Why Richard Dawkins has post-modernism all wrong
I was chatting with Middlebrow today about the recent/ancient kerfufle about post-modernist thought, and I could tell I was losing him. "Ah oh! Here comes another disconnected rant!" I could hear him say, although he was more than cordial. I persisted, however. The reason that Dawkins doesn't get it is simple: he is misapplying post-modernism to science, much as he complains that post-modernists misapply science in their texts. I felt, however, that I had not properly explained my point and I did feel like some conspiracy theorist after my chat with Middlebrow. I've got a lot to deal with in this thesis, I realize, not the least of which is my ability to lose people in pointless rants, so with that I will attempt to be succinct: Dawkins creates a straw man argument with post-modernism because he is talking about the perception of the world vs. the post-modern notion of texts. Post-modernists talk of texts and only texts. Those texts represent a relationship to...