Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Edinburgh's "Creation of Reality Group" (CRAG)

facepalm
   Seriously?
   Unless that website is incredibly misleading, that's just embarrassing.
   Edinburgh is already notoriously the epicenter of some Very Bad Ideas, to wit "science studies" and the "strong program" in the sociology of belief (mistakenly typically called the "sociology of knowledge"). So I guess this is, in some sense, par for the course there... I mean...somebody actually wrote this:
In the last decades, we can observe a strong increase in the belief that our reality is or can be created, whether it is phenomenological, subjective or collectively shared. It is visible in popular culture, often via New Age formulations; it is present in the sciences, for example in the discourse of brain studies. It is also active in the humanities, within the diverse offspring of social constructivism, but also in politics, as a variation on democratic empowerment and community activism.
Not to mention this:
The Crag is a think-plateau on the diverse modalities of reality creation. We will try to entwine all the research disciplines around the constitution of a ‘crealist’ science, a human science of the creation of realities. The group is also conceived as a laboratory for a multidisciplinary and public ongoing seminar and an annual conference.
That, my friend, is the kind of bullshit that gives bullshit a bad name...
   And, er....that chart...is that in any way interesting? It seems like it's meant to provide evidence for the claim that believe in "reality creation" is on the increase...but that seems to be, at best, information about how many times such a thing is mentioned, whether favorably or not. It does seem to indicate percentages of some kind, so at least that bit seems reasonable...
   I'm also hesitant to take anything seriously that has such slick "production values"...but maybe that's just me...
   I'm fairly worried about academia outside the natural sciences...and this doesn't help any.

Labels: , , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home