NP no facts only interpretations

[jbor]

>From: Michel Ryckx <michel.ryckx at freebel.net>
>

> Mr. Bauerlein simply makes a difference between the how and why of
> scientific truth; and the
> epistemological basis for it.  He says that, what he calls 'social
> constructionism' leads not to an
> inquiry of its epistemological basis, but, when the axiomatic thinking
> takes over, to an 'excess of
> confidence' as 'a key to social constructionist argumentation'.

You will find that this questioning of the epistemological basis of their
own discipline and methodologies is actually integral to the processes of
argumentation and inquiry employed by the many linguists, sociologists,
philosophers, historians et. al. who recognise and accept that language, and
knowledge, are social constructs.

> He also
> says that those questioning
> the ideas he referred to, are not attacked on scientific, but on
> psychological grounds.

Again, this charge remains totally unsupported in the article. In fact, it's
what Bauerlein is doing, not those he castigates.

> jbor goes on:
> "As well as all the nonsense about professors in these fields no longer
> reading anything, it's
> absolutely hypocritical of him to accuse academics of ad hominem argument
> when it's exactly what
> he's doing by calling them "social constructionists"."
>
> Where does he write such a thing?

Throughout the article he labels a whole swathe of academics as
"constructionists" and "social constructionists". It's a term he has made
up, a term of contempt and derision. The people he is addressing refer to
themselves as philosophers, linguists, historians, sociologists,
anthropologists etc. Bauerlein condemns these people and calls them this
name because they all happen to agree with one another on this point. I
think it's pretty obvious that he doesn't agree, even though he doesn't
announce his own beliefs. This is intellectual dishonesty, in my opinion.

snip
> "Which of course they are".  This is in the final paragraph:
> "Scholars may have initially embraced constructionism as a philosophical
> position, but the evolution
> of constructionism into a brash institutional maneuvering indicates that it
> now functions as a
> response to a changing labor environment."  He does not deny as you say,
> languages & cultural
> systems as socially-constructed.

He's trying to discredit the notion, surely? Why else has he bothered to
write such a antagonistic and inaccurate diatribe?

> jbor again:
> "As you've twigged to, the alternative viewpoint, which remains unstated in
> the article because it's
> just so dumb, is that language and knowledge are down to some miracle of
> divine intervention. It's
> easy to figure where Pynchon stands on that particular "debate"!"
>
> If I were nasty, I could say this phrase is a perfect illustration of the
> mentality described in the
> article.  I won't.

But, of course, you have. Bauerlein's polemic is framed entirely in the
negative, but there is most certainly an unwritten agenda there. Imo.

> But: mr. Bauerlein says one has to make a distinction
> between how a truth has
> been discovered, and the epistemological basis of that truth.

Not really. He suggests that "truths" are "truths" regardless of the context
of their "discovery" or the epistemological framework in which they have
been posited as "truth". What he never says is what he means by "truth".

> To conclude
> that the author silently
> asserts a divine intervention is intellectually dishonest.

I take it that in attempting to debunk the notion that language and
knowledge are socially-constructed Bauerlein is actually trying to resurrect
the notion that there are such things as "objective truths". The only
substantive evidence he provides is that "the laws of Newtonian physics
still have a truth-value". Of course, Newton's so-called laws are simply
descriptions of natural phenomena which were previously unquantified, their
"truth-value" of the same order as the observation that planets are
spherical or that organisms have cells.

> By the way: if cultural systems are socially-constructed, how could you
> then still maintain that
> capitalism is not an ideology?

I think you'll find I wrote that there is "no such thing as market
ideology", which there isn't, and which is quite a different thing.

best