Reading about Godel Here's a link to a review one of the two books on Goedel that I mention in class today. I'm not so sure about the reviewer's comments because she has a tendency to say things like:

The Vienna Circle celebrated empirical science as the basis for those new foundations, but as the ideas of positivism evolved and filtered into such disciplines as literary theory, anthropology and linguistics, science itself became a target of skepticism. Enter, postmodernism. Every form of knowledge came to be analyzed as a set of rules created by flawed human beings whose biases inevitably infected those rules. The relativity, uncertainty and incompleteness of Einstein, Heisenberg and Goedel became metaphors for the unreliability of what we once took to be truth.

Granted that Godel's and Einstein's works have been used to support conclusions outside of science that they don't actually support. But was Darwin's, and Mendel's, and even though I gather that Newton may have had some sympathy for the more esoteric uses of his theories, they've still been put to this use. Scientific theories have been misapplied to advance nonscientific agendas for at least as long as they're have been respectable scientific theories to misapply. Perhaps longer, depending on what you think the Pythagoreans were up to. Einstein and Goedel haven't been particularly abused and postmodernist haven't been uniquely guilty. In fact, the postmodern scepticism of science probably keeps the average post modernist by abusing scientific conclusions too much. (Biographical aside: it was reading Lyotard's Report on the Post-modern Condition while taking a direct study in quantum mechanics that cofirmed my analytic conditions. If memory serves, Lyotard is quite egregious in misapplying Einstein and Goedel.)

But what really gets me about this passage is that it seems to indicate that postivism gave rise to postmodernism. Despite its flaws, positivism was a movement to establish some evidential standards in philosophy. No matter how problematic that might, its really not the same thing as unprincipled scepticism. (As opposed to the sceptical kind that I like.)  ¶ #

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