"STEM, objectivity, rigour and replicability are not products of the West. Postmodernism and its latest incarnation 'Critical Social Justice,' however, are.

"It is absolutely essential that we make more people aware of this aspect of the 'Decolonise movement, in particular [i.e,, 'decolonising' science by 'problematising' rigour, objectivity and replicability]. 

    "I don’t think I have ever seen anything more imperialist than claiming STEM [the study, practice and artefacts of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics] to be white & Eurocentric. Complete ahistorical nonsense that can only be written by someone who has never had to try to work with the 'maths' that existed before Europe adopted Arab numerals and maths. As a late medievalist, let me inform you that trying to do maths working in 7s over 20s in Roman numerals as Europeans did before this is a primary reason for so many calculations of anything from that period being wrong.
    "Aside from it being factually wrong to claim STEM to be white & Western, it is an insult to all the doctors, scientists & engineers the Western world needs to recruit from Africa and Asia to keep those fields running. If all the Indian, Nigerian and Pakistani Brits left for their former homelands or that of their parents and grandparents, [Britain's] National Health Service (NHS) would collapse, engineering would struggle and we’d be much diminished in output in science more broadly. As I have had to point out to anybody insisting that my critiques of fields using the approaches of Critical Social Justice are just a way to attack the work of 'people of colour,' if that were actually my motivation, it would be medicine and technology I’d have to critique, not Critical Social Justice, as this is where black and brown Brits are most represented.
   "STEM, objectivity, rigour and replicability are not products of the West. Postmodernism and its latest incarnation 'Critical Social Justice,' however, are. If you want to ‘decolonise’ Western 'ways of knowing,' start by weeding out that one, not the development of science which has been a worldwide project for millennia, although Europe was a relative latecomer to it."

~ Helen Pluckrose, from her comment on Jerry Coyne's post 'Three authors “problematise” rigour, objectivity, replicability, and yes, all the aspects of “colonising and white Eurocentric science”'

Question of the Day: Am I a feminist?

 

 

From Helen Pluckrose’s article ‘Why I No Longer Identify as a Feminist'’

“I think it’s time I accepted that ‘feminism’ no longer means ‘the aim for equal rights for women’ but is understood to refer to the current feminist movement which encompasses so much more and very little that I want to be associated with. I posted this on Twitter recently:

“The serious issues faced by … the disempowerment of young women can [now] only be opposed, sadly, by opposing feminism itself.”

[Hat tip Stephen Hicks who comments, “Good essay: How postmodern philosophy vanquished liberal feminism.”]

.