It’s important to make sure our basic definitiins and assumptions are well defined… That being said I’ve always been pissed at epistomogists that opened the door to crackpots and manipulators to “define their own truth” and invite fascism.
I’m not saying epistomology is bad, but creating a debate about a well established fact is exactly what right-wing people will do when trying to impose their anti-scientific ideas.
Oh, please. Let’s not go there. Epistemologists have never suggested or promoted any such thing, your wariness is misplaced, it seems. If anything, fascism will use any and all rhetorical resource to promote their rise and stay in power. Remember, before post-modernism—which is the source of the “every person has their own truth” thing you dislike, not epistemology which predates post-modernism by a couple of centuries—fascism used objective truth as justification for the superiority of the in-group in power. Eugenics was touted by fascists in the 1800s as the epitome of scientific enlightenment. It was obvious and proven scientific knowledge that black people were an inferior race, etc. All the classical Nazi pseudo-arguments. A harsh and closed view of objective truth is precisely the kind of mindset where fascism thrive. Fascists like absolute truths quite a lot, even when they contradict each other.
The point of epistemology is to analyze the ways in which humans come up with and use knowledge. It has absolutely no prescriptive tenets at all. It is entirely descriptive.
Like, you can’t look at me in the eye and seriously suggest that Bertrand Russel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Locke, Hume or Immanuel Kant were fascists.
Definitely not! It just so happened that in my life experience, I was introduced to socio-constructivism just at the same time that alt-right was beginning to be a thing…
When professors were telling us “Einstein proved that Newton was wrong” without understanding that relativity reduces to Newtonian mechanics at low speed… It really failed to get me on board.
You had shitty teachers. That doesn’t mean social-constructivism is wrong. Quite the contrary, it kind of bizarrely proves how social relations alter your perception of reality.
Haha that’s exactly it: perception of reality. It doesn’t change the underlying real world, and so it only affects “truth” if we are forced to redefine it based on what socio-constructivism wants it to be.
It’s just like alt-right debates: just by accepting to play the game, you already lost. It’s a logical paradox, and therefore it can’t be a valid theory.
Yeah especially about things that are considered fundamental like the physics of fluids.
Unless they’re arguing about some quantum effect that hasn’t been proven maybe, but then they’re either a physicist or a Feynman bro who thinks they figured it out after “thinking hard about at and watching 7 hours of YouTube videos”.
It’s important to make sure our basic definitiins and assumptions are well defined… That being said I’ve always been pissed at epistomogists that opened the door to crackpots and manipulators to “define their own truth” and invite fascism.
I’m not saying epistomology is bad, but creating a debate about a well established fact is exactly what right-wing people will do when trying to impose their anti-scientific ideas.
Oh, please. Let’s not go there. Epistemologists have never suggested or promoted any such thing, your wariness is misplaced, it seems. If anything, fascism will use any and all rhetorical resource to promote their rise and stay in power. Remember, before post-modernism—which is the source of the “every person has their own truth” thing you dislike, not epistemology which predates post-modernism by a couple of centuries—fascism used objective truth as justification for the superiority of the in-group in power. Eugenics was touted by fascists in the 1800s as the epitome of scientific enlightenment. It was obvious and proven scientific knowledge that black people were an inferior race, etc. All the classical Nazi pseudo-arguments. A harsh and closed view of objective truth is precisely the kind of mindset where fascism thrive. Fascists like absolute truths quite a lot, even when they contradict each other.
The point of epistemology is to analyze the ways in which humans come up with and use knowledge. It has absolutely no prescriptive tenets at all. It is entirely descriptive.
Like, you can’t look at me in the eye and seriously suggest that Bertrand Russel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Locke, Hume or Immanuel Kant were fascists.
Definitely not! It just so happened that in my life experience, I was introduced to socio-constructivism just at the same time that alt-right was beginning to be a thing…
When professors were telling us “Einstein proved that Newton was wrong” without understanding that relativity reduces to Newtonian mechanics at low speed… It really failed to get me on board.
You had shitty teachers. That doesn’t mean social-constructivism is wrong. Quite the contrary, it kind of bizarrely proves how social relations alter your perception of reality.
Haha that’s exactly it: perception of reality. It doesn’t change the underlying real world, and so it only affects “truth” if we are forced to redefine it based on what socio-constructivism wants it to be.
It’s just like alt-right debates: just by accepting to play the game, you already lost. It’s a logical paradox, and therefore it can’t be a valid theory.
Yeah especially about things that are considered fundamental like the physics of fluids.
Unless they’re arguing about some quantum effect that hasn’t been proven maybe, but then they’re either a physicist or a Feynman bro who thinks they figured it out after “thinking hard about at and watching 7 hours of YouTube videos”.