consistency of the universe is inadequate to render induction logically valid (i.e. equivalent to deduction). (If that is what he says, he means to imply that Hume said it too).

I believe Stove's point is that induction, even without the logical validity of deduction, is a perfectly acceptable way to get truth, and that its failure to be as rigorously formal as deduction is not terribly significant. To me that sounds like Godel observing that all formal systems contain truths that cannot be proved within the system.