Kollege Philip Stott schreibt heute über die postmoderne Zerstörung des wissenschaftlichen Meinungsmonopols. Ich bin freilich mehr als skeptisch gegenüber Philips Idee, gegen den postmodernen Wissenschaftsbetrieb helfe nur, die sprachlichen Waffen des Postmodernismus selbst einzusetzen:

At last, just as he is about to retire and to be replaced by John Beddington, a biologist at Imperial College London, the UK government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, appears to have grasped the fundamental challenge for science in a postmodern/pre-modern world:  ‘Chief scientist attacks health reporting by Today and Daily Mail’ (The Guardian, December 6):

“The government’s chief scientific adviser criticised the BBC’s Today programme and the Daily Mail yesterday over what he called their ‘campaigns’ against GM food and the MMR vaccine. Sir David King said Britain’s failure to adopt GM crops had cost the economy between £2bn and £4bn and that falling measles vaccination rates as a result of negative publicity about MMR would lead to between 50 and 100 child deaths.

He singled out Today’s lead presenter, John Humphrys, over the current affairs programme’s editorial line on GM, saying: ‘What a massive shot in the foot that was for the UK economy.’ Humphrys is known for his enthusiasm for organic farming.”

This is something I have been pointing out for over fifteen years, and it was brilliantly predicted by Jean-François Lyotard in his seminal work, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge [La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, 1979: English trans., 1984]. Lyotard draws a clear distinction between the language games of an idealised formal science and the language games of narrative knowledge on which social relationships are based. For legitimation, Lyotard argues, formal scientific knowledge requires that one language game - one system of ‘denotation’ or signification - be retained and all others excluded. A scientific statement’s truth-value within the language game of science is the only criterion determining its acceptability. The relationship between the sender, referent and addressee depends on what the nineteenth century called ‘verification’ and the twentieth century ‘falsification’ within, that is, the limits of the formal science language game. The process is seen as producing a ‘consensus’, although not every ‘consensus ‘is ultimately regarded as a sign of truth by those not involved in the original language game, nor by the all powerful social bond.

[...] Science can no longer function in a vacuum and legitimise itself. Indeed, it is questionable whether this was ever the case. The fight for ‘truth’ involves, above all, the use of language, of words of power (Lacan’s famous points de capiton), and, unless science can counter the power of a postmodernist neologism like ‘Frankenfood’, it cannot win the debates in a post-modern world. 

Science has to learn that science no longer controls the debate, and that ‘truth’ will not be legitimised by science alone.

Moreover, this works both ways. The grand narrative of ‘global warming’ has sucked in, and garnered in, scientists through its unquestioned power. The best defence against the ‘global warming’ grand narrative has accordingly itself to be postmodern in character, namely: political; economic; myth-making; but, above all, about alternative languages, about competing words of power. Scientific argument alone will not suffice to overthrow the social bond. We must create an alternative social bond, one that is just as powerful, but for growth, for development, for the poor, for trade, for cautious science, and for optimism.

Language is everything. One mythical phrase employed by one clever media outlet can overthrow the whole edifice of science at the press of a computer key.

Hence this web site; hence why the BBC’s Environment Correspondent, Richard Black, was wrong when he argued (November 16) that we ‘sceptics’ should get back into the science in order to fight (“So that is point one of my plan; scientifically credible sceptics need to get back inside the institutions of science”).

In the postmodern world, the precise opposite is true. The battle ground is the social bond, not science. That is where I am fighting.

And, paradoxically, and perhaps amusingly, this is something that ‘global warming’ scientists are about to learn to their cost at Bali, where a different, but equally powerful grand narrative from the developing world, could well topple the ‘global warming’ grand narrative of a rich and ecochondriac North.

The battle of the narratives is well underway. As an academic, I shall observe it with fascination.
http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/iWeb/Global%20Warming%20Politics/A%20Hot%20Topic%20Blog/D6E30ABA-2A36-44CB-B8C2-EBCC6B722B39.html