Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins

The goals of certain late-medieval alchemists were nonsense, but science and engineering often follow nonsensical goals (insert your favorite politically-funded project here). The major advances are usually serendipitous, and only a tangential relationship to the goals.

Alchemy had a long history, though, and often resembled practical chemistry much closely than it did a quest for chimerical substances. The practical side of alchemy produced some worthwhile facts and techniques, and overlapped in many places with early chemistry. Some late practitioners of alchemy are also honored as important early scientists: Isaac Newton, Roger Bacon, and Tycho Brahe among them. The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_chemistry shows quite a bit of overlap.

But alchemy had to be rejected in order for modern science to emerge. There were several reasons: first, it was illegal to practice alchemy in many areas. Partly because of this, alchemists were secretive, while science advances by sharing information. Finally, Francis Bacon's work on the scientific method came along late in the game. So the only logical way forward was to re-brand the sensible parts of alchemy as natural philosophy or natural science, and proceed from there.

But because it's "fluid and leaky", it's not going to fossilize...

I think that every culture has had their fair share of overly-respected sophomores. How many do you think trolled around Athens, and were forgotten by history because nobody cared to record what they said? With a bit of common sense, that's what will happen here too.

> it is metaphor.

For what?

> it might be saying something worthwhile about scientists and gender roles (in a stylised and heavily symbolic way) once put back into context.

Please, humor us. What might that "something worthwhile" be?

OK, so. Disclaimer first: I am a professional programmer and not a professional philosopher. However, I have a degree in philosophy, albeit one from a program which was heavily analytic (and thus removed from/disdainful of much of what passes for postmodern philosophy).

That said...

My biggest problem with postmodernism is simply that there seems to be no "there" there. Of course, postmodernists would likely argue that that's the point, but it's terribly hard to talk about something so nebulously defined.

But the result of decades of postmodernist (and deconstructionist, and poststructuralist, since they're all interrelated) thought, to me, has ultimately been nothing but a game. One plays the game by choosing some particular thing (the "text", which of course is not required to actually consist of text) and:

1. Denying any and all conscious intentions the author/designer/creator may have had.

2. Reading into it any and all assumptions/positions/prejudices which happen to be fashionable to assign to one's target, by liberally playing with language or context.

This is problematic to me because it has no justifiable basis -- it's just as ad-hoc and just as unsound as a Freudian constantly asserting this or that unobservable, untestable subconscious motivation. Of course, within postmodern thought this is considered valid because postmodern thought admits the existence of nothing but present subjectivity.

And the worst part is that the largest visible result has been nothing more than the fulfillment by postmodernists of what Foucault had described in his work: an entrenched power which can bring itself to bear against dissidents and which structures all discourse to its own advantage through things like its use of language.

Meanwhile, what you consider to be "cool ideas" are not necessarily new, and not necessarily foreign to people here. Take, for example, "the map is not the territory": this is not a particularly new insight, and it would be a poor programmer indeed who confused, in the style of Magritte's famous warning, an instance of a Pipe class in a program with an actual pipe.

> For what?

Are you saying the language in the quote above isn't loaded down with symbolic and metaphorical imagery? Or, more specifically, that it isn't drawing metaphorical parallels, rather than literal ones, between physical concepts and cultural ones?

> Please, humor us. What might that "something worthwhile" be?

Please, spare me your sarcasm and scare quotes.

Should I interpret your scepticism as a belief that there is nothing at all worthwhile to say about gender and culture in science?