Primrose Road

Some of the ScienceBloggers have picked up on a story about a teacher who threatened, via email, to sue her (freshman comp!) students for harassment. It's quite obvious that the woman was simply litigious -- she also tried to sue her superiors because they "ignored" the harassment -- and couldn't handle her students' challenging her. (I wish more students would disagree with and challenge me in class.) Unfortunately, this one case of a teacher's thin-skinned childishness is being used in the science blogosphere to attack postmodernism in general, which I think is unfortunate and reflects a continued misunderstanding of the term and philosophies it encompasses.

Sure, some postmodernists will argue that science is just one "way of knowing," but their aim is to question beliefs that we accept as "natural" because of religious and social norms, not to present a drippy New Age form of relativism. The scientific method is in my view the most effective and safest "way of knowing" in the medical field; people who sell magic water make me angry too. But the ways in which many scientists and proponents of the "new" atheism on the blogosphere praise Enlightenment seems to me philosophically problematic: while the "scientifically study the natural, reject the supernatural" aspect of it makes sense, the (implied) "only (certain privileged) humans can shed light on what's been kept in the dark" aspect can be somewhat unsettling. Historically, there's a little bit of colonialism buried in Enlightenment, a factor that should be acknowledged.

Basically, just because there are perhaps more than a handful of New-Agey relativists out there who call themselves postmodernists doesn't mean that postmodernism runs counter to science.