Preposterism and Its Consequences (1998)

COSMOS + TAXIS | Volume 8 Issues 6 + 7 2020, 2020

The present paper is part of a Festschrift to Susan Haack and focuses on her reflection on academic ethics and the repercussions in the Latin American academic context.

2006

It is difficult to think of a topic of greater concern than the nature of truth. Indeed, truth and the knowledge thereof are the very rails upon which people ought to live their lives. And over the centuries, the classic correspondence theory of truth has outlived most of its critics. But these are postmodern times, or so we are often told, and the classic model, once ensconced deeply in the Western psyche, must now be replaced by a neopragmatist or some other anti-realist model of truth, at least for those concerned with the rampant victimization raging all around us. Thus, “we hold these truths to be self evident” now reads “our socially constructed selves arbitrarily agree that certain chunks of language are to be esteemed in our linguistic community.” Something has gone wrong here, and paraphrasing the words of Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Newman, “We came, we saw, and we conked out!” The astute listener will have already picked up that I am an unrepentant correspondence advocate wh...

Parrhesia: A Journal of Continental Philosophy, 2019

Educational Researcher, 2007

Textual evidence shows that since 2500 BCE academics studying the ancient world, so much ancient as modern ones, have been fooled by ancient theologians.

Human beings are paying a dire price for disparaging philosophy in all facets of life, especially in the field of natural science where the most intelligent explorations of nature for the survival and advance of Homo sapiens species are supposed to be conducted. In the mean time, the professional discipline crowned with the title “philosophy” has been haunted by its own collective and systematic pitfalls. Consequently, despite of the apparent rapid growing global prosperity, the earth civilization is indeed walking at a fast pace down to a deep crisis. To make matters much worse, due to its intelligent challenge, the weakened collective philosophical capacity in the world is not something that can be made up with some crash courses as for scientific and technological trainings. If there were some kind interstellar competitions as claimed in some ufologist products, this hazardous trend in human mainstream philosophy would definitely put earth civilization in a scarily disadvantageous position; even if the interstellar competitions are only fairy tale, the collapse of human collective philosophical capacity would undoubtedly be hazardous for humans when facing expected or unexpected disastrous natural perils, let alone those created by humans due to the poor collective philosophical capacity. This writing will demonstrate through examples how philosophically erroneous mistakes in mathematics and physics that were made at the turn of 20th century could last for more than a century without being identified, as well as an issue that has lingered for several centuries and still confuses the whole world with its philosophical complexity. In those examples, we could see that scientists with the aura of the smartest people on earth could easily be convinced by “simple, straight, and brilliant ideas”, which could bring aesthetically attractive convenience but would lead to various kinds of false knowledge and wrong practices, and then defend those ideas with all their lives for a long time, simply because the scientific community has not been prepared with strong philosophical capacity of reasoning. In addition to the mistakes in mathematics and physics, this writing will also discuss the devastating stale status of the existing academia of philosophy as well as the need and vision of having a parallel new professional community of philosophy.

The Journal of Higher Education, 1993

in opposition to socialism, the expansion of women's rights, and the mixing of races"; yet he quotes Tonnies as saying, "As sociologists, we are neither for nor against socialism, neither for nor against the expansion of women's rights, neither for nor against the mixing of races" and adds that sociology's task is not to further or obstruct particular ideas or movements (p. 92). Similarly, on the basis of his examination of the views of prominent defenders of the ideal of value freedom (Sombart, Simmel, and Weber), Proctor argues that the commitment to value-freedom functioned to exclude women from science. But it is far from clear that their beliefs about value freedom (as opposed to beliefs about women's alleged capacities) had anything whatever to do with their attitudes toward women is engaging in scholarship. Indeed, they reached significantly different conclusions in spite of the similarities in their commitments to value freedom. In other cases, important errors creep into the argument. In the chapter devoted to Weber, for example, he fails to recognize that Weber's view of value-freedom is qualified by his recognition that "ideal-types" are constructed with an eye to their "cultural significance": different investigators, working from different points of view, will select different traits in constructing "an ideal-typical view of a particular culture" (The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 1949, p. 91). Proctor also appears to confuse Weber's ideal-types with the "idealizations" of the physical sciences (p. 146). In a similar vein, we are also told that "the positivists" believed that "methodology must be closely linked with subject matter" (p. 146), though we later learn (this time closer to the mark) that positivism is committed to "an assumption of the unity of science" (p. 159). More seriously, however, the work loses its way in forgetting its primary lesson, that the call for valuefreedom in science is not one thing but means different things and that it is advocated for different reasons in different contexts. Although granting that the ideal of neutrality was once "progressive," it no longer is so, Proctor asserts, because "science has become a power in itself" (p. 270). Warming to his theme, he argues that "all science is politics, or ethics," because "science should respond to practical problems of human need and suffering" (p. 270). But if this work teaches anything, it is that science is not a unified agent to which power and responsibility can be ascribed. Proctor dismisses the ideal of neutrality on the grounds that "the priorities of science are shaped by larger social priorities" (p. 267). But few advocates of value-freedom would disagree with that observation. The problem is to organize the practice of, and to set priorities for, research without compromising the objectivity-or, to use an even more old-fashioned term, the truth-of the results; it is to guard against the kinds of abuses epitomized by Lysenkoism and Aryan physics. Theory, as Proctor argues, can "shape the world" (p. 230), in part because research can lead us to alter what we believe and how we act in unexpected ways. And precisely because of that, the course and outcome of research can never be fully determined or controlled. Whatever else they advocated, the proponents of value-free science understood that point and, with it, the limits of Proctor's claim that "science is politics."