RE: Destructionism
Sean Draine (seandr@Exchange.Microsoft.com)
Fri, 11 Dec 1998 17:54:14 -0800
Geraldo Bustamantaguatavini, as quoted by Matt:
> "The most powerful gesture in poststructuralism at this point--the gem it
> has to offer--is the motion of acknowledging the constructed and
> arbitrary nature of "truth," reason, science and law, etc."
Literary theorists have this interesting habit of assuming their musings to
have profound implications for science. This reflects either a
misunderstanding of science or an inflated sense of self importance.
There is infinitely more wiggle room in assigning meaning to complex textual
narratives than there is in say, modeling the solar system based on a rich
set of observations. Subjective factors do play a role in science, but the
game of science has a set of well understood rules that require its
participants to contend with observable events and formal logic before they
hold forth on the nature of reality. Thomas Kuhn and his ilk have made
convincing arguments that scientific theories will never get the truth quite
right, and that today's paradigms will likely be discarded tomorrow, but no
one has ruled out the idea that paradigm shifts in science involve replacing
approximate truths with increasingly better approximations.
People like our dear Geraldo readily dismiss scientific progress, yet they
take airplanes to their silly conferences, they read their dull journals by
electric light, and they wash their hands after a crap for fear of spreading
disease (except perhaps the French ones). All of these actions reveal a
faith in science advance, and, I think, just a touch of hypocrisy.
Literary theory may in the end be nothing more than a peculiar form of
intellectual masterbation. No one will ever convincingly reduce science to
such.
-Sean