10. Postmodernism And Science

The application of science in some countries has given them simultaneously the most advanced weaponry and the most awful civil wars, poverty and famine. Postmodernism, therefore, not without reason, often openly attacks science as the villain involved in horrific aggression, environmental pollution, alienation and exploitation.[p 272] [p 273] Just another story? Postmodernists tend to hold that the claims that scientists make are exaggerated, because they do not recognise the ways in which their reason is beclouded. For example, some postmodernist thinkers assert that the laws of nature that have been discovered by scientific investigation are nothing but social constructions, that is, they are products of the scientists' own social culture, rather than reflections of how the universe actually works. Richard Rorty (1931–2007), who was a postmodern pragmatist, wrote: The pragmatist tells us that it is useless to hope that objects will constrain us to believe the truth about them, if only they are approached with an unclouded mental eye, or a rigorous method, or a perspicuous language. He wants us to give up the notion that God, or evolution, or some other underwriter of our present ...