Relativism

Voodoo psychology suggests that culture and expectation tyrannically shape our perceptions. Taken to an extreme, objective knowledge is impossible,since all our sense-data is filtered through our own bias. Taken to a very far extreme, we get things like What The !@#$ Do We Know?‘s claim that the Native Americans literally couldn’t see Columbus’ ships,because they had no concept of “caravel” and so the percept just failed to register. This sort of thing tends to end by arguing that science was invented by straight white men, and so probably just reflects straight white maleness, and so we should ignore it completely and go frolic in the forest or something.— Scott Alexander, 5sep17 «Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty»See: Postmodernism; Nihilism;
Category:Nihilism