The “Listener letter” appeared in 2021, signed by 7 professors at the University of Auckland (see it here) in New Zealand. It was a response to the drive (still going on) to teach indigenous “ways of knowing”, Mātauranga Māori (MM), as coequal with science in science classes. The letter argued that while MM was of great value in understanding local culture, its nature was fundamentally different from that of modern science, and therefore MM should not inhabit the science classroom. If it did, they argued, this would only confuse New Zealand students about the nature and practice of science. A quote from the letter:
Indigenous knowledge is critical for the preservation and perpetuation of culture and local practices, and plays key roles in management and policy. However, in the discovery of empirical, universal truths, it falls far short of what we can define as science itself.
To accept it as the equivalent of science is to patronise and fail indigenous populations; better to ensure that everyone participates in the world’s scientific enterprises. Indigenous knowledge may indeed help advance scientific knowledge in some ways, but it is not science.
The signers were attacked (and some had their jobs downgraded) by Māori and their allies who argued that MM was indeed equivalent to science—it was just “local science”. Indeed, there are bits of MM that do constitute empirical truths (how and when to harvest food, etc), but these facts are enmeshed in a stew of mythology, religion, legend, superstition, and ethics. That is why, for example the Māori are arguing that, because of an ancient myth involving kinship between kauri trees and whales, the present oomycete blight on kauri trees might be cured by rubbing the trunks with whale oil and whale bone, and chanting prayers to the trees. This endeavor will proceed, funded by New Zealand taxpayers. This is what happens when you mix indigenous myth and science.
Now, a group of people of Māori ancestry (and their allies) at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) have finally admitted that the signers of the Listener letter were right: “Māori knowledge is not science.”
You’d think that would settle the issue, but no: the authors argue, in fact that Māori knowledge seems better than modern science because the latter not only changes over time (as science should) but that the truth “is both factual and ethically value laden.” They argue that this is the right meaning of “truth”, and that every other culture in the world save “Western culture”, which is apparently totally scientific, combines facts and values. In this way the authors fall victim to the naturalistic fallacy (“is” equals “ought”), grossly misunderstanding the difference between science and ethics. The entire article is a justification for changing science education at AUT—and throughout New Zealand—from an education in modern science to an education aimed at rectifying racism and inequities in society. But that is not science, and their mixing of ethics and science just results in a poorly thought-out program with explicit ideological aims. Whatever they propose here, it has nothing to do with modern science.
You can read this new article at PESA Agora, a site discussing philosophy, education, and culture. Click on the screenshot below or get a pdf here.
The authors first describe the updated Bachelor of Science curriculum at AUT, which has two new courses about indigenous knowledge. They note that “student feedback on the new courses has been mostly favourable,” but student reaction is no way to design a curriculum. And these courses, it seems, are not science courses, but are designed to give students “cultural competence,” which apparently means fixing inequities in society. Excerpts from the article are indented below, while all bolding is mine:
The updated BSc has catalysed lively discussions among the academic staff of the School of Science. In this context, reference to the word or idea of ‘racism’ is like a bomb going off: dangerous and causes lots of collateral damage. Views of non-Māori/Pasifika academic and teaching staff in the school range widely, from those who are active allies, to those with entrenched oppositional beliefs to the effect that science is a-contextual and therefore a-cultural. This latter view holds that science is ‘pure’ knowledge and not responsible for social problems. Of course ‘science’ is not directly responsible for social problems, but as ethical science educators we cannot ignore inequities in our outcomes. Why not consider what we could do to ameliorate those inequities?
The requirement for academics to demonstrate cultural competence has encouraged many staff to seek support from the Māori and Pasifika staff of the school, who have held workshops for teaching staff, plus many one-to-one meetings to support individual academics. In these ways, the burden of attempting to overcome the effects of a history of Eurocentrism in science and the university falls back on the staff who represent social groups harmed by those effects.
Of course this has nothing to do with science; it is part of an ideological program to rectify what they see as ongoing racism in science (i.e., the lack of inclusion of indigenous “ways of knowing”) by redefining “knowledge” as a combination of facts and values. There’s a fair amount of science-dissing in the rest of the piece:
Lack of knowledge of the philosophy of science as well as lack of knowledge of Māori/Indigenous knowledges combine to cause difficulty for some people in considering Indigenous knowledges as complex knowledge systems. An understanding of philosophy and history of science would mean scientists were aware of the always hypothetical, possibly transient nature of scientific theory. We are mindful that we cannot raise up Māori knowledge by denigrating science. It is important for Māori/Pasifika commentators not to speak about science in the highly-publicised ways that some scientists and academics have spoken about Māori/Indigenous knowledge. This observation crystallizes the purpose of establishing a discussion group on respectful relations between science and Māori/Indigenous knowledge. We are interested in engaging teaching staff whose views on these matters are undecided, or in the middle of the spectrum, in an attempt to facilitate and build more reasoned and collegial discussion of these topics.
They clearly have realized that denigrating science (which they then proceed to do) can’t elevate MM, and apparently hold MM as superior to science because its “truths” are eternal. But the ephemerality of “truth” is a feature of science, not a bug. Any assertion beyond disproof is not scientific.
The authors’ solution is to say that modern science is deficient because its facts aren’t attached to values:
We need a new narrative about science that is more open and inclusive to people and other knowledge systems. It will take courage to admit that science and the other disciplines historically excluded Indigenous knowledges in order to consolidate themselves. This process was completed in the 18th century in the establishment of the academic disciplines (Herrnstein Smith, 2005). It will take the courage of humility to admit that science is only as good as the people who dare to call themselves scientists, and that examples abound of bad science, where people have sold out to greed and profitmaking (Marks, 2017; Proctor, 2012). It will take personal courage to think deeply about the ethnic inequities for Māori and Pasifika students in the courses we teach and about our own responses to these inequities.
Well, teaching science is one thing, but they’re talking about a “new narrative about science”, with the specification that this “narrative” has to be taught to science students. In other words, you don’t get a dose of science without a dose of both ideology and ethics—bt clearly the postmodern ethical views of the authors that conform to the oppressor/oppressed narrative.
A critical aspect of the ‘pure knowledge’ claim of science originates in the fact/value dichotomy where, in the 18th century, the bifurcation of fact from value was used to separate science (fact) from literature (fiction), in the process freeing science from ethical responsibility for its effects (Proctor, 1991; Putnam, 2004; Richardson, 1990). This move allowed science to claim control of truth. Science is extremely specialist, so each scientist has a small domain of expertise, which helps dilute the ethical significance of their work. But so far as we know, no other culture except the modern Western culture, influenced by science, separates facts from values. Māori (and Indigenous) ethical concepts are both facts and values at the same time. This means that truth according to Māori (Indigenous) worldviews is both factual and ethically value-laden. This is one way to explain why Māori knowledge is not science.
At last—the admission that the Listener authors were right is in the last sentence. But the rest is balderdash. First of all, science is not a “culture” in the sense of an ethnic culture like that of indigenous people or “Europeans”. Science is simply a toolkit for gleaning truths about the universe, truths that, of course, have been responsible for vast improvements in health and well-being of society, as well as producing wonder about the universe. And of course “modern Western culture” includes both facts and values (the values vary across populations), but so what? The practice of science, or rather, the truths that it produces, are designed to be unpolluted by values. Truly, I am not sure what the authors are talking about here. Sadly, they give not one example of a Māori truth that is both factually accurate and at the same time “ethically value laden”. But the lack of supporting examples is chaeracteristic of this type of polemic from New Zealand.
But wait! There’s more!
The concept of ‘mana ōrite’ (equal mana) is a useful rendering in te reo Māori (the Māori language) of what we mean by ‘respectful relations’ between science and Mātauranga Māori. A call for equal mana is a call for the ending of the denigration of Māori knowledge in mainstream discourses. Knowledge of those discourses, as well as of the history and philosophy of science, makes it clear why we might want to talk about ending the disrespect of Māori knowledge (Stewart, 2023). But as a result of the specialist nature of science, few if any scientists have even a basic working knowledge of either the philosophy of science or of Māori knowledge. Hence many scientists display intensely negative reactions to any suggestion that Māori knowledge is of any scientific value. The debate has been cast as a simplistic, yes-no question: Is Māori knowledge science? But the wide brief of both science and Māori knowledge make this question meaningless: a provocation or conundrum, not a question with an answer in the ‘scientific’ sense (Stewart, 2019).
Of course any knowledge that is intimately attached to ethics will not be accepted by modern scientists as “of scientific value”. Only the facts that are cleanly stripped of ethics fit in to modern science. Furthe, I’ve seen no examples of “Western” scientists rejecting facts discovered by the Māori simply because they were discovered by Māori. What we can say is basing a cure for kauri blight on ancient legend that is palpably false (whales and kauri trees do not share a modern ancestor and were not “created” by a divine being), is not a path we want to travel.
As I’ve said repeatedly, some of MM indeed does count as scientific knowledge, but most doesn’t. And yes, the entirety of MM can be taught as sociology and anthropology, for, as the Listener letter argued, “Indigenous knowledge is critical for the preservation and perpetuation of culture and local practices, and plays key roles in management and policy.” I agree, yet add that different tribes of Māori have different conceptions of MM. But I also agree that MM is not science, should not be taught as science, and that ideological programs should not be injected into science education. What the authors are trying to do, as far as I can see, is make a new argument that indigenous knowledge is vital to science because it includes ethics, and that scientists should adopt “indigenous knowledge” precisely because of its ethics—an ethics aimed at creating social equity, which is not the same as creating equal opportunity. The whole mishigass is confected simply to remedy what the authors see as inequity based on ethnicity.
As the anonymous Kiwi who sent me this article said:
What they say about the fact/value dichotomy is bollocks. I don’t know whether they don’t understand this dichotomy (i.e., you can’t extract an ‘ought’ from an ‘is), or they deliberately misrepresent it. . . . They rely almost completely on the woke idea that because they’re “oppressed” and that “Western” scientists are speaking from “privilege and power”, all of us are obliged to accept their statements at face value. I think people are starting to tire of this sort of ideological bullying.
Great post your explanation how the scientific method only works because it tries to be free of bias and ideology.
Damnit – things getting worse in NZ.
Somehow “the burden falls” on the oppressed for having to (“DO THE WORK” – this hectoring tone is common in this type of idiocy) *explain* to their (press ganged and forced) non Maori peers, the “wisdom” of MM….
but if they don’t…
….then presumably M.M. is being “marginalized” “othered” and ignored.
Which is it?
Like in the US “white flight” is abandonment of neighborhoods, but investment in a neighborhood is “gentrification”. You’re buggered in every situation.
One question I’d ask is a basic one: How, in modern NZ, are Maori oppressed? I’m curious. I’d like proof b/c it is kind of a foundational question which holds up the whole system. Without that, the entire edifice falls.
The above letter/article is almost a type specimen of modern woke progressive nonsense that, evidently, has infected an entire generation of kiwis (and many Americans… witnesseth any elite American campus).
The woke invasion of science and sanity and the meritocracy is startling.
D.A.
NYC
You might have to define ‘oppression’ because there will be plenty who think that equal treatment and unequal outcomes are oppression, and at least some Maori representatives sounding off about the tyranny of the majority.
Currently, Maoris (including two of the three leaders of the governing coalition parties) are significantly over represented in Parliament as a proportion of the population.
Since Maori as a group (there are problems with NZ’s racial classifications) have, on average, lower income, home ownership, and life expectancy, it is superficially credible and common in the media and motivated research to ascribe these outcomes to racism in education, health services etc, or the consequences of inter-generational colonial trauma, all of which can be cured by ‘by Maori, for Maori’ approaches, often supported by anecdotes, much less commonly supported by rigorous statistical analysis.
Two examples of this genre: yesterday I read a report complaining about the higher number of self-inflicted drug overdoses among Maoris; in a news report several days ago a Maori surgeon cited as an example of racism in health services the higher proportion of knee/hip surgeries (about 87% of the total) for NZ Europeans (about 67% of the total population) but there was no mention of the different age distributions of the two populations (the median NZ European age is 14 years older than the median Maori age) or that these surgeries are disproportionally, I believe, given to the elderly in response to degenerative conditions.
On the topic of our host’s post, here is Richard Feynman expressing science’s values:
1) The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
2) It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
3) Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.
The problem is those two blokes are peasants in the Iwi class structure that is still quite feudalistic.
The thing is they’re independent natured men who shunned their overloads and took advantage of their talents.
I may not be their biggest fan but there is no denying they’re brilliant men.
As Prof. Coyne says, science is simply a toolkit for gleaning truths about the universe. The toolkit involves tools for making observations and the development of theories that have made it possible to establish truths about the universe through observations using instruments as tools. Modern science started off gleaning truths about the universe from telescopes and microscopes. And went on gleaning further truths through the development of further and more complex truth-gleaning instruments, and the development of theories on which the construction of truth-gleaning instruments could be based. Science education depends on understanding how the tools in the toolkit work, how they enable us to glean truths about electromagnetic radiation or the ways the eyes of spiders work or whatever. Our toolkit gives us an amazing ability to glean truths about the universe, and science education should give people the capacity to use the tools and also to appreciate the system of science and how it enables us to understand the universe in a way that does not depend on some particular culture.
Gosh what a load of waffle. Reminds of reading some of the defences used back in the day when the evangelicals were trying to get intelligent design in the science classroom.
And that is why “modern Western culture” is superior and produces much better results.
You won’t be surprised to learn that the regressives over at Pharyngula are poo-pooing any criticism of “other ways of knowing”, by saying it’s “complex”, and that “science used to be called natural philosophy”, etc.
Essentially, what the Discovery Institute peeps used to say. Oh, and PZ had a post up the other day where he admits he’s a terrible lecturer who struggles to motivate his poor students. Also, in other news, the Pope is Catholic.
It would be interesting to tabulate the age distribution of academics who put out this kind of hogwash and those who see through it. In the pre-modern world, ~40% of children typically died of disease before reaching adulthood, but today only a very few suffer this fate, thanks to “Western science”. As a result, young people have only minimal direct experience with modern medicine, and rarely even think about it. Older individuals come to have more and more such experience, which reminds us rather forcefully that indigenous folktales and robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery do not merit equal mana, not even close.
Jon –
“the age distribution of academics who put out this kind of hogwash” –
Oh I’ll bet anything there’s a HUUUGE age skew, and you know which direction it points. Because that age skew is evident in our own anti-woke battles in the US as well.
Which is further evidence in itself that this is a social contagion, not anything based in objective reality.
Which French philosopher said that if you get people to believe in absurdities they’ll commit atrocities? So true.
Here the atrocities aren’t murder or war, but in NZ they’re the future of science. And the “vanguard” of idiocy comes from the young who have absorbed these prejudices of oppression/oppressor wholesale.
The problem is who and how to fix this mess? Hope that the brighter kids read what PCC(E) et al write? I hope so b/c the system is deeply ingrained.
D.A.
NYC
I think this still applies :
“… and so the dialectic continues.”
-Delgado and Stefancic
Critical Race Theory – An Introduction
p.66, 3rd Ed.
2017
This caught my eye – the précis by PCC(E) :
“.. the authors argue, in fact that Māori knowledge seems better than modern science because the latter not only changes over time (as science should) but that the truth “is both factual and ethically value laden.” ”
The word for this condition – IMHO – is Aufheben – Hegel’s term, an interesting German word meaning to cancel out or abolish, and simultaneously holistically elevate to a higher understanding, using dialectic.
The Maori themselves seem not to take their arguments seriously. If Western science is devoid of value and real “science” should have ethical value, then why don’t they eschew value-free science and its products, like Maxwell’s equations, electricity, modern antibiotics and vaccines, airplanes, gas motors, and other fruits of real science.
This reminds me of a conversation I had in the Amazon with a member of the Huaorani, a fairly recently contacted tribe previously living completely independently of the rest of the world’s science and culture. During the covid pandemic I was worried that they might not accept vaccines. My Huaorani friend assured me that everyone got vaccinated and that “we believe in science”. It was obvious to them that science works.
Add the wheel to your list. At least, as I understand it, the Maori had not yet hit on that when the English arrived.
In fairness, the Maori did not have access to any beasts of burden as New Zealand didn’t have any native land mammals (not even rodents) that would have necessitated the invention of things like carts or ploughs or wheels.
Given enough time they might have managed to domesticate the Moa, had they not driven it extinct.
We should also reflect on the ethical/environmental side of the Maori way-of-knowing—that they refused to invent the wheel as part of their stewardship of the Aotearoa environment. Wheels, after all, would leave ruts in the ground, and would lead to roads, motorways, roundabouts, suburbs, and traffic congestion. On similar grounds, the Maori refused to invent submarines because of the damage these would do to our friends the whales.
They could have invented the bicycle. (I know that I am being nasty.)
The Moa became extinct because of their insatiable need for protein. 70 % of all Fauna in NZ were eaten out to extinction before the colonials arrived. they drove them into the swamps then cut their legs off while alive. Found by archaeologists in swamp grave yards where the giant flightless birds were dismembered.
The stronger larger tribes hunted out and kiiled the weaker iwi tribes, displaced them from their territories, enslaved them , and in some cases cannibalised the vanquished, and much worse. All documented by independent historians, but of course because it is the truth that the woke do not want to wake up to many of the books were ordered off the bookshelves or removed from sale.
New Zealand’s school history curriculum was re written three years ago to reflect a very biased view of colonialism to make te Maori the ‘oppressed’ with no mention that the majority of the 540 chieftains who signed the Treaty of Waitangi wanted an end to all the inter- tribal bloodshed and sought the protection of the English Crown willingly under the original agreement; and most importantly – protection from slavery. this fact entirely glossed over and forgotten now over only 180 years later in the mists of the land of the long ‘white’ woke.
There are volumes on this topic but not many want to read the truth of what actually happened.
As I’ve said before, when New Zealand needs science during an existential crisis, science won’t be there to come to its aid. All they will have is the foreign scientific literature, which they will not be able to understand fully because of how badly the minds of their scientists and policymakers will have been distorted by this nonsense. The path they are on is taking them to a bad place.
So maybe the Indigenous Ways of Knowing philosophy is the New Zealand version of woke academic philosophy in the US. Our scientific publications and medical schools are spewing anti-scientific gabblegarble on DEI, trans issues for children and youth, and other social issues that have, at most, a nebulous relationship to reputable science or medicine. Our host and the commenters on this website have the courage to discuss these issues but that courage and candor seem unusual in current academically oriented discourse, on the internet anyway. Kudos to Dr. Coyne for leading and facilitating courageous and intelligent conversations on thorny issues.
The US is heading in this direction too (along with Canada, of course):
“The Biden-Harris Administration has formally recognized Indigenous Knowledge as one of the many important bodies of knowledge that contributes to the scientific, technical, social, and economic advancements of the United States and our collective understanding of the natural world.”
https://www.whitehouse.gov/ceq/news-updates/2022/12/01/white-house-releases-first-of-a-kind-indigenous-knowledge-guidance-for-federal-agencies/
But how do they know that it’s true?
This is the issue that springs to my mind. While reading this I thought- if I were living in NZ and the parent of a young adult interested in studying science, I would find a way to send them to University elsewhere. Others must have similar conclusions. If the situation gets worse before it gets better, established scientists and promising students will leave NZ. Science funding will more and more channel to superstitious “experiments.” Who will push back on this as the older generation retires. I wonder of the average NZ is aware of this situation.
I agree that “Any assertion beyond disproof is not scientific.” That excludes many declarations based on religion or superstition. But is the assertion “Any assertion beyond disproof is not scientific” itself scientific? How would it be disproved? And if it is not a scientific assertion, what kind of a claim is it?
Similar to the discussion of string theory in WEIT on 9/17/24. Quoting Brian Greene: Critics argue that the situation is untenable, noting, “If you can’t test a theory, it’s not scientific.”
Is the theory “If you can’t test a theory, it’s not scientific” a testable theory?
It’s hard to see how any progress could be made on problems if we entertained unfalsifiable theories.
Imagine that I invent a cure for cancer that involves a) drinking orange juice and b) invoking a chant that I devised that is supposed to channel the “positive energies” in the orange juice to combine with the “natural healing energies” in the body of the sufferer.
Trials are run and it turns out my treatment works no better than chance. But wait…I can always claim that the sufferers need to truly believe in the treatment in order for it to work. Therefore you can never falsify my claim that the treatment works because I could always claim that the patients didn’t have enough faith and that’s what explains the null result…my theory is unfalsifiable.
Imagine the waste of time and resources it my unfalsifiable theory was taken seriously…
“Popper’s demarcation criterion [= falsifiability] has been criticized both for excluding legitimate science (Hansson 2006) and for giving some pseudosciences the status of being scientific (Agassi 1991; Mahner 2007, 518–519). Strictly speaking, his criterion excludes the possibility that there can be a pseudoscientific claim that is refutable. According to Larry Laudan (1983, 121), it “has the untoward consequence of countenancing as ‘scientific’ every crank claim which makes ascertainably false assertions”. Astrology, rightly taken by Popper as an unusually clear example of a pseudoscience, has in fact been tested and thoroughly refuted (Culver and Ianna 1988; Carlson 1985). Similarly, the major threats to the scientific status of psychoanalysis, another of his major targets, do not come from claims that it is untestable but from claims that it has been tested and failed the tests.”
Science and Pseudo-Science: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/
Regarding science and values, I agree with Sam Harris that science is not value free. Per Sam in this essay https://www.samharris.org/blog/facts-values-clarifying-the-moral-landscape
“We have convinced ourselves that somehow science is, by definition, a value-free space and that we can’t make value judgments about beliefs and practices that needlessly undermine our attempts to build sane and productive societies.
The truth is, science is not value-free. Good science is the product of our valuing evidence, and logical consistency, and parsimony, and other intellectual virtues. And if you don’t value those things, you can’t participate in a scientific conversation.”
This issue is not whether science is value free…it’s how good science is in assessing reality compared to alternatives like adherence to tradition, “faith-based” religious doctrine, etc. Reality behaves in certain ways and not others, and it seems like the toolkit of science, as Jerry describes it, is the best method we apes have come up with to understand reality.
So the MM crowd aren’t even correct about science lacking values…
These kinds of statements are true, and common, but IMHO trivial.
The deeper statement is this: the goal of science is objective knowledge about the world. “Objective” means that we don’t want our knowledge statements to be predetermined or censored by someone’s political/religious/ethical/ethnic/whatever precommitments.
In other words, the “values” in science are narrowly limited to keeping people’s “values” (broadly speaking) out of science, because they can interfere with the knowledge discovery process.
There are a few other areas where values come in, e.g. ethics about plagiarism, human trials, animal trials, etc. These are all pragmatic constraints to keep the system functioning, have social permission for science to operate, etc.
One other deeper statement: the purpose of science is knowledge about the world, not inquiries into ethics. Ethical inquiries are a valid subject, just a different discipline than science.
“Ethical inquiries are a valid subject, just a different discipline than science.”
But surely ethics, which is ultimately about human flourishing, is informed by science. It’s a behavioral discipline. There are experts in animal behavior, and they are considered scientists. Unless one wants to argue that humans are not animals, I fail to see why science is highly relevant to the behaviors associated with human flourishing.
Mātauranga Māori could indeed be studied – but leading to a Batchelor of Arts degree for ‘folklore’.
“First of all, science is not a “culture” in the sense of an ethnic culture like that of indigenous people or “Europeans”. Science is simply a toolkit for gleaning truths about the universe” – J. Coyne
Science is a social institution (like art and sport), and as such it is part of human culture. In the second sentence “science” refers to the methods of science.
There is a huge irony here. The Mauri wish to brag that their traditional “way of knowing” came up with some true facts (though probably not so much as regards whales and trees). The only reason we know that the Mauris had ancestors who were smart people able to find knowledge is that Western science can verify those facts. It is Western science that developed scientific epistemology better than any other culture ever has. We only know that Mauris attained some correct knowledge of their environment because we can prove it correct, when it is correct. Otherwise we would shrug and dismiss their claimed knowledge the same way we shrug at their creation myths.
By the way, one of the authors of that commentary, Georgina Tuari Stewart, has written a book on Maori philosophy that I find very useful as an introduction:
* Stewart, Georgina Tuari. Maori Philosophy: Indigenous Thinking from Aotearoa. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.
As a NZ’er with ties to the academy, please please please keep up your great work highlighting this insanity.
Not sure if you’ve seen this but one of the authors of the paper you mentioned above has also had a go at the ‘In Defence of Merit in Science’ article you were a co-author of: https://www.journalofglobalindigeneity.com/article/90966-responding-to-_in-defense-of-merit-in-science_
Ironically their critique makes so many errors that they themselves accuse the Merit authors of making such as strawmanning, and this one particularly stood out to me: “Postmodernism and Critical Theory are oriented towards improving science, not attacking it.’ Delusional in the extreme.