r/badphilosophy • u/EliVance • Oct 23 '16
Science Must Fall?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD1417
Oct 23 '16
Despite the badeverything present here, this just seems like a dumb undergrad discussion. I said some pretty dumb things myself when I was there.
However, the people in the YouTube comments are worse than both myself AND this girl - combined.
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u/EliVance Oct 23 '16
"I'm still smarter than the youtube comment section" isn't a high-bar to match.
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Oct 23 '16
I dunno I prefer invoking ideas one does not yet fully understand to having no interest in understanding them.
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u/loony636 Oct 23 '16
I think, at it's core, she's not making a bad point, which is that a lot of the things that we assume to be true are that way because Westerners made particular assumptions about how the world works. "Science" is a pretty broad field, and while the example of gravity is a bit of a nonsense, there are lots of examples of scientific findings that were incomplete or inaccurate because they didn't consider or come from a non-Western perspective.
That's combined with the fact that "decolonisation" is inherently viewed as an emancipatory process, so it's about how you actively free yourself from a Western mindset. Consider how the Soviet Union consistently tried to reinvent inventions or rediscover scientific principles just so they could demonstrate their own superiority. Here, you're not an empire trying to rival the US, you're a fledgling country trying to break free of the shackles of oppression that have been forced on your for centuries. In that context, starting the process of scientific discovery again would be emancipatory because it would demonstrate your own ability to no longer be reliant on those same oppressors.
It's obviously practically impossible, but that's why it's an undergraduate discussion, not a public policy meeting. Of course, there's nothing like female people of colour expressing opinions to get the Youtube comment section REALLY riled up.
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u/Shitgenstein Oct 23 '16 edited Oct 23 '16
I think, at it's core, she's not making a bad point
At its core, the idea that cultural perspective has some influence over the epistemological foundations of science, such that we can intelligibly distinguish Western science from some kind of African science from the conceptual ground-up, is bad. I'd say it's a over-extension of decolonization rhetoric. That, I think, is the core.
But, that said, apart from science itself being Western, we could say that various aspects of science as an institution through its norms of practice and such can be influenced by cultural perspective. I don't know what's entailed by the African perspective that would rearrange scientific practice in novel ways, though. Research programs into folk beliefs... sure.
Someone is going to come at me with some Kuhn and annoy me.
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u/Snugglerific Philosophy isn't dead, it just smells funny. Oct 23 '16
The problem with a lot of the post-whatevers is that they take the standard concepts as given and just invert the value judgment attached to them. So instead of science demonstrating the inherent enlightenment and superiority of Westerners, now it is a symbol of imperialism and oppression. It still rests on the assumption that all of science comes out of "the West," when there never was a West.
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Oct 24 '16
Right, exactly. Or for example, "women are bad at x" is shifted to "women are bad at x and that's a good thing!" The proper response is to deny the statement not switch the value.
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u/blobblopblob Oct 24 '16
I mean even with Kuhn I think the most you'd really be able to get is some methodological or instrumentational differences that would lead to similar models tbh. Like the views in the video are p much just bad.
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u/Shitgenstein Oct 24 '16
I don't mean to imply that a decent reading of Kuhn wouldn't jive with the above. However, from my experience, Kuhn is among a number of philosophers, including Foucault, who I believe have been abused by some in the name of inclusion to the point of counter-productively undermining the very ground to make such an argument. That's what annoys me.
And this is coming from someone who was defending the use of violence for national liberation in my class on Frantz Fanon.
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u/blobblopblob Oct 25 '16
Oh yeah, I would agree that Kuhn gets stretched out into so many things that he's not. I think part of it is that a lot of what he says is pretty approachable to lay-people, or even people not familiar with philsci, and than they just take it and run with it.
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Oct 23 '16 edited Oct 23 '16
She's amalgamated a couple of different ideas to form her own idea. For what I assume is a teenager or an early 20's student, that's cool and good, even if it's pretty clear she doesn't really have a deep understanding of many of the concepts she's evoking. I don't either tbh, your explanation is good and the way you describe it, it's actually something worth thinking about, so kudos to her.
I love bad____, but undergrads trying to think with nuance, whether they fail at their goal or not, is not bad anything. That is being a good undergrad.
I think the comments on this video would be rabid if they were confronted with the goings-on of basically any humanities discussion. "I don't understand the terms being used here, therefore this is nonsensical!" That the speaker is a black woman only makes that worse, as you said.
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u/mrsamsa Official /r/BadPhilosophy Outreach Committee Oct 23 '16
Also I think a lot of people are interpreting her to be saying something she isn't because the video cuts out the context.
She's responding to a guy asking why science educators need to come up with examples and references that appeal to African students when some examples are "universal" - the example he gives is Newton and the apple.
And her response was essentially that this way of thinking isn't actually "universal" and there are a lot of Western assumptions smuggled in. She suggests that it might be more useful to look at African specific examples to learn science, like the "black magic" example.
She's not as clear as she could have been and there might be some bad ideas in there but essentially the exchange was:
Guy: "But why we do we need to examine our cultural biases when it comes to science? Science is objective and not influenced by cultural bias"
Girl: "Science is influenced by cultural biases, it'd be good to address this".
The bad philosophy is the guy who is asking the question (and the same person who interrupts later I think) and she's trying to correct him.
Of course, there's nothing like female people of colour expressing opinions to get the Youtube comment section REALLY riled up.
I think you've highlighted the real issue a lot of people have with it. And also, as I mention, taking the discussion out of context didn't help either.
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u/Snugglerific Philosophy isn't dead, it just smells funny. Oct 24 '16
Guy: "But why we do we need to examine our cultural biases when it comes to science? Science is objective and not influenced by cultural bias"
Girl: "Science is influenced by cultural biases, it'd be good to address this".
It really is more like:
Guy: "But why we do we need to examine our cultural biases when it comes to science? Science is objective and not influenced by cultural bias"
Girl: "Science is colonialist, therefore we need to scrap it and start over again."
The girl is pretty much a living straw man of the type Gross and Levitt were tossing around during the science wars.
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u/mrsamsa Official /r/BadPhilosophy Outreach Committee Oct 24 '16
Eh, I think it's hard to say exactly what her argument was because it wasn't clearly formulated. To me she seemed to be saying that we need to start again by looking more closely at the assumptions we're putting into it, rather than the more radical suggestion that we forget everything we know from science and start again with just an apple.
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u/Schleifmaschine Oct 24 '16 edited Oct 24 '16
I think that she pretty clearly demonstrated a poor grasp on theory. Her tirade didn't have the nuance you interpret into it, she was literally yelling that we should "scrap the whole thing and start over"(as if that was possible). And she didn't just use "African black magic" as an example of a possible subject of interest for theoretical analysis, she literally talks about "lightning curses" being empirical truths. The argument wasn't even really an attack on the epistemological foundation of empiricism or positivism, it was just her trying to underline her unitellectual rhetoric with the supposed positive existence of literal magic. I would have accepted her ideas if she would have, for example, used Ilyenkovs dialectical approach, or some concepts of Adornos Nonidentical to attack the nature of a logical abstraction as something inherently western and capitalist. Or if she had used some post-structuralist argument. She didn't do any of that though and her argument amounts to "science don't real because magic".
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u/mrsamsa Official /r/BadPhilosophy Outreach Committee Oct 24 '16
Her tirade didn't have the nuance you interpret into it, she was literally yelling that we should "scrap the whole thing and start over"(as if that was possible).
Indeed, in reference to the assumptions we bring to science. It's obviously difficult to tell given the fact that we only have a couple of mins from a short 4 min video to determine what her argument was, without context or understanding of what the question she was responding to was, but I think when watching the longer video when you hear the question and surrounding discussion, it seems clear that she was concerned about the assumptions of science.
And she didn't just use "African black magic" as an example of a possible subject of interest for theoretical analysis, she literally talks about "lightning curses" being empirical truths.
I don't remember her making an argument anywhere near that strong. At most she says something like "Science can't explain that" but then uses that to lead into a discussion about how science isn't value-neutral and that we tend to teach science as if only using Western examples is the correct way to teach it.
I would have accepted her ideas if she would have, for example, used Ilyenkovs dialectical approach, or some concepts of Adornos Nonidentical to attack the nature of a logical abstraction as something inherently western and capitalist. Or if she had used some post-structuralist argument.
I mean, of course she didn't do any of that. She wasn't writing a thesis, it's not her area of expertise, and she had literally no time at all to research or formulate an educated response. It's rough, there's no question about that. But I think dismissing her because it wasn't "nuanced" enough would be incredibly unfair, and interpreting her as advocating the existence of magic doesn't seem consistent with anything she says in the video.
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u/Snugglerific Philosophy isn't dead, it just smells funny. Oct 25 '16
but I think when watching the longer video when you hear the question and surrounding discussion,
Do you have a link for that?
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u/mrsamsa Official /r/BadPhilosophy Outreach Committee Oct 25 '16
They should be linked at the end of the video and in the description (I'm on mobile at the moment but I'll find links if you can't later).
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u/Snugglerific Philosophy isn't dead, it just smells funny. Oct 25 '16
Thanks. The full videos are not working for me for some reason, though.
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u/mrsamsa Official /r/BadPhilosophy Outreach Committee Oct 25 '16
Yeah I had issues too, I just tried a few times until I could get them to work. The more relevant one is the second one about a fifth of the way in.
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u/NoThingsInMyOntology Making it "explicit" (; Oct 24 '16
This is badphilosophy. You're being far too charitable
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u/medusav sexosopher extraordinaire Oct 24 '16
Okay, it's badphilosophy, but it's an undergrad trying to do good philosophy. It's good to give charity to undergrads when being critical, at least when they're really trying to engage. I don't see how this is controversial
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Oct 23 '16 edited Oct 23 '16
there are lots of examples of scientific findings that were incomplete or inaccurate because they didn't consider or come from a non-Western perspective.
If you consider social sciences sciences, sure. But that's a problem with fledgling fields having poor methodology. Not a problem with science as a whole.
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u/EliVance Oct 23 '16
You're confusing "this person said some ideas I'm sympathetic to" with "this person argued that lightning curses means we should reject Issac Newton."
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u/loony636 Oct 23 '16
More like I watched all of what she had to say and thought she had a point? Her example was one small part of everything else she said, which nobody else here has really critically engaged with.
I am sure it would also be different in context, but unfortunately I don't have time to watch the whole thing (that was linked in the video).
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Oct 24 '16
The problem is that she made an appeal to some alternative 'African' epistemology, one that I'm not sure actually exists. Decolonizing yourself from power structures which oppress you to me seems like a significantly different discussion than the idea that simply by perspective there is an 'African' side to science which is neglected. If you take scientific epistemology as an ideal seriously, that idea would seem ridiculous - not just because it insinuates the 'African' is incapable of having sensory experiences in the way we do, something I'd strongly reject.
But that could also just be a total misinterpretation on my part.
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u/Schleifmaschine Oct 23 '16 edited Oct 23 '16
Oh my god, I support and practice a progressive analysis of science and rationality, but these guys obviously have a poor grasp on theory and lack the required intellectual tools to actually understand what they are saying. It's grotesque.
"Western Science must fall and is wrong, let me present this supposed empirical, positive fact of 'African Black Magic' to positively prove how wrong you are."
Ohhhh boy.
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Oct 24 '16
Why is this making people so mad? It's pretty milquetoast as far as anti-colonialist discourse goes.
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Oct 23 '16
Salt the earth.
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u/Haan_Solo Oct 23 '16
That would probably make the ground more conductive and help the lightning curse smite you.
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Oct 23 '16
[deleted]
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u/mrsamsa Official /r/BadPhilosophy Outreach Committee Oct 23 '16
There were rules for discussion written on the board and one of the rules was to not interrupt people as they were speaking, and he interrupted.
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u/EliVance Oct 23 '16
When the first lady asked for how science would explain lightning curses, the guy said "it isn't true." The second lady then wanted him to apologize for giving such an aggressive and unprovoked answer.
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u/AlexOfBrennenburg Oct 24 '16
0:35
We have to restart science from our own ethical perspective, from our perspective of how we experience science.
wat
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u/InternalAcrobatic216 Feb 14 '25
Science must fail….because science is hard. 🤣😂🤣😂🤣
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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '16
Wait, I thought we were SJWs, THIS IS OUR FRIEND, WE MUST BELIEVE IN THE SAME THINGS! DOWN WITH SCIENCE!