Ms. Rand Call Your Office!

David Bernstein, at Volkh Conspiracy, joins Professor Norman Levitt in taking a whack at "Science Studies," the specialty of the Lecturer at Dartmouth who sued her students for thinking.

One clear advantage to this methodology, obviously, is that it gives its practitioners leave to dismiss scientific findings they find discomfiting without the necessity of developing significant scientific arguments against them. If science is a phantom constructed by a cabal with social interests opposed to yours, you have only to utter a few magic words from the science-studies canon and, poof!, the offending ideas go up in smoke. One can see this at work in the supposed findings of many authors, from Helen Longino, who doesn't like the fact that exposure to hormones in utero can affect the behavioral propensities of young children, to Vine Deloria, the American Indian activist who simply despises western science root and branch and asserts that it has no authority to dispute Native American lore.

I don't know that it will surprise any ThreeSourcers, but the brazen capacity of academe to deny truth and reason should astonish -- we must not inure to it.

Hat-tip: Instapundit

Philosophy Posted by jk at May 13, 2008 1:32 PM