Anyway, you’ll be surprised to find that some rightists do suggest ditching the scientific method in favour of, um, whatever. Ludwig von Mises reportedly wrote this in Epistemological Problems of Economics:

In matters of human action no experiments can be performed. History needs to be interpreted by theoretical insight gained previously from other sources.

(As zompist remarks, “The ‘other sources’ turn out to be armchair ruminations on how things must be.” And, Aaron Swartz’s comments already point out that experiments can be performed in matters of human action.)

Then there are those who don’t even bother with the concepts of “science” or “objective truth”. If your claim is that these people are implicitly accepting the validity of the scientific method—well, you aren’t kidding anyone.

i just don’t think the label “postmodernist” (or postmodern, which is, of course, different) has to be dismissive. it can actually be a helpful descriptive term, imho.

peace

again, i recommend gilkey and appleby to you for help with expanding your categories. but since you seem to understand everything already, then i guess we’re done. personally, i think you’re just winging it. good luck with that.

Then there are the ones (such as the “intelligent design” supporters) who jump up and down and scream that they are right because their science is better than that of the Darwinians. They’re obviously wrong, of course—and ridiculously easy to refute—but their crappy pseudoscience bears no trace of the postmodernist’s arched brow at the mere mention of scientific objectivity. On the contrary, they themselves claim the mantle of scientific objectivity—even if falsely—and hence openly and firmly oppose the postmodern position of doubt as to its existence.

Bi: You’re perfectly entitled to believe that liberal scientists who embrace the theory of evolution and reject claims of gender differences in mathematical ability are completely justified in doing so, whereas conservative scientists who embrace some flavor of creationism or lend credence to claims of gender differences in mathematical ability are blinded by political bias or stupidity. After all, your belief—right or wrong—implicitly accepts the legitimacy of the scientific method, the possibility of scientific objectivity (even if only some achieve it), and the ability of objective scientific research to arrive at objectively correct conclusions.

The same applies to conservatives—whether they’re right or wrong—who lend credence to “creation science” or gender differences in mathematical abilities, and dismiss Darwinians and believers in gender equality as politically biased. Being wrong, or even stupid, doesn’t make you a postmodernist. The careless slinging of such dismissive labels as “postmodernist” simply detracts from the important arguments about how to do good science, and what the results tell us.

This is total bull. First, that’s not the claim; rather the claim is, your particular set of scientists may be (N.B.) politically biased and therefore should be ignored, while for some mysterious reason my particular set of scientists is obviously infallible and any criticism of them is “intellectually vapid”!

Second, regarding your claim that “non-postmodernist leftists” do this sort of thing “all the time”… just look at Aaron Swartz’s blog entry on Lawrence Summers. Nowhere do I see Swartz casting aspersions on Summers just because he’s a rightist. In fact, he actually bothers to directly debunk his claims by citing actual experiments:

In the present context, a study by Claude Steele brings some of the problems into sharp relief. … Steele … took some of the best and most dedicated math students they could find and gave them an extremely difficult math test. The men performed more than three and a half times as well as the women — an enormous gap. Then they gave students the same test, but told them this was a special test in which women always did as well as men. The gap closed almost entirely, with women’s scores increasing dramatically.

“All the time”? So, Dan Simon, which fictional world are you now living in?

If “right-wing postmodernism” is a real phenomenon, it’s surely left a more convincing paper trail than that.

Well, at the very least I do have a paper trail. You don’t even have any paper trail. You’re just a ritualized troll who makes unsubstantiated claims.

last semester in class, i had a true-believer student who would regularly argue that there is no more or less solid case for evolution or creation, so really, you should just pick one and acknowledge that it is a faith-claim rather than pretending that it is “science”. that is bogus, of course, but it illustrates that a certain form of postmodernism is working its way through right-wing, particularly conservative christian circles. i think sivan, appleby, and almond’s strong religion is very good on explaining fundamentalisms as postmodern phenomena and in particular the importance of their adopting certain principles from the postmodern, despite their general rejection of both postmodernity as a concept and postmodernism as an ideology or school of thought.

of course, how can we not agree that the form of postmodernism deployed by my student and deplored by my grad school comrades is absurd, no matter who uses it? the idea that we require some absolute Truth or some absolute notion of fact(s) in order to distinguish brutal repression of dissent from the preservation of freedom (aka, mere fiction), or the superiority of one account of cosmogony over another, or even the status of a cosmogony as science or as religion, seems to me . . . antiquated, even disingenuous.

clever leftist: that “left-wing school of thought”, post-modernism, was already the bastard child of right-wing modernists (hegel, kant) before it was adopted back into the right-wing family. cf. deleuze . . . :)

In any event, I’m sure you don’t want the left’s opinions judged on the basis of some anonymous left-wing commenter’s response to a posting on a conservative blog somewhere. If “right-wing postmodernism” is a real phenomenon, it’s surely left a more convincing paper trail than that.

Complete concensus in the scientific community??

Wasn’t the last time that happened was when Galileo was almost excommunicated for suggesting that the Sun does not go around the Earth?

…and later, by the same goon:

It seems completely intellectually vapid to attribute any opposition to the anthropogenic climate change theory to being “employed by oil companies”. It is not like those pushing the “global warming” theory don’t have anything to gain from it. There are billions of dollars going into this research. Clearly there is an incentive to make it seem as bad as possible in order to keep getting grants for more research, etc.

Yeah, it’s all about agendas! Who cares about the raw data?

Well, that certainly does sound like postmodernism. Are you saying that such arguments are standard among global warming skeptics? Could you point out some specific examples of people actually saying something like that? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen anything of the kind—although that isn’t saying much, given how far I am from being well-read on the topic.

And you can see the same sort of thing among “supply-side” economists.

Again, I’d appreciate seing some examples. Which supply-side economists do this, what economic realities do they consider “socially constructed”, and how much of economics do they regard as irretrievably subjective?

Both sides of this argument are well-trod, and I’ve got better ways to spend my time than in an incessant pissing match with such empathetic paragons of the universe as yourselves …

In other words, when your arguments are found to be bogus, just accuse the other side of being too closed-minded to accept your bogus arguments!

And this (visit the first link):

It is often argued that a student would not develop fully if faculty were grossly lopsided by race or gender. … Doesn’t this apply to political orientation?

Yeah, a student wouldn’t develop fully if faculty were grossly biased towards objective truth. But wait! “Objective truth” is an oppressive concept! Everything is an opinion! Diversity! Diversity! Diversity!

And, last but not least, this:

Think this will render all the palaver about fillibusters, Iraq, red-blue divide, social security and so on irrelevant: Reports coming out of Qinghai suggest H5N1 infections in humans and birds are out of control …

Oh, OK. Bush lied, people died… but that’s all just palaver!