You can disguise soldiers as press corp. You also can also compromise the position of medical workers turning them into combatants to surprise the enemy, when appropriate, as well as aid workers. How about religious figures — they could be used in Iraq and Afghanistan to penetrate the an occupied Mosque? Why not just disguise troops as ordinary citizens and ambush the enemy. Yup, take off the uniforms and fight without them. It’s a real advantage.

I personally think you have zero expectation of reporters in the described situation, to be other than reporters. If you get a hero, fine. It’s not up to you though.

What is odd about your comments about Lakatos (if one could call them comments, since as usual, you don’t actually talk about his ideas — and you haven’t talked about any ideas of any philosophers, in fact, in any of your comments thus far) is that Lakatos is, among the three big philosophers of science of the 20th century, the most conservative, which is why I specifically picked him as a potential point of departure for a discussion (which you are either unwilling or unable to have). I figured you would be most amenable to his views, though for some reason you seem to think Kuhn made the bigger contribution.

I’ve been reading philosophy since I was in high school — I first read both Lakatos and Kuhn then, over 25 years ago, and I’m always interested in having a substantive discussion about their ideas.

The reason I’m posting in this blog’s comments section is partly because I find Neo’s writing interesting, but also because I am trying to find a way to have a reasoned discussion across what is ordinarily an unbridgeable political gap between the two “sides”. Lakatos, it seems to me, is a reasonable starting point for a conversation as he made an intense effort to bridge between Popper’s straightforward model and Kuhn’s revolutionary model. I don’t know that he succeeded, but he at least tried to speak to both sides, unlike, for example, Feyerabend.

So, yes, if we’re going to be turning postmodernism into a punching bag, I do think it makes sense to try to bridge the gap by starting with a discussion of Lakatos “of all people”. I am presuming that you have read Lakatos and if so, I’d be happy to discuss that with you. It seems to me that the problems he poses to the interpretation of science are quite similar to the challenges offered by postmodern thinkers (though I will admit that postmodern thinkers do a worse job when talking about science in particular, since they don’t often fully understand it — but that is different from saying they have nothing worthwhile to say at all, particularly when they are discussing literary theory where they are far more in their element.)

Engaging in debate about the actual content of what people say is a “post-modernist game of obfuscation”? That’s an interesting viewpoint.

So far, Sally has made a bunch of assertions about various philosophers here, without actually referring to anything they actually said, even in general terms. If we’re going to be talking about philosophy in the comments thread of a blog — a very strange endeavor as it is — it seems to me that actually discussing what they’ve said is a lot more worthwhile than simply making value judgements without even referring to any content whatsoever.

I have to admit that I can’t really tell whether Sally is saying things based on an actual reading of the philosophers we’ve been talking about — she says, for example, that Lakatos’ contribution was “less” than Kuhn’s (I actually don’t necessarily disagree with this) but from what she says I have no idea why, since she makes no reference whatsoever to either Lakatos or Kuhn’s ideas in her posts.

In fact, I’m surprised that Sally would even admit that Kuhn’s ideas are worthwhile since his notions fly in the face of the conservative tendency to want to identify with fixed paradigms. I am in fact curious to find out what Sally’s basis is for her claims — has she studied philosophy? What has she read? What is she basing on hearsay?

>You simply sound, and I believe you are, philosophically
>naive, Mitsu, to put it bluntly.

“Philosophically naive” — that’s an amusing phrase coming from someone who, like Sokal, admits to having no understanding of a large number of philosophers we are supposedly discussing (presumably because there’s nothing to understand… yet as I’ve said before, I understand them quite well.)

If you want to get into a philosophical debate, believe me, I’m quite well-prepared to do so. Let’s stick to people you and I both agree DO have something to say, let’s say, Lakatos. What do you think of his attempt to salvage Popper’s notion of a criterion via his introduction of the idea of the research programme? And why do you think his approach is less of a contribution than Kuhn’s in _Structure of Scientific Revolutions?

Consider that the anti-war people call Iraq a quagmire (and would call Afghanistan a quagmire if they didn’t need something to prove their bogus creds). Every time something spectacular happens, the quagmire theme is reinforced.
“How can you call it a democracy when there are car bombings?” Simple. They have elections, but the anti-war people don’t want to admit that. So the more spectacular but objectively meaningless (except to the victims) actions get front-page treatment, the better for the anti-war types. Since the terrs can’t do anything substantial against US troops, and are increasingly having a hard time against Iraqi forces, the fuel the provide the anti-war types must be the slaughter of civilians.

The anti-war types know their position demands successful terr ops, and the only ones now available are slaughters of civilians. No biggie. The terrs know it, too. And cooperate.

The role of the journo here is not only the reporting of an incident, but the choice of his editors to publish and emphasize.

So the Kosanese encounter would be important in a war in which the US effort was, say, a thousand men, and not when the US effort was 100,000 men. But placed on the front page absent any similar stories about how the US is waxing the Kosanese asses for them wholesale–which is approximately the current reality–we have a genuine impact on the public perception which means on the outcome of the war.

In that case, and we cannot presume any journo is ignorant of the case, the journo is purposely doing something which will handicap the US’ efforts.

The ways in which I am claiming postmodernism is allied with science have to do with ideas of paradigms and paradigm shifts, a la Kuhn. That is to say, Kuhn brought up a number of problems with Popper’s idea of scientific progress, and proposed a different view, which is less clear-cut. Nevertheless, both Kuhn and postmodernists admit to an idea of scientific progress, simply not one which is defined in the sorts of simple, clear-cut terms of Popper (but which Kuhn, Lakatos, and others demonstrated cannot be correct).

As for relativity — it did represent A paradigm shift in physics (or two, if you count special and general relativity separately), but it is just a theory and not a meta-theory.