Now that’s funny. Made me do one of those loony blurts of laughter at the computer screen that solidify one’s feeling of creeping insanity. No but really, it is funny. The Guardian has a really exceptionally irritating smug knowing comment in a leader on our debt to Derrida. My point is not to quarrel with the late Derrida, whom I haven’t read; my point is to quarrel with this particular remark in this particular rather silly piece in the Guardian.

What was important was that deconstruction held that no text was above analysis or closed to alternative interpretation. It is no coincidence that it came into vogue in the 1960s and 1970s, when many cultural and social institutions were being

My colleague and I have been talking in an inconclusive back-and-forth way about the subject of certainty, the revisability of scientific claims, the difference between in principle and in reality or in practice or in fact, transcendence, labeling, rhetoric, the difference between what can be imagined and what is a live possibility. We’ll talk about it further in a couple of days (well, three) when we’ll be able to do it with the useful accompaniment and assistance of gestures, grimaces, thrown objects, slaps, pinches, what my brother always called as he administered it to me an ‘Indian rope burn’ but which must be called something else now but I don’t know what, table-thumping, brow slapping, eye rolling, hair tearing, and … Read the rest

Speaking of poetry – Norm has a poem by Sophie Hannah. It’s brilliant. I’d quote a bit but that would spoil the effect; read the whole thing.

Poetry rocks.… Read the rest

A little more Bloor for you, in case you’ve been missing him.

The law which is at work here appears to be this: those who are defending a society or a subsection of society from a perceived threat will tend to mystify its values and standards, including its knowledge…[T]he variable of perceived threat operating upon underlying social metaphors explains the differential tendency to treat knowledge as sacred and beyond the reach of scientific study.

This is interesting stuff, because what Bloor means by ‘beyond the reach of scientific study’ is ‘not considered amenable to substantive analysis by people who are not trained in the subject.’ That is, he is claiming (in great detail, e.g. via an extended comparison of Popper … Read the rest