Postmodern Science Research Articles

LIS, Method, and Postmodern Science

This article discusses scientific method and LIS's difficulty in being a modern science. The epistemological crisis in modern science during the last thirty years, however, gives LIS a central role to play in postmodern science. Implications for this turn are suggested.

Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Reading By Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction J. E. Steinbach Damien Broderick. Reading By Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1995. xvii + 197 pp. While science fiction (sf to its fans) has been a staple of popular culture, it has only recently come to be accepted by academic audiences because, as Damien Broderick asserts in his introduction to Reading By Starlight, “sf’s imaginative texts often baffle or dismay readers trained to enjoy only the literary or ‘canonical.’” Broderick’s contention is that when we (as readers of science fiction) try to “uncover the codes and strategies of science fiction,” we evoke the central paradox of the genre. This is a paradox for the twentieth-century reader, who has been located in a conflict of mutual incomprehension between the cultures of the sciences and the humanities, a conflict which in turn [End Page 933] engenders the contemporary theorized interest in sf. Broderick, a writer of science fiction himself, argues that for the last 70 years much of the science fiction genre produced in the English language has evolved from a set of protocols depicting the objective world of rigorous empirical observations to the creative invention of imagined subjects drawn from typical literary fictions, leaving sf in a neutral space open to interpretation by literary and scientific metatheorists. Reading By Starlight is constructed around the argument that we have reached a time of crisis in theory and criticism for both literature and science; since the purpose of theory is now to challenge and problematize the established canon (and the criteria for inclusion therein) traditional modes of critical exposition should also be rethought. Part one of Reading By Starlight serves as a review of recent theory on sf. The factor that sets Broderick’s work apart from that of several other recent critics of sf is his informative and insightful synthesis that ties together the sometimes disparate assumptions of his theoretical predecessors to offer both a history of sf’s development—from early formula fiction to postmodern text—and an assertion that these narratives should not be considered as a “genre” but rather as a “mode,” a way of thinking rather than literary formulation. However, Broderick’s theoretical positioning creates a contradiction in his position. While he asserts that the theoretical interest in sf is due to “the rise of popular culture studies, discourse theory and deconstruction [which] de-privilege in various ways the literary canon which excluded sf from serious critical attention,” he also maintains that one hindrance to the acceptance of sf by more “literary” audiences is that “rich responses to sf texts require a sort of apprenticeship by the reader.” This problematizes the question of Broderick’s intended reception of this text; Reading By Starlight is very much an academic treatise, but the small number of literary academics who have also undertaken the sf apprenticeship greatly diminishes his target audience. Perhaps for that reason most of Broderick’s text is limited to examining the theory surrounding the acceptance of sf and only offers a limited reading of actual sf itself. This is not to say that the readings of sf scattered through the latter half of Reading By Starlight are not insightful. Broderick’s examination of Samuel Delany’s The Eisenstein Intersection is intriguing. He coins the term “allography” in order to describe this text and to argue that [End Page 934] it may be read as an allegory for writing and reading sf in general, using this text to offer an extensive reader-oriented approach to sf. However, in his treatment of another Delany text, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (as well as in his readings of cyberpunk and Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia cycle), his critique, though informative, may well stand alone and does not necessarily extend the critical groundwork he lays before us at the outset. Reading By Starlight is, however, an engaging and provocative reassessment of the reception of contemporary—that is, as the subtitle of the text indicates, postmodern—sf. While the “new model of sf textuality” Broderick promises in his introduction is more a postmodern montage, an argumentative collage combining aspects of multiplicity and indeterminacy with reader-based theories...

Book Reviews : Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction Scott Bukatman Publisher: Duke University Press Year of Publication: 1993 Length: 404 pages Price: $57.95 (hardbound), $18.95 (paper

Book Reviews : Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction Scott Bukatman Publisher: Duke University Press Year of Publication: 1993 Length: 404 pages Price: $57.95 (hardbound), $18.95 (paper

Conquests, chaos and complexity: The Other in modern and postmodern science

Western civilization has appropriated the scientific achievements of all Other civilizations, declared that they are not science and written them out from the history of science. Nevertheless, Western science is a product of the scientific achievements of all non-Western cultures. In its ‘modern’ form science is Eurocentric and based on a racial economy. Will postmodern science, of which chaos and complexity are the most noteworthy examples, treat non-Western cultures differently? Will emphasis on holism and new perceptions of nature transform science into a pluralistic enterprise? What is the significance of Western obsession with discovering a Theory of Everything? This essay explores these and related questions.

Why We Should Fear Postmodernists

Postmodernism is the raging fad, and in geography Michael Dear is perhaps its best known Brooks Brothers, Wall Street ad man. Uncharacteristically, in his commentary on what I have to say about Australia's wild horses, he loses his cool and flails away at me with a ceremonial tomahawk and a parlor house derringer. He shows that he does not understand or biologists. He can't find his way into public publishing record. He chooses to turn away from the delicious horse fodder I offer up. He plays coy and querulous with the simplest of ideas. He equivocates and contradicts himself. He appeals to a cheap literary trick (Let's have fun reconstructing Symanski's unrecorded thoughts). And, to what will surely be the bountiful delight of those enamored with tropes, he spawns several ironies, a couple of which are more than a little disheartening. How ironical that Dear should accuse me of being stubbornly anchored in an outmoded Judeo-Christian tradition that emphasizes Man's Dominion Over Nature. The British, Dear's ancestors, introduced the many domestic animals into Australia that turned feral, now well more than a million critters that are having, and have had, such a devastating impact on Australia's native flora and fauna, on fragile ecosystems best suited to small and lightfooted wallabies, bilbies, and lizards. Innocent as Dear may be of this (I'd be the last to argue that one ought to be blamed for the arrogance of one's ancestors), he has little reason to be taking the high-moral ground with me, implying that like good postmodernists, he embraces a biocentric point of view. Were it true, one would expect Dear to be as keen as I am to rid the Australian outback of calamitous introduced feral species-not just horses. He would not be interested in having his ancestors' mistakes persist in the name of horse love and indifferent temporizing while overbearing foreign intruders pillage natives and animal liberation crackpots are given a hearing. The embracement of filibustering under the seemingly enobling idea that all voices are of equal value sanctions mischievous politics, and, in this instance, leaves the strong impression that Dear harbors imperialist and colonialist sympathies. Using a disreputable literary technique a la Joe McGinniss, Dear also mistakingly infers state of mind on this issue of Judeo-Christian dominance over nature. Between the spring of 1992 and December of 1993 I taught four lecture courses on environmental analysis to more than 1,600 students. These were courses in which a centerpiece idea was the imperative to adopt some form of biocentric philosophy. Dear's assertions that supporters of a postmodern science are perhaps most common in the field of biology . . . and that typically endorse the Gaia thesis bear no resemblance to the mind-sets of biologists who have been primary reference group for the past fifteen years or so. The overwhelming majority of professional biologists I know or read (and the one I live with) are hardcore materialists, positivists, or realists. They have not the slightest interest in (or even know about) postmodernism; and those who have heard about its basic tenets consider them irrelevant if not mindless. Nor do they think of the Gaia hypothesis as other than indisputably wrong (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1991:20; Schneider 1991). And this point: Does Dear know the difference between the Gaia hypothesis and a biocentric philosophy? Dear's angst over my reality [being] preferable and cheek for attacking postmodernism without having any kind of published record on postmodernism strikes me as a strangely twisted perspective on the postmodernist concern with privilege. It reminds me of a conversation I had with one of wife's Ph.D. students on a remote cattle station in the Northern Territory in May of 1991. Two days after arriving in Australia, which was

Cultural politics of everyday life: social constructionism, rhetoric and knowing of the third kind

Traditions of argumentation and knowing of the third kind getting in touch - the metamethodology of postmodern sciences of mental life power on the margins - a new place for intellectuals to be Vico and the poetics of practical sociality Wittgenstein and psychology - on our hook up to reality Rome Harre - realism and the turn to social constructionism Vygotsky, Volosinov and Bakhtin - thinking as a boundary phenomenon conversational realities and academic discourses rhetoric and the social construction of cognitivism what is a personal relationship? the politics of identity and belonging epilogue - critical tool-making and providential eloquence.

The problem of theory and practice in the medical profession<sup>1<sup>

Scientific knowledge is a symbolic system consisting of hypotheses, models and theories generated by means of a paradigm-mediated interaction between a scientific community and a research domain. Such a knowledge generating paradigm consists of already existing theories, as well as methodological and ontological beliefs or assumptions. In this article it is argued that the meaning ascribed to the central concepts of medical science(such as patient, disease, causality and therapy) are fundamentally determined by the 19th century logical positivist scientific paradigm. The ontological and methodological implications of the postmodern natural sciences (e.g. quantum physics) have not been applied to medical science. The 19th century ‘natural science paradigm’ therefore acts as a metatheory for both medical science and medical practice. However, the theoretical knowledge system generated by medical science acts as the theory for the practice of scientific clinical medicine which therefore functions with the same understanding of the central concepts such as patient, disease and disease causality, therapy etc. The limitations of this paradigmatic monism are illustrated by an analysis of the medical and societal response to the AIDS epidemic and it is concluded that medical science and practice, because of the complexity o f its research and practice domain, must accept in principle the possibility of paradigmatic pluralism (as in the social sciences) or should attempt to develop a holistic paradigm that will cope more adequately with its fields of research and practice.

Postmodern Scientific Cosmology and the Christian God of Creation

AbstractAfter brief explanations of constructive postmodern science and its epistemology, and the most widely accepted cosmological theory, the Big Bang, this essay explores their potential for theological reflection on the Christian God of creation. Attention is given to the Christian doctrinecreatio ex nihilo; concordism of it with the Big Bang is ruled out. The potential for consonance of postmodern Big Bang cosmology with the Christian God of creation is examined. In a revisionist move, an abstract, unipersonal theism is rejected as not true to Christian trinitarian revelation and therefore inappropriate for an exploration of consonance with Big Bang cosmology. Consonance of major elements of cosmic process, made intelligible by postmodern cosmology, with the exocentric Trinity “immanent to the world” is proposed.

Environmental education, narrative complexity and postmodern science/fiction

In this paper science education and environmental education are considered as story‐telling practices and the narrative strategies used by educators in these fields to represent and problematize human transactions with the phenomenal world are critically examined. It is argued that the characteristic discourses of much contemporary science and environmental education rarely encompass the narrative complexities that are needed in order to (i) make problems of human interrelationships with environments intelligible (and, thus, amenable to resolution) and (ii) conceptualize postmodern scientific understandings of ‘nature’ and ‘reality’. It is suggested that these problems and concepts are modelled more appropriately‐and interrogated more critically‐by much literary fiction, especially the complex and complicating textual strategies of postmodern science fiction. I thus argue that critical readings of science fiction texts should be integral to both science and environmental education and that the narrative s...

Education research and the natural sciences: What can be learned from chaos theory?

This article explores some aspects of the relationship between education research and the natural sciences. It begins by pointing out that empirical or positivist science of the Modern era has had a powerful influence on the method and on the products of education research. From there the article moves to discuss the post modern sciences of the current era and speculative examples are given of the way they too may influence the method and the products of education research. In conclusion it is argued that this can and will occur as both education research and post modern science inhabit the same cultural and epistemological field.

Information science: The study of postmodern knowledge usage

There is a lot of discussion about paradigms. Most of the approaches seem to have the same basic structure: Assuming a fixed problem and stating solutions. The alternative view would be to look at the deeper structural problem which could be illustrated by comparison with actors dealing with knowledge under conditions of a change in the role of knowledge. This is observed in four dimensions related to the development of sets of technologies: depersonalization and communication technologies, believability and observation technologies, fragmentation and presentation technologies, and rationalization and information technologies. This change is furthermore supported by the phenomenon of “informatization.” If information science considers itself to be that science, it has to learn that such a science would be established (together with some others like ecology) as a prototype of a new or postmodern science. Postmodern science is not like classical science, driven by the search for complete understanding of how the world works, but by the need to develop strategies to solve in particular those problems which have been caused by classical sciences and technologies. Such a science has to face a new theoretical situation for which three approaches are envisaged: (a) development of basic models by redefinition of broad scientific concepts (e.g., “system,” leading to the concept of actor, “communication,” leading to the concept of complexity reduction); (b) scientific reformulation of inter-concepts, that is, concepts that are that familiar and common in that they are not yet scientifically worked out as such (e.g., “knowledge”, “image”); and (c) interweaving of models and inter-concepts.

Voyage to Eudoxia: The Emergence of a Post-Rational Epistemology in Literature and Science

IN A NEW NOVEL BY THE JAPANESE NOVELIST Haruki Murakami, Hard Boiled Wonderland or The End of the World, the hero discovers that a brilliant but somewhat amoral scientist has implanted a cybernetic device in his brain. The device has three parts: one controls the conscious perceptions of the hero, one the unconscious dream states, and one the stable sense of the self. As the novel progresses, the hero understands that the switches that keep these three circuits separate from one another in his head are dissolving and as a result, his world-the world as he knows it-will literally end. Interspersed with this hard-boiled narrative in alternating chapters is another thread of the novel, concerned with the hero's shadow self and his actions in the dream world. As the novel progresses, the dream-hero in the dreamland-called End of the World-and the real hero, living in Tokyo-slowly become aware of each other's existence. At the end, Murakami implies in his complex cybernetic fiction, the two worlds inevitably merge, requiring the marriage of two cognitively separate realms as well as two different methods for knowing the world. When the last barriers between ego self and the dream self dissolve, with the aid of that clever cybernetic hardware, Words and Worlds end. Murakami's scheme is a parable for the subject of this paper, the culmination of our Cybernetic Age resulting from the collapse of the barrier between two epistemologies. My thesis is this: the barriers between the rational epistemology of science and the irrational epistemology of literature are dissolving in a way already prefigured in postmodern sciences and literature. The result will be an entirely new order of discourse we can now begin to define. At least one aspect of this new order of discourse is clear: the computer will play the role of l'entremetteur for this transformation of discourse after postmodernism. My goal here is to outline the shape of this final transformation of postmodernism.

Governing Chaos: Postmodern Science, Information Technology and Educational Administration

(1993). Governing Chaos: Postmodern Science, Information Technology and Educational Administration. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 79-103.

The Post-Modern Reader

Preface. Charles Jencks: Post-Modernism - The Ism that Returns. Part 1 Defining the Post-Modern. Charles Jencks: What Then Is Post-Modernism? Jean-Francois Lyotard: Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism? Andreas Huyssen: Mapping the Postmodern. Margaret A Rose: Defining the Post-Modern. Part 2 Literature and Architecture. John Barth: The Literature of Replenishment. Umberto Eco: The Postscript to The Name of the Rose: Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable. Linda Hutcheon: Theorising the Postmodern: Towards a Poetics. Ihab Hassan: From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: Pillars and Posts: Foundations and Future of Post-Modernism. Jane Jacobs: The Kind of Problem a City Is. Robert Venturi: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Charles Jencks: The Language of Post-Modern and the Complexity Paradigm. Paolo Portoghesi: What Is the Postmodern? Part 3 Sociology, Economics, Feminism, Science. Zygmunt Bauman: Is There a Postmodern Sociology? David Harvey: The Condition of Postmodernity. Robin Murray: Fordism and Post-Fordism. Anatole Kaletsky: 9/15 - The Birthpangs of Post-Modern Economics? Susan Rubin Seleiman: Feminism and Postmodernism: A Question of Politics. Craig Owens: The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism. Tito Arecchi: Chaos and Complexity. John Gray: Evangelical Atheism, Secular Christianity. David Ray Griffin: The Reenchantment of Science. David Bohm: Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World. Charles Birch: The Postmodern Challenge to Biology. Edward Goldsmith: Gaia and Evolution. Index.

Chaos and social change: Metaphysics of the postmodern

In this article, findings of chaos theory are explained and extrapolated to social dynamics. Henceforth all social theory must be change theory. Chaos findings demonstrate that natural systems are fractal in their ontology and nonlinear in their dynamics; that bifurcations cascade to transform dynamic states; that near-to-stable dynamics are possible given specific interactions between members of a set. Chaos findings decenter all claims of perfection, finality, normality or historical necessity and thus provides an elegant theoretical envelop in which to locate postmodern science and politics. In social terms, near-to-stable systems embodying the ethics and aesthetics of a praxis society are possible if destabilizing bifurcations in wealth, power and status are avoided. The postmodern quest in emancipatory social science is a search for those attractors which produce an infinite number of near-to-stable iterations of social dynamics congenial to praxis.

Chaos and entropy: Metaphors in postmodern science and social theory

(1991). Chaos and entropy: Metaphors in postmodern science and social theory. Science as Culture: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 188-226.

PANIC USA: Hypermodernism as America's Postmodernism

This is a series of meditations on panic as the dominant mood of postmodern culture at the fin-de-millenium. As technological imperatives of postmodern science merge with the social demands of popular culture, ours is an age of both deep anxiety and giddy euphoria. Vibrating between poles of despair and ecstasy, the central tendencies of postmodernity may be characterized as a catastrophic implosion of the languages of modern power into a dense and high speed oscillation between meaning and meaninglessness, control and chaos, increased centralization and an orbital spin into abstract and disembodied codes of information. Indeed, central to the human situation of the late twentieth century is the profound paradox of ultramodern technologies as simultaneously a prison house and a pleasure palace. We now live with the great secret and equally great anxiety that the technological experience is both Orwellian and hopelessly Utopian. But at the cost of whose bodies is this panicky secret kept for what parasitical profit? We probe some key sites of postmodern panic and trace the political, economic, and sexual effects of this panic scene on those it envelops. Thus: panic ideology; panic (shopping) malls, panic suburbs, panic TV, panic urine, and panic USA.

Getting in touch: The metamethodology of a postmodern science of mental life.

Abstract In the past, much of modern science has been conducted from within a ‘mechanistic’ world view: the view 1) that ‘objective’ reality exists absolutely and apart from ind; 2) that the relations between all its parts are orderly, mechanical, causal, and necessary; and 3) that, because of its essentially passive nature, it can only be investigated by a one‐sided use of input‐output, cause and effect methods — in which observation is the main way in which data is gathered. But currently, there is a transition afoot, a movement from modern to postmodern science, a movement which, among its many other features, accepts both a much more ‘chaotic’ view of reality, or realities, as well as their ‘made’ nature. Central among the many other changes the movement involves, is a shift from the standpoint of the detached, theory‐testing onlooker, to the involved, interested, interpretative, procedure/testing, critical participant; associated with a shift from a one‐sided process of investigation (in which only i...

Disintegrating the House that Objectivity Built: Consensual Domain, Irreversibility and Symmetry‐Breaking Interventions

This paper considers a difficult clinical problem, namely chronicity or recidivism, and examines the appearance of the phenomenon in a number of clinical vignettes. From the vantage point of a clinical introduction, it will be argued that chronicity is an epistemological problem in that it arises from a belief in the clinical value of ‘objectivity’. It will be suggested that ‘objectivity’ is an insufficient concept for dealing with the recursive complexities of clinical practice, and that its application to clinical issues leads both to fragmentation and timelessness. Drawing on the concepts of post modern science, ‘consensual domain’ and ‘irreversibility’ are put forward as more appropriate principles for orienting practice, and the development of ‘symmetry‐breaking interventions' is advanced as a useful therapeutic strategy in addressing situations where chronicity has taken hold.

Reviews

Books reviewed in this article: Cry of the Environment: Rebuilding the Christian Creation Tradition. Edited by Philip N. Joransonand Ken Butigan. The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature. By Stephen Toulmin. The New Story of Science: Mind and the Universe. By Robert M. Augrosand George N. Stanciu. The Theology of Grace and the American Mind: A Representation of Catholic Doctrine. By Daniel Liderbach. The Human Animal. By Phil Donahue. Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Religion. Edited by Frank Whaling.