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Um, maybe because QM is science, and science uses a systematic methodology to make predictions, and they're right or wrong, and the reasoning behind them is either sound or flawed? Is that it, maybe?

I mean, what in hell does it mean for a scientific discipline to be "postmodern?" I'm not up on the Madsens, but...yeah, wikipediaing madsen...lots of them...googling with "postmodern"...finding wayne and rebecca...wikiing again...finding a member of the 9/11 truth movement...looking at the blog of Wayne and Rebecca again...finding posts about postmodernism...googling specific quote...only one hit, from a critique paper on the NYU website. Yeah, I give up on isolating the source of that. No background reading for me.

Well, OK, taking a stab at it: science is not about absolute truth as such, it is about predictive models. The philosophic underpinning of science shouldn't be, isn't, postmodernism or nihilism or anything but the search for predictive models. In many cases, models which posit an absolute truth like a universal simultaneous time are successfully predictive, and they are good. In other cases, like quantum events which appear to be probabilistic, models which do not are much better. But the criterion by which we decide which model is better isn't some philosophical precommitment, it's predictive power.

For a philosopher to come along and claim a theory as somehow consistent with, supportive of, influenced by, or a product of, a philosophical idea or movement, is more than a bit silly.

So science must qualify as "postmodern" to be good, or useful? Thanks a lot, I'm sure all the deterministic, truth-modeling sciences will love to hear that arrogant philosophers bred on the excesses of wealth their models created are bashing them based on nonconformance with their philosophical ideas. Reality is so passe; time for postmodern science.

We should be especially wary of letting philosophical precommitment commentary on science slip through. Soon it's religious or political precommitment commentary, then arm-twisting, then book burning. I know, it's histrionic, but how far does this go? At what point do you stand up and say "no, this theory is good, because it's right, and your philosophical problems with it are insubstantive; grow up?" And when you do, who knocks on your door the next morning? Science and enlightenment hang by threads all the time, and we could lose them. History can make one paranoid.

That may be the most alarmist thing I've ever written and posted on the internet. I'll read it over in a bit, and decide what of it I want to support and defend. In the meantime, your homes and labs are probably safe, and I shouldn't post when hopped up on a 2-hour physics final and 12 hours of room cleaning and tidying and packing and logistics, supported by movie scores.

Don't worry, Ari. It's not nearly as bad as the postmodern feminist critique of mathematics. Apparently the true-false "dichotomy" in mathematics is a social construct, and postmodern criticism has demonstrated that this dichotomy is epistemologically fallacious.

Someone in my house has almost convinced me to take this class that spends a significant chunk of time studying postmodernism.

I'll leave aside the idea that logic is a social construct. No refutation needed.

Adam, you never told me they're here (well, really there, for the next month!) at UChicago. That's actually pretty distressing; where did they come from and why haven't they inherited, borrowed, or synthesized some sense? Also, could someone please remind me again why I didn't go to CalTech?

Oh, right, the weather.

Ari.

It's okay; even the people who are majoring in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities (the department in which the course is listed), don't take it seriously from what I've heard. It is an unfortunate fact that all comprehensive institutions of higher learning are probably contaminated by at least a speck of postmodernism.