Is the Universe “objective” if so it is possible, or desirable, to attempt to describe the Universe Objectively

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Post-modernism/post-struturalism suggests that we cannot provide genuinely objective observations of the world.  That our own biases, perspectives, and even the intermediation of our own senses between our mind and the world limits our ability to speak of anything “objectively”.

Therefore, while “objective truth” may exist it is virtually impossible for Humans to express such truth.

Should we try?

Discuss.

[DMC]

6 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Therefore, while “objective truth” may exist it is virtually impossible for Humans to express such truth.

Should we try?

Yes.  Just because no one can be wholly objective does not mean there isn't much societal worth and even personal utility in trying our best to do so.  That goes for philosophers, journalists, academics, as well as personal relationships/interactions and the age-old ideal of empathy.  Maybe I'm just getting old, but any epistemic precept that suggests we should all just retreat to our inherit biases seems like a great way to ensure this world goes to shit as fast as possible.

[OldGimletEye]

3 hours ago, DMC said:

.Maybe I'm just getting old, but any epistemic precept that suggests we should all just retreat to our inherit biases seems like a great way to ensure this world goes to shit as fast as possible.

Agree.

Vox has often been writing about the theme of an epistemic crises. Below is an example of such an article.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/impeachment-trial-trump-bannon-misinformation

I'd agree that when it comes to spewing bullshit, the right, particularly the extreme right, are the best applied practitioners. However, I think it's a bit disappointing for Vox, which has touched on the current epistemic crises in several articles not to acknowledge that certain elements of the left supplied and developed the theory justifying the spewing of nonsense, more so than the right generally, even if in practice the right is more prolific at spewing baloney.

The article says:

Quote

My Vox colleague Dave Roberts calls this an “epistemic crisis.” The foundation for shared truth, he argues, has collapsed. I don’t disagree with that, but I’d frame the problem a little differently.

The denial such a foundation was what exactly post modernism argued and provided. I'm left of center but I quite frankly disdain it's epistemological stance. Moreover, its method of communication tends to be extremely obscure, loaded with jargon, and pompous. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

DMC, OGE,

I entirely agree with both of you.  Post-Modernism/Post-Structualism (PM/PS)seem, to me, to be a modern day form of solipsism.  That PM/PS advocates are trying to obscure the forest for the trees and discounting the desire of various individuals in seeking objective.

I’ve said a number of times that PM/PS is a very nice tool to have in the intellectual ratchet set.  However, it is ultimately damaging if it is the framework on which all analysis hangs because what is “discovered” no longer matters.  The intention of the seeker is more important in such a framework than what is sought or found.

[OldGimletEye]

Another Vox article on the epistemic crises.

One cannot believe in climate change and in post modernist thought at once. It doesn't work.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/1/26/21068473/youtube-climate-change-misinformation-epistemic-crisis

[.H.]

Being very much a philosophical layperson, and also in general just an idiot, I don't understand this topic.

To go all the way back, so as to not obscure things, maybe, are we saying that Kant is flatly wrong?  That we do (somehow) have access to Noumena, not just Phenomena?

If not, then we return back to the first post, we might not have access to things-in-themselves, so then what should we do?  I don't know (perhaps born more of ignorance than anything) that I agree with the notion that all "post-modern" thought (whatever that could possibly be) is just a form of solipsism.  I don't know that you would find much "serious scholarship" for people who deny there is, say, a material world, or that there are "objects" or something like that in there.  Of course though, if you take the the margins, you are bound to find some wild stuff but that hardly (to me) means we should definitely throw the baby out with that bathwater.  Likely I'd have something better to say about what we could work towards with "objective knowledge" in light of this, had I actually finally read Karl Popper's Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach.  I just got it though, so it's in the massive backlog I have.  But I suspect he has something "important" in there, if you'll excuse the supposition and innuendo.

Also, I don't think I buy that we have a linguistic problem, per se, in that "objective truth" exists but we can't express it because language is insufficient (although maybe it is) but we can't access a noumenal truth, because how could we?  All we can "access" is phenomena and only infer what the noumenal would (possibly) be.  (Might be a whole other can of worms there though.)

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

One cannot believe in climate change and in post modernist thought at once. It doesn't work.

I'm not sure I believe this and I feel like you could likely find many who would probably align themselves with something like "post-modernism" and still "believe" in climate change.  I think Zizek would probably be a good example, although he does call himself a Hegelian, rather than a post-modernist, but he is very much a post-Kantian.

Deleuze and Guattarri, in What is Philosophy:

Quote

The philosophical sieve, as plane of immanence that cuts through the chaos, selects infinite movements of thought and is filled
with concepts formed like consistent particles going as fast as thought. Science approaches chaos in a completely different, almost opposite way: it relinquishes the infinite, infinite speed, in order to gain a reference able to actualize the virtual. By retaining the infinite, philosophy gives consistency to the virtual through concepts; by relinquishing the infinite, science gives a reference to the virtual, which actualizes it through functions. Philosophy proceeds with a plane of immanence or consistency; science with a plane of reference.

That hardly seems "anti-science" or anything like that, to me.

Of course, perhaps I am just not smart or well-read enough to grasp the "argument" here though.  However, there is such a wide breadth of what could "count" as post-modern thought, I don't really understand how one could really typify it exactly in any case, except in the broadest of broad terms.  But again, perhaps my ignorance just shows.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

7 minutes ago, .H. said:

Being very much a philosophical layperson, and also in general just an idiot, I don't understand this topic.

To go all the way back, so as to not obscure things, maybe, are we saying that Kant is flatly wrong?  That we do (somehow) have access to Noumena, not just Phenomena?

If not, then we return back to the first post, we might not have access to things-in-themselves, so then what should we do?  I don't know (perhaps born more of ignorance than anything) that I agree with the notion that all "post-modern" thought (whatever that could possibly be) is just a form of solipsism.  I don't know that you would find much "serious scholarship" for people who deny there is, say, a material world, or that there are "objects" or something like that in there.  Of course though, if you take the the margins, you are bound to find some wild stuff but that hardly (to me) means we should definitely throw the baby out with that bathwater.  Likely I'd have something better to say about what we could work towards with "objective knowledge" in light of this, had I actually finally read Karl Popper's Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach.  I just got it though, so it's in the massive backlog I have.  But I suspect he has something "important" in there, if you'll excuse the supposition and innuendo.

Also, I don't think I buy that we have a linguistic problem, per se, in that "objective truth" exists but we can't express it because language is insufficient (although maybe it is) but we can't access a noumenal truth, because how could we?  All we can "access" is phenomena and only infer what the noumenal would (possibly) be.  (Might be a whole other can of worms there though.)

I'm not sure I believe this and I feel like you could likely find many who would probably align themselves with something like "post-modernism" and still "believe" in climate change.  I think Zizek would probably be a good example, although he does call himself a Hegelian, rather than a post-modernist, but he is very much a post-Kantian.

Deleuze and Guattarri, in What is Philosophy:

That hardly seems "anti-science" or anything like that, to me.

Of course, perhaps I am just not smart or well-read enough to grasp the "argument" here though.  However, there is such a wide breadth of what could "count" as post-modern thought, I don't really understand how one could really typify it exactly in any case, except in the broadest of broad terms.  But again, perhaps my ignorance just shows.

To me, the problem with PM/PS is that it focuses on motive to a degree that it ignores what is found in science.  It wants to ascribe more meaning in the motive for the search than in what the search finds.  As I said it feels like missing the forest for the trees.  While there aren't many in PM/PS who attack science.  That doesn't mean it doesn't happen:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3463968/

From the article:
 

As part of their campaign against GM crops, activists have tried repeatedly to undermine the credibility of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which performs risk assessments for GM crop varieties (http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/efsaanswersback.htm). The reason that the EFSA and its scientists have become targets is that individual EU member states cannot reach consensus on whether to allow the cultivation of GM crops [8]. As such, the decision falls to the European Commission, which usually follows the EFSA's advice. Given the political paralysis, the EFSA has become the de facto reference for risk management and, consequently, the target of political groups seeking a complete and indefinite ban on GM crops. Thus, anti-GMO activists are following Arthur Schopenhauer's (1788–1860) ‘ultimate stratagem' for a dispute that your opponent is winning: you move on from the subject of the dispute to the disputant himself, attacking his person and, in this case, his independence (Eristic Dialectics: The Art Of Being Right, 1831).

 

In this context, some postmodern discourses have sought to undermine the EFSA's science-based risk assessment, by accusing it of wearing “a false mantle of objective, singular and uncontestable science” [9]. From this it follows that if science is not objective and that if its truths are heavily influenced by the opinions of scientists—and the EFSA does call its scientific conclusions ‘opinions', rather than facts, for example—then risk assessment by the EFSA is merely a ‘framing of truth' by a panel of people with shared presuppositions, which can be countered by any other group of people with their own frame or set of ‘truths'. More insidiously, such thinking can convince political authorities to abandon the “rigid division” [9] between scientific and non-scientific knowledge, and thereby open the door wide for what are called ‘participative' policies. However, if these ‘participative' policies and the involvement of stakeholders can be considered as relevant and legitimate where decision-making is concerned, they cannot and ought not to interfere with what are ultimately scientific questions.

For example, the French Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) and several other laboratories have developed transgenic grapevine rootstocks that are potentially resistant to the grapevine fanleaf virus (GFLV). Non-GM plants were grafted onto these GM rootstocks and a first field trial was set up in the Champagne region of France in 1996. This trial was terminated in 1999 due to pressure from a retail chain on the Champagne producer involved. INRA resumed its interest in these trials in 2001, officially to “deal with the challenges” that field trials are essential for research but might face public opposition [10]. A participative approach was chosen and a working group was set up in 2001. This initial consultation step provided support to restart the trial under certain conditions. However, even these conditions did not satisfy radical anti-GMO activists, who criticized the INRA initiative as being a “programme of opinion manipulation” [11]. In the spring of 2003, a Local Monitoring Committee (LMC) was set up for the new field trial at the INRA Centre in Colmar in France. The LMC had ‘broad stakeholder representation', which is to say that a large number of representatives from ‘green' organizations were involved. As a result, INRA congratulated itself for having developed “a research-action method based on the principle of both acknowledging the learning of all parties and also the validity of other modes of reasoning” [10]. In truth, under the influence of the ‘green' organizations, the LMC had actually redesigned the transgenic grapevine research trial to push for new research “on the environmental impact of GMO rootstocks as well as on the alternatives for controlling GFLV using organic viticulture”. Ultimately, the field trial was vandalized by an individual in September 2009, restarted with unanimous support from the LMC and then uprooted by 65 activists in August 2010 (INRA press statement, 2010: http://www.international.inra.fr/press/destruction_of_a_gmo_trial).

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Another one:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-unfortunate-fallout-of-campus-postmodernism/

From the article:
 

Quote

Students are being taught by these postmodern professors that there is no truth, that science and empirical facts are tools of oppression by the white patriarchy, and that nearly everyone in America is racist and bigoted, including their own professors, most of whom are liberals or progressives devoted to fighting these social ills. Of the 58 Evergreen faculty members who signed a statement “in solidarity with students” calling for disciplinary action against Weinstein for “endangering” the community by granting interviews in the national media, I tallied only seven from the sciences. Most specialize in English, literature, the arts, humanities, cultural studies, women's studies, media studies, and “quotidian imperialisms, intermetropolitan geography [and] detournement.” A course called “Fantastic Resistances” was described as a “training dojo for aspiring ‘social justice warriors’” that focuses on “power asymmetries.”

If students are taught there is no "truth" what purpose do objective inquires in the hard sciences actually serve?  The entire idea behind PM/PS undermines the purpose of science, to divine that which is false from that which is not false, because to PM/PS believers that isn't the point.

[Ormond]

13 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Post-modernism/post-struturalism suggests that we cannot provide genuinely objective observations of the world.  That our own biases, perspectives, and even the intermediation of our own senses between our mind and the world limits our ability to speak of anything “objectively”.

Therefore, while “objective truth” may exist it is virtually impossible for Humans to express such truth.

Should we try?

Discuss.

This argument is an example of all-or-none thinking. As a psychologist I can agree that 100% complete objectivity is very rare. That does not mean that by making our observations better and by being willing to question our previous assumptions that we can't get closer to the truth than we were before. 

The Earth is not a 100% perfect sphere in geometric terms. That does not mean that saying the Earth is "round" isn't hugely closer to objective truth than saying it's "flat".  Working on getting closer to the truth is extremely important in almost every human endeavor. 

[.H.]

I'm not sure what to draw from either of those articles.  If people take issue with Kuhn, it might be rightly so.  Let us not pretend that science, and the scientific method, is perfect, as is.  Now, is their criticism making valid points?  I don't know, I'm neither a scientist nor a philosopher, so I can't really give you an answer worth anything there.

However, the notion that any and all post-modern thinkers must consider that there is nothing like "truth" or that "all perspectives are equally valid" is kind of nonsensical and I've never come across any thinker who would actually espouse that stance.  If you want to aim deconstruction at "science" for example, it is equally well aimed right back at you.

I think it is 100% fair game to look critically at science and the scientific method, because it is not something "objective" in being completely outside human subjectivity, as far as I can tell.  Look at how "research" on nutrition has changed.  First sugar was fine, fat was bad, now, fat is likely fine, sugar is horrible for you.  You can look back in the past and find many, many examples of this and it's not likely to end any time soon.

There is nothing wrong with being critical, but to lump any and all "post-modern" thought in the same boat, well, that is going to be a very strange, very contentious ride.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

In terms of objective truth and platonic ideals, this may be the most perfect and most Scot of all Scot threads .

Also, IMO "truth" is a red herring (put differently, I'm with Ormond here).

[.H.]

A good talk by Rick Roderick on the notion of relativism, vis-a-vis Nietzsche.

(Since that first article made the claim that this could be "traced back" to him.)

[OldGimletEye]

42 minutes ago, .H. said:

I'm not sure I believe this and I feel like you could likely find many who would probably align themselves with something like "post-modernism" and still "believe" in climate change.  I think Zizek would probably be a good example, although he does call himself a Hegelian, rather than a post-modernist, but he is very much a post-Kantian.

Not saying you are doing this, but I'm well aware there is always going to be that left wing wise ass who claims that we just don't understand the post modernism, and, if only, our pea sized brains could comprehend it, we'd see its beauty, power, and profoundness. But, most likely, the truth is nobody really understands it. That's because clarity and brevity ain't exactly post modernism's strong suit. Instead, it largely specializes in producing long winded, obscurantist, and jargon laden baloney.

But to the extent anything can be said about post modernism, because its own obscurantist methods makes it hard to know what it is precisely,I think it is fairly accurate to say that it holds that language is a barrier between the human mind and the material world, and accordingly, we can never know the real world and objectivity doesn't exist or isn't knowable. I think that is fairly accurate description, to the extent anyone can understand what post modernism really is.

I have yet to see a defender of post modernism say in clear language that objectivity exist and can be known. So, I think it is quite right to infer that post modernism endorses a radical subjective epistemological view.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

6 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

In terms of objective truth and platonic ideals, this may be the most perfect and most Scot of all Scot threads .

Also, IMO "truth" is a red herring (put differently, I'm with Ormond here).

I wanted a term other than "truth" but I couldn't come up with a good way to come at it without using the term "truth".  Karl Popper would suggest that the best science can do is point out what is false and let the chips fall from there.  Regardless, I agree that PM/PS is useful.  I get frustrated by those who want PM/PS to be the lens through which everything else is viewed.  

[maarsen]

9 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I wanted a term other than "truth" but I couldn't come up with a good way to come at it without using the term "truth".  Karl Popper would suggest that the best science can do is point out what is false and let the chips fall from there.  Regardless, I agree that PM/PS is useful.  I get frustrated by those who want PM/PS to be the lens through which everything else is viewed.  

Scot, when people start railing on about how knowledge is subjective and we can't distinguish reality from unreality because of our inherent biases, then lately I just ask them to show me the math that they use to justify their opinion. 

[.H.]

1 minute ago, OldGimletEye said:

Not saying you are doing this, but I'm well aware there is always going to be that left wing wise ass who claims that we just don't understand the post modernism, and, if only, our pea sized brains could comprehend it, we'd see its beauty, power, and profoundness. But, most likely, the truth is nobody really understands it. That's because clarity and brevity ain't exactly post modernism's strong suit. Instead, it largely specializes in producing long winded, obscurantist, and jargon laden baloney.

Well, I agree with this.  And, to note, I wouldn't call myself a post-modernist, nor would I count myself as a defender of it.  I think there is a ton of things that are "not good" about a large number of post-modern works and you lay them out well.  However, I don't think that necessarily makes them wrong, per se.  Rather, it makes them flawed and we should, rightly, point that out when and where we can.

I mean, it's not as if post-modern though is the only obscure stuff there is.  If you try to read Hegel or Heidegger, or even Kant, directly, it's a hell of a time.  But I don't think that makes them wrong either.

7 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

I have yet to see a defender of post modernism say in clear language that objectivity exist and can be known. So, I think it is quite right to infer that post modernism endorses a radical subjective epistemological view.

Sure, I mean, it seems like it would be hard (read: nearly impossible) to be a post-Kantian and insist that somehow you had access to the noumena and not (rightly) be laughed at and lampooned.  If you start with the notion that all knowledge must be subjective, all subjective knowledge is (potentially) biased and should be questioned, then you should (rightly, again) be applying your own method to your own position.  However, the dogmatists (that are likely the ones on the margins making what I'd call nonsense claims) aren't doing this, because their positions could not abide such a sustained criticism without falling to such a radical skepticism that posits that there is nothing (essentially) and thus being largely totally useless.

12 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I get frustrated by those who want PM/PS to be the lens through which everything else is viewed.

Totalizing claims are likely to almost always best be dismissed.  Even critiques of Hegel for his "totalizing schema" are likely misplaced, since Hegel's point is (as Zizek presents it and I kind of agree) that The Absolute is incomplete, therefor the totality of Being is not a unified whole, but the dialectic of incompleteness.

But I do think one should be weary of any and all dogmatists, regardless of what they are peddling.

4 minutes ago, maarsen said:

Scot, when people start railing on about how knowledge is subjective and we can't distinguish reality from unreality because of our inherent biases, then lately I just ask them to show me the math that they use to justify their opinion. 

Is this an argument for mathematical realism?  I mean, I admit that I have a very hard time accepting that somehow math is "objective" let alone the knowledge of math is "objective knowledge."  Then again, it might be due to me not understanding the argument there.

[maarsen]

Mathematics, and logic, may be incomplete but it is consistent in that it does not contain contradictions. If an argument is framed mathematically , or logically, it can be shown to be either valid or invalid. As to whether mathematics is real, I could say it is just as real as the English language, or any other language.  

[.H.]

3 minutes ago, maarsen said:

Mathematics, and logic, may be incomplete but it is consistent in that it does not contain contradictions. If an argument is framed mathematically , or logically, it can be shown to be either valid or invalid. As to whether mathematics is real, I could say it is just as real as the English language, or any other language.  

Sure, I'd agree with all that, but along the lines of Gödel, we can't "prove" that the underlying assumptions are "true" from within the system (I think).

However, this is where we go back to Popper's sort of notion about an "evolutionary approach" to the objective.  We never get there, but we can get things that "work."  For example, General Relativity is not "complete" however, we can get satellites into orbit and have them stay there (for a good amount of time) which we couldn't do if we just figured "well, Newton's theory is just as good as Einstein's."

I'd actually ask them if their phone works, or if a GPS has ever actually gotten them where they wanted to go.  There is something out there, something objective seeming, even if we can't have explicit knowledge of it, or so my little brain would think.

[Rippounet]

Well, sorry @OldGimletEye but I'll be that guy and say that I'm pretty sure there's a big misunderstanding about what post-modernism is supposed to be.

Quote

Students are being taught by these postmodern professors that there is no truth, that science and empirical facts are tools of oppression by the white patriarchy, and that nearly everyone in America is racist and bigoted

I wouldn't describe such discourses as "post-modern," I'd just describe them as "bullshit."

The way I understood it, post-modernism was about understanding that any notion of "truth" was relative to a given historical and social context. I don't think that entailed not looking for truth, or that humans couldn't agree on a form of truth, however subjective.
Otherwise that would just be a kind of nihilism.

Post-modern thinkers were not nihilists. Having read a little bit of their stuff (Foucault or Baudrillard) I certainly don't think these guys were not trying to find some kind of truth and to get others to agree on it/with them. The difference was that they didn't do so within the frameworks that were already established; i.e., being skeptical of grand narratives allowed them to develop fresh approaches (which made them famous).
To take an example I'm familiar with, Baudrillard developed a perspective on the consumer society that went beyond traditional economic or socio-economic analyses to describe how the consumer society affected human thought itself, that it touched upon our relationship to "reality" (i.e. the material world) and thus changed the way we define our identities. However, someone like Baudrillard would never have gone as far as rejecting facts or data imho. What he was doing was going beyond a "simple" Marxist (thinking of consumption relative to power and property) or economic (figure-driven) perspective to incorporate psychological and philosophical notions (anthropological perhaps even) and then focusing on those to reach rather original conclusions, quite different from the "traditional" political ones of his time.
In a similar way, Foucault would describe his works as being "methods" rather than "theories," i.e. elaborate forms of thought experiments to approach... truth (I'd say). But a truth that perhaps would be less dependent on the ideas of his own time, or on established disciplines.

I would daresay post-modernism led to two things:
- The idea that whatever is seen as "true" at any given point in history is essentially the expression of the ideas (/ideology) of the dominant group or of the majority.
Well, yes. Simply put, that's hard to argue with. However, I don't think post-modernists wanted to go as far as to say that "science" or "facts" should be dismissed, or that universalist theories should be discarded altogether ; I'd say it was about the way scientific facts could be interpreted and manipulated. And I think their caution was warranted, because even science can be used politically (think about Darwinism's role in WWII for instance).
I'd say the point was for individuals to be more critical of "grand" theories and try to develop their own approaches without being constrained by them.
A different way to say it is that I don't think post-modernism sought to reject Enlightenment values, merely to find new approaches and be wary of dogmatism. Problem is, of course, that this ended up weakening Enlightnement values by presenting them as relative to historical periods.
- New forms of interdisciplinarity.
Based on my own experience I'd say postmodernism led to new interdisciplinary approaches, but maybe that's just me, because a British colleague described my own work as "post-modern" once . I didn't get it at the time, but I do now.

If I were to describe post-modernism in simple terms i'd say that it's cranking up your critical mind to the max and questioning all your assumptions. However, that objective truth does not exist doesn't mean we can't agree on subjective truths, and on a day-to-day basis it really doesn't matter that they are subjective.
Or, to phrase it differently, there are different levels of subjectivity. The way we view facts may be subjective but by definition facts are what we can all agree on, while ideologies and dogmas are what we should constantly call into question.

Or to make it simple:

14 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Therefore, while “objective truth” may exist it is virtually impossible for Humans to express such truth.
Should we try?

Of course. Since we're all humans most of the time it won't matter that the truths we use and discuss are really subjective.
We just have to bear in mind that new approaches are always possible, and try to keep an open mind.
 

[DMC]

10 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Since we're all humans most of the time

Now I'm pondering what exactly I am the rest of the time...