We don’t often hear debunking debunked

But that’s what happens when no one believes in reality any more:

Even on the individual scale, debunking is not the simple scene of deworming that we might be tempted to picture. What we should imagine instead of an impartial skeptic is a person who gets a charge out of being the rational member of the exchange – someone who is drawn, for reasons that might or might not be clear to him or her, and that are probably difficult to articulate, to the drama of unmasking. The adversarial scene of debunking breaks down into a strange collaboration between debunker, charlatan and dupe. This collaboration leaves us with a different way of thinking about ‘modernity’ itself. That’s the argument I make in my book, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (2018).

Emily Ogden, “Debunking debunked” at Aeon

Whatever. The debunker, a righteous “skeptic,” so often turns out to believe in the multiverse and human-like elephants. The one makes no sense and the other obviously isn’t true.

But then most debunking is merely an attempt to claim as much reality as possible for naturalism. Evidence-based reasoning hasn’t been the winner by any means.

When post-modernism declared war on modern science, there could only be one winner and postmodernism looks like surviving.

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