I’ve just returned from a discussion held by the UWA Christian Union on ‘Dawkins v God’. It was enjoyable, and I thought the speaker’s characterisation of Dawkins was pretty fair. The usual old canards came out though. Dawkins is a fundamentalist. Hitler and Stalin were atheists, so atheism kills people. Science and religion don’t necessarily conflict (but then why the hell do they always reach opposite conclusions?). And as a bonus, Dawkins was wrong because the speaker didn’t like his vision of morality. Pretty thin stuff.
There was one special area where the speaker had some real trouble: Is god empirical or not? During the presentation, the speaker made two contradictory claims:
- God can’t be examined empirically because… well… he doesn’t want to be, for some reason. Sort of like UFOs, he only comes out when no one’s around.
- Despite the inability to examine god empirically, the empirical evidence for god’s existence is very strong.
So which is it? In fact, this argument lets the believer have it both ways; you can grab onto evidence that looks promising, but you’re covered when there’s none.
The empirical evidence for god is not strong. Prayer studies come up consistently empty, evolution is a better explanation than creation, and anecdotes about finding keys just aren’t empirical data. The speaker was leaning pretty heavily on the ‘historicity of the New Testament’, but even if the writers did write it just as it appears (which is what Mark Twain would have called a ‘stretcher’), it just means they wrote it, and not that it’s true.
My question, which never really got answered, was this: If you can’t use empiricism or science to study god, what are you going to use? How are you going to make sure that your evidence for god isn’t just whatever you want to see?
4 September 2007 at 2:53 pm
I read an interesting journal article the other day about the effects of intercessory prayer on a group of patients admitted to the coronary care unit. This study found that, based on a scoring system they developed to measure the severity of medical complications, patients receiving prayer had fewer overall complications than those who did not.
I was pleased that the experimenters mentioned that they did not prove that God listens to prayers, or even that God exists, but that they were only reporting on a phenomena they had observed.
It did make me wonder, however, what would be the atheistic response if intercessory prayer was found to have a significant and reproducible effect. An acceptance that it may constitute evidence for the existence of the supernatural? Or claims that it is simply the effect of some natural, though undiscovered, phenomenon?
– A charming and gracious student
P.S. Don’t worry, you’re not crusty.
Harris, W.S., et al. (1999). ‘A randomized, controlled trial of the effects of remote, intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients admitted to the coronary care unit.’ ARCHIVES OF INTERNAL MEDICINE 159(19).
5 September 2007 at 2:58 am
Interestingly enough, I came across something through my recent studies in a statistics/probability class. There was this guy called Bayes who came up with a probability theorem. Oh yes, it’s quite helpful, and it’s all fun and mathematical, but I was more intrigued with WHY he came up with it versus the actual equation itself. His design was to calculate the probability of God’s existence (I assume the Christian one – Bayes was British if I recall correctly, and they liked that sort of thing). This has got to be one of the smartest ways to approach this age old question (regardless of the outcome). Take your tools, and apply science and reason to draw a conclusion.
Another interesting aspect to this was that he wasn’t trying to get to a yes or no answer (like the scenario where everything in Algebra equals 0 or 1 – how annoying) – he was trying to calculate the PROBABILITY, which of course varies (usually on who you ask!). Bayes seemed to want to check the odds of God’s existence, see if things were favourable or not.
To remove math from this, I was caught up in a recent BBC marathon viewing of Doctor Who (which meant any work I really needed to do got shunted to the side as I devotedly sat in front of the television while my mind got sucked in), and there was a episode about drilling an impossible planet. At the end of the drilling, they discovered the corporeal existing of Satan. The Doctor killed the physical existence (of course – go Doctor), but Satan existed through idea. The Tardisode illustrated that you can kill the physical, but an idea, well, that’s much tougher to squelch. I found this to be very interesting, and it showed the power of the human mind. Of course God exists – people believe him to do so. Just as all the other flavours of gods, past and present, have and will do. They exist/ed mentally; therefore they exist/ed.
Gotta love Doctor Who. 🙂
5 September 2007 at 3:37 am
The response from this atheist would be “Whoopdee-doo! Yippee-skippee!” followed by a little dance. Because I would love it.
But not so fast. For a scientific test to be valid, it has to be reproducible. If it worked two or three times, I’d say something was happening.
But other studies have found nothing. Note this test. People who didn’t know they were being prayed for didn’t get better, and people who knew they were being prayed for had significantly more complications.
So now I’m thinking about that speaker’s talk yesterday. He was saying that god doesn’t show up on these tests because he doesn’t want to. So even if it kills people, he won’t bless and heal them if scientists are watching. Doesn’t sound like anyone I’d like to worship. Maybe I’m wrong about wishing it all were true.
5 September 2007 at 5:09 am
Susan: My linguisitcs professor John Robertson was fond of the distinction between what is real and what exists. He said that Santa Claus is real because it’s a concept in people’s minds and you have to deal with it. But Santa Claus doesn’t exist.
You reminded me of his lectures just then
5 September 2007 at 11:31 pm
I agree, Daniel. The greatest reason for me not to be interested in God as presented by Christians is the utter callousness inherent in that presentation. Personally I quite like that Jesus guy, but then he was a human and therefore capable of compassion due (probably) to the old mirror neurons.
5 September 2007 at 11:34 pm
“He said that Santa Claus is real because it’s a concept in people’s minds”
Don’t ever let me catch you dissing post-modernists again! Rorty and Derrida would be proud of you.
5 September 2007 at 11:57 pm
Now, now! Postmodernism is still crap.
When he said ‘real’, he didn’t mean to imply any actual physical reality. He meant psychological reality.
But then again he thought that if you believed something hard enough, it could change the physical world somehow. So maybe he would have been open to the post-modern view, however much he railed against it.
6 September 2007 at 1:59 am
The reality/existence argument is currently my get-out-of-jail free card for explaining my position on God with my wife.
At times it seems like Christians are so eager to throw away the Old testament and reconnoitre at the New as if it itself was not predicated on previous writings.They get hung up on this assumption that there was such a thing as journalistic integrity back then.
If people really thought that atheism was so dangerous to mankind, wouldn’t they demand people like Dawkins and Onfray be wheeled into speaking engagments in a Hannibal Lechter contraption? Do people honestly still think Hitler was an atheist? These people need to get their history from someone other than Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich.
6 September 2007 at 9:17 pm
Daniel, postmodernism is a broad set of ideas but I know of no postmodernists who claim that to ‘speak’ of something makes it real in the physical world. That is a gross misreading of postmodernism. Most scientific thinkers are far more postmodern than they realise but some of the extremes of postmodernism have been seized upon by the scientific community and portrayed as though that’s *it*. Much like non-scientists point at the atom bomb and claim that all scientists are amoral monsters. Postmodern thinking is perfectly rigorous in it’s critical analysis, it’s just in a different level to science.
7 September 2007 at 3:57 am
Sorry — I thought that was one of your implications.
I’m happy to discuss post-modernism if someone can explain it (even with a link) in a way that a reasonably intelligent person can understand it. In particular, I’d like to know what specific claims it advances.
I’ve found that’s a big ask though because pomo is very poorly defined. I actually wonder if anyone can really do anything with it.
I would track down my old books about it, but I think they’re in the box at my Mom’s, along with my Girbaud jeans and my Jesus Jones CD.
7 September 2007 at 10:47 pm
Obviously it’s a bit too big a subject for a comments box but there is a lot of good critical thinking going on in some strands of pomo. It’s a bit like Newtonian and quantum mechanics. They are apparently contradictory but both work because they’re operating in different realms. Scientists get upset because in the 20th century positivism was supposed to the big hope for answering all questions. It hasn’t quite worked out that way especially in the human sciences. But that doesn’t mean that postmodernism (or post structuralism as I prefer) is all about reverting to some wishy washy new age nonsense.
This is quite a good page:
http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/poststruct.html
Basically as a poststructuralist I would suggest that you have uncritically replaced one essentialist faith (God) with another (science). This isn’t to say that science isn’t extremely *useful* as a way of describing and making use of aspects of the world. I am not anti-science. But science is not the Truth. It works for predictable, logical systems, but for dynamic unpredictable systems (like humans) it is notoriously useless in the same way that Newton is not helpful for understanding the behaviour of atomic particles. So a different sort of thinking/analysis/practice is necessary and postmodernists are in the process of putting forward methods to do that. Some are a ineffective and some are downright barmy but many are very useful but they are new and therefore easy to dismiss just like physicists dismissed atomic physics – Bolzheim killed himself over the ridicule he endured when only a year later Einstein published a paper that proved him right.
And it’s not easy stuff, it’s hard to get to grips with. It’s certainly not the sloppy thinking of new agers.
10 September 2007 at 4:12 am
Your comparison of post-structuralism to quantum physics is somewhat apt: both are poorly understood, and both have been used by unscrupulous charlatans with shaky commitment to truth in order to fleece the fluffy-headed. Beyond that, the comparison breaks down. Quantum physics (which I don’t understand) puts forth testable hypotheses that have been stunningly and repeatedly confirmed by actual observations. I don’t see even one testable hypothesis offered by post-structuralism.
I think you’re quite correct that science doesn’t show us immutable truth; that’s why scientific theories are always up for review when new evidence comes. But you seem to say that when it comes to people, science fails. This is untrue; we can examine human behaviour and make guesses about why people do the things they do, and test these guesses experimentally. Science works fine. How precisely does post-structuralism improve on the scientific method?
I did read the page you suggested, and it was surprisingly clear. The biggest problem comes early: challenging the essentialist assumption. As the page says, essentialism posits that there’s a reality out there that exists, independent of thought, language, or ideology. This is the cornerstone of the scientific method, and it’s one of the key things that post-structuralism challenges.
I confess I was disappointed to see you referring to science as an ‘essentialist faith’. It made me wonder if perhaps you harbour some misunderstandings about science. Science is not a faith. It works whether you believe in it or not, and if you don’t believe someone’s conclusions, you can examine their data and replicate their experiment yourself. No faith required.
Yes, the essentialist assumption is an assumption, but it’s a good assumption because reality acts as if it’s out there. If I drop a ball 100 times, it will fall 100 times (unless there’s some other force acting on it, which I can also understand using the scientific method). Someone else with a different language or ideology will also have the same thing happen. This may be a basic example, but it just wouldn’t happen if the essentialist assumption were false. Scientific inquiry would be impossible. And since scientific inquiry seems to work, I’m going to require some pretty strong evidence to overturn essentialism. So help me here: Can you name me even one piece of evidence that would overturn essentialism? In what way is reality not ‘out there’?
I hope you don’t think I’m being horrible here; I’m asking some very pointed questions of you because I think you can take it, I want to understand your view, and I secretly don’t think post-structuralism can do anything helpful. But as always, I’d love to be wrong.
10 September 2007 at 9:54 pm
That’s ok – you aren’t being horrible at all. The ‘essentialist’ stance in science is outdated – even Galilleo refuted that science can tell us anything about essences. (I can give you a reference to this if you need one) It describes the physical world very well – enough for us to do amazing things like send spacecraft to other planets.
The problem with essentialist science is that it is too often science done by non-scientists. If you ask a physicist ‘is there such a thing as gravity’ they will not say ‘yes’, they will say ‘not exactly, it’s just a way that we describe an observable effect’. This is what post-structuralists would say too – humans would not be able to utilise gravity if they had not been able to describe it. With science all that happens is more and more sophisticated descriptions. There is undoubtedly something ‘out there’ – I am not disputing that, what I am disputing is that outside of human experience, it is not essentially extant – we experience only through language even if that language is ‘ouch that hurt’.
Ok you ask what use is it. Let’s take the case of psychiatry, one of the great pseudo-sciences, second only to psychology. They offer us a human being as full of unconscious inner drives, neuroses, personality traits, mental illnesses etc. Everything is situated within the person as though we could look inside them in the way we can with material objects. However, you only need to scratch the surface to realise that it all starts falling apart quite rapidly when you contest some of the premises upon which these structures are based. It is in this sense that we can talk about ‘post-structuralism’.
Once we contest the received wisdom about people we can create new descriptions that are much more useful. One such example is the medical versus the social model of disability. The latter has been so much better at describing disability that it has been adopted by the World Health Organisation for their new Classification system. (ICF, instead of ICD). This wouldn’t have happened without post-modernity. Modernity likes to think everything is fixed and nailed down. As I said before this works ok in the Newtonian world but not in worlds with unpredictability. So being able to describe disability outside of the medical discourse has created enormous changes in the access and rights of disabled people. I think that’s pretty significant.
You said “This is untrue; we can examine human behaviour and make guesses about why people do the things they do, and test these guesses experimentally. Science works fine.”
No, I’m sorry it doesn’t work fine. Such experiments rarely fall outside of best guesses and into the level of certainty and reproducibility of material science. The notion of ‘statistical significance’ is a way of indicating that it isn’t actually precise. There are always exceptions in a way that doesn’t happen in material science except these are glossed over by applying the label of ‘science’ to them – it is in this sense that I would say people have ‘faith’ in science. Just because it works with chemistry doesn’t mean anything called ‘science’ always works.
Your unquestioning belief in science as always applicable is actually quite typical of those who are post-religious. In fact I could do a ‘scientific’ study to prove that 😉 You want certainty – first in God and now in science. You want to believe there are essences and that we can know.
The problem with science is that it’s actually quite uncritical – it rarely considers power, historical and cultural contexts or social influences. That may not matter in a high school classroom when doing a chemistry experiment but there are many areas of human experience where it is the difference between life and death.
12 September 2007 at 10:43 pm
I found an article by Gergen that critiques social psychology from a social constructionist stance and addresses the limitations of empirical research. If you can be bothered it explains more succinctly what postmodernism might be good for!
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/kgergen1/web/page.phtml?id=manu1&st=manuscripts&hf=1
13 September 2007 at 8:20 am
You know, I’d be happy to let it slide if you’d said something like “Post-whatever-ism is interesting, has some good ideas, and we can use it to do stuff.” I might agree or not, but no big deal. But here you’re saying that post-structuralism represents some system of knowledge that actually overcomes difficulties in the scientific method, or even worse, stands apart from science as some other way to validate ideas, perhaps in non-material areas where science doesn’t work. What that tells me is that your discipline doesn’t know its own limitations, because those claims are not at all well-founded.
Before I get into it though, let’s list some areas where we’d both agree.
– We’d both agree that there is a world outside of our perception where things happen. As you say: there is undoubtedly something ‘out there’. Congratulations, by the way — you’re an essentialist.
– The scientific method is good at examining things in the physical world.
Lucky for us we live in one.
– Often we can’t say what’s so with absolute certainty, and we need to describe what’s happening probabilistically.
In fact, probabilistic descriptions are a well-accepted part of science. I’ve often used Bayesian networks in my research.
– Human language is going to have some kind of effect on our perception.
Although as a linguist, I have noticed that people tend to overestimate the influence that language has on thought.
– Finding regular patterns in the mental states of individuals is going to have to be handled a little more carefully than for inanimate objects.
I think where we diverge is in the reality of the outside world and the utility of empiricism.
There’s nothing in anything you’ve written or linked to that suggests that postmodernism corrects any perceived failures of the scientific method. Let’s look at the example you mentioned: the medical model of disability. It was a model, and it got superceded by a better model. Fine. That happens all the time in science. That’s actually a good thing. You’re saying the new model was suggested by something in postmodern theory? That’s fine, too. You can get a hypothesis from lots of places. I get hypotheses from horoscopes sometimes. But at some point the rubber has to meet the road. You have to test your ideas to see if they’re any good. How are you going to evaluate which model works better? You can go with the scientific method, in which you’d use observable facts, or else you’d use… what exactly? Intuitions? That will invariably do a worse job of modeling reality than empiricism. Or do we say, ‘well, this can’t really be studied empirically?’ In which case, I’d say maybe you’re right, but anything else you’d use will do a worse job.
I mean, what am I supposed to do with this:
If you ask a physicist ‘is there such a thing as gravity’ they will not say ‘yes’, they will say ‘not exactly, it’s just a way that we describe an observable effect’.
Well, yes, that sounds about right. I’ve noticed that the closer I come to understanding something, the weirder it gets. But let’s keep going:
This is what post-structuralists would say too – humans would not be able to utilise gravity if they had not been able to describe it.
Is this testable? Are you saying things fell up before language? Or are you getting gravity confused with the theory of gravitation? How can I verify this if I’m not sure? How am I supposed to anything with this?
I think the weakness is your approach is captured by this paragraph:
No, I’m sorry it [science] doesn’t work fine. Such experiments rarely fall outside of best guesses and into the level of certainty and reproducibility of material science.
Well, I have news for you; that’s the way it goes. If you don’t like what empirical observation shows you, you’re not justified in going beyond it. What that is called is: making shit up. If your experiments don’t show that something’s happening, you need to run the experiment again, design a different experiment, or accept that maybe the thing you’re looking for isn’t happening. Or you can go non-empirical, in which case you’re doing pin-balanced angel counting.
In this light, it’s ironic you should say I’m the one who craves certainty. I’m happy to leave it uncertain until evidence comes, and not to go beyond the data. The only one here who’s trying to get more certainty than the facts would warrant is you.
Your unquestioning belief in science as always applicable is actually quite typical of those who are post-religious. In fact I could do a ‘scientific’ study to prove that 😉
Not if you’re correct, you can’t. If reality doesn’t exist outside of language and ideology, if there’s no essential ‘out there’ out there, then science shouldn’t work on any level, even the most basically material. The fact that it does should tell you something.
So I’ll ask you the same question I asked that pastor all that thread ago: if we can’t use empiricism to understand [god / reality], what are you going to use? How will you know if an idea is good? Is reality random? in which case, how do you explain times when it’s reproducibly orderly?
I’m interested in the reaction by other readers. Is one of us up in the night? Or has everyone abandoned the thread?
PS: I did read the Gergen article. People really did have high hopes for psychology, didn’t they? But things do have a habit of turning out to be discouragingly complex. It’s too bad that people then blame the scientific method for the difficulty of the discipline. In fact, even Gergen doesn’t advocate abandoning empiricism, as you seem to. BTW, I don’t think it’s justified to call psychology a ‘pseudoscience’; there are some demonstrably regular tendencies in human behaviour, especially in the aggregate. If it weren’t so, no one would be able to replicate experimental results. In fact they can. How do you explain this?
13 September 2007 at 11:00 am
Well, I may be biased as a psychology student, but I disagree with snowqueen’s description of psychology as a pseudoscience. The Freudian psychiatry that you seem to be discussing has been largely discredited by modern psychology and scientific findings. So really, this straw-man has already been knocked down by science.
Snowqueen, you also claim that science is quite uncritical and it rarely considers power, historical and cultural contexts or social influences. I think this depends on which branch of science you are looking at. If you are considering something like chemistry or physics, then you are correct that it ignores cultural contexts and the like. But I don’t think that a failure to examine irrelevant contexts equates to being uncritical. On the other hand, a science like psychology or linguistics will almost undoubtedly take into account historical, cultural, and social influences.
I think post-structuralism can, however, be useful in areas where science has trouble. There is most certainly something “out there”, independent of human thought or ideology. But there are also concepts that do not exist independent of humans. Take for example the concept of beauty. Science can examine the ways people conceive of beauty, how they respond to beauty, perhaps even the evolutionary basis of ideas of beauty. But it cannot provide an essentialist description of what is beautiful. Perhaps this is where the subjects of post-structuralism take hold.
From what brief description I have read, post-structuralism seems not to contest science, but complement it. I think post-structuralism is better off being referred to as a world-view than a theory.
I really hope that made sense…
13 September 2007 at 10:47 pm
Daniel and Stephanie (hi!) I’m obviously not making what I’m trying to say particularly clear because you still seem to think that I’m proposing that post-modernism is a) anti-scientific, b) an alternative to science. I’m not saying either of those things. The example of the the medical and social models of disability is a useful example. The way you describe it, Daniel, is that the social model is a better model than the medical model because of some kind of testable hypothesis that means that one has superseded the other. This isn’t the case. Both are still equally valid per se, but in pragmatic terms, the social model is gaining favour because of shifting social contexts. And yes, I am saying that postmodernism had a part to play. The modernist view of medicine was that it was an absolute science, able to decide ‘truth’ about the body. Medicine had the power to say ‘you are disabled because you have no legs, you need our care and charity to survive’ This was largely uncontested until swathes of Vietnam vets started to say ‘hang on a minute, we might have no legs and use wheelchairs to get around but if you just made the environment more accessible and stopped treating us as subhuman, we could lead equally productive and successful lives as able-bodied people’. This happened in the context of the Rights movements such as Feminism, anti-Racism etc which are all characterised by a challenge to existing structures and practices by examining propositions, not by examining scientific hypotheses. The apparently real ‘stuctures’ of society were challenged. People really did believe that women were inferior and black people were stupid. The reason perhaps that you are confusing this is because post-modernism is not devoid of logical method just because it isn’t scientific.
Post-modernism isn’t a replacement for science like the I-Ching or some other primitive system. It isn’t really a theory although within the postmodernist movement there are some theories like social constructionism, for example. Instead it is a general movement towards problematising knowledge, I would suggest liberating it from limiting structures. There’s an interesting article in last month’s Edge about the theory of evolution being only a phase in our understanding of the development of humans. In a structuralist world that is unthinkable!
I think we have a different understanding of ‘essentialist’ which might be causing some confusion. You say because I accept there is something ‘out there’ that I am an essentialist. This is not the case. While I can observe and describe (and utilise) what is out there, I would not claim to be able to say I knew what its essence was through that process. That is what Galilleo realised. It’s why atomic physics is so disturbing.
So my comment about gravity does not of course mean that I think things fell up before humans described it! That would be ridiculous. But think about why gravity can be utilised even though we didn’t know what it *essentially* is (there are some interesting theories around now but Newton didn’t know them). Newton didn’t ‘discover’ gravity, he observed something and developed a language that has been incredibly useful in utilising it. It’s actually much more brilliant thtan discovering something, it’s using the human mind in a creative way. There are probably tons of forces of which we are totally oblivious but are significant to other organisms if only they had the creativity to describe them using vocabulary that made them usable. Maths is a stunningly creative language. But it isn’t describing some ‘truth’ out there, it describes reality in the human realm. It is our truth, we constructed it. And because of that it works damn well for us.
Stephanie, as a psychology student I do not wish to dent your enthusiasm, however I can assure you that most psychiatry consists of diagnosis (on the basis of extremely dubious aetiology) and treatment by prescription medication which causes a multitude of iatrogenic problems. Therapies such as CBT still present individualised notions of illness, deviations from an ideal state, mental and emotional structures for which there is little evidence and so on, which of course require the treatment by experts. Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting that talk therapy isn’t helpful – just that it probably works despite all the theories rather than because of them.
I call it a pseudoscience because I don’t believe something is a science just because of the methods it uses. My favourite quote on this subject comes from Frances Bacon in the Novum Organum (credited as the founder of the scientific method):
“I foresee that if ever men are roused by my admonitions to betake themselves seriously to experiment and bid farewell to sophistical doctrines, then indeed through the premature hurry of the understanding to leap or fly to universals and principles of things, great danger may be apprehended from philosophies of this kind, against which evil we ought even now to prepare.”
14 September 2007 at 1:46 am
Ok, I think I’m starting to better understand what you’re talking about. Post-structuralism isn’t about rejecting science, it’s more about recognising that using scientific structures aren’t always the most appropriate or most helpful way of dealing with something, eg. disability. Have I kind of got the idea? Maybe?
We haven’t really covered much in psychology about psychiatry yet, so I’m just hoping it’s not as bad as that! Although judging by the ridiculous number of children being put on ADD and ADHD medication, you’re probably not wrong. Personally, I’m more interested in the research side of psychology than the problem/treatment side, so don’t worry about denting my enthusiasm. 🙂
15 September 2007 at 10:42 am
Yes, you’re getting there. But the bit that is important is that scientific structures aren’t always the most appropriate or most helpful way of *describing* something. In order to treat illness medicine describes the body and the person in particular ways. These are linked to the way the body is understood through science – as a machine with working parts (at its crudest, but to an extent this is still the case). The medical model is about fixing things that go wrong (by fixing (mending, joining) or taking things away (eg infected appendix) or adding things (eg pacemaker). And most of the time this works, the description is useful. Because of the privilege of describing the body accorded to medicine, disability (characterised by impairments to the body) naturally fell into this domain. Thus the practices (care, separation) and structures (charities, institutions) arose out the medical descriptions of the body. (this is what social constructionists call ‘discursive practices’). The social model describes disability differently because it is not using the scientific discourse. Its description goes something like this: There are people whose bodies are impaired (some might say ‘different’) who are disabled by the lack of equal access to the structures (e.g. buildings) and practices (e.g. work) of society. This is a *description* that focuses on a systemic model of the individual in society.
Now if you look again at the Bacon quote in my previous post, you can see that the generalising of medicine across into disability was a little hasty, lacking, one might say, in wisdom (sophistical doctrines). It’s understandable if you look at the historical, social and cultural context. At the time, society was modernist, science was seen to provide answers for everything, all humanity’s problems would be solved etc etc. Science sent men to the moon, but it isn’t the universal panacea. Humans still need to think critically, even about science. Even science is open to scrutiny, the knowledge can (and must) be contested in certain contexts – it cannot be above critique or it becomes a monster. Postmodern methods of critique are one way of doing that. Any powerful system must be viewed critically. Patriarchy, white supremacy, religion, science are all very powerful systems with their own discursive practices.
So theories like social constructionism are not alternatives to science, they are methods of critique. So if you are interested in an alternative to the psychiatry I described then I suggest you check out the critical psychiatry group (of psychiatrists) for example:
http://www.critpsynet.freeuk.com/