Postmodernism & science
• Wishful Thinking
But there is a new kind of animus that has become conventional wisdom in many universities over the past three decades. It goes by the name of perspectivism or situatedness or social constructionism . This view purports to show that science is neither universal nor peculiarly well equipped to arrive at the truth; that on the contrary it is local, Western, socially and culturally embedded, and therefore, merely one form of knowledge among many. Its claims of objectivity and dispassion are an illusion, rationality is window dressing for power, evidence a matter of negotiation and agreement, and truth an outdated metaphysical word that should be confined to the dustbin of history. Indeed, in this view science is not only no better at discovering the truth about the world than any other method, it is worse. Some epistemologies are more unequal than others. Science is crippled by its blind infatuation with reason, its foolish insistence on evidence before believing something, its tiresomely pedantic insistence on replicability, peer review, statistics, falsifiability, distinguishing correlation from causation, and all such nit-picky hair-splitting rules that impede a good imaginative hypothesis.
Ophelia Benson, Butterflies and Wheels: Paradigms U Like