A House Built on Sand Quotes

“Even on purely political grounds, however, it is difficult to understand how this could have come to seem a good way to conceive of multiculturalism. For if the powerful can't criticize the oppressed, because the central epistemological categories are inexorably tied to particular perspectives, it also follows that the oppressed can't criticize the powerful. The only remedy, so far as I can see, for what threatens to be a strongly conservative upshot, is to accept an overt double standard: to allow a questionable idea to be criticized if it is held by those in a position of power, Christian creationism, for example, but not if it is held by those whom the powerful oppress, Zuni creationism, for example. Familiar as this stratagem has recently become, how can it possibly appeal to anyone with the slightest degree of intellectual integrity, and how can it fail to seem anything other than deeply offensive to the progressive sensibilities whose cause it is supposed to further?”
― Noretta Koertge, A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science

“And this fact again illustrates a major problem in Latour's formulation. If his article was meant to be a formal, or semiotic, reading of Einstein's text, it is not relevant to arbitrarily substitute words whose meanings are not justified by the text. Furthermore, the very premise of his "semiotic" reading of a text in translation begs the question of whether he is imputing meaning to the author or the translator.”
― Noretta Koertge, A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science