Friday, November 25, 2016

Climateer Line of the Day: Fake and Real Edition

I was thinking of doing a piece on the responsibility of the academy in the history of "Post-truth", the Oxford Dictionaries ' Word of the Year, 2016 and how Derrida and the deconstructionists led to the normalization of making shit up by postmodernist folks in the social sciences which led to changes in how some journos looked at what they did which led to advocacy getting traction in the media while maintaining an aura of journalistic objectivity but then I thought "a turkey club sandwich sounds good" so you get this while I take a walk down the street.

From Daniel C. Dennett, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, writing at Edge back in 2013.
...Postmodernism, the school of "thought" that proclaimed "There are no truths, only interpretations" has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for "conversations" in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster....
Back in a bit.