Stephen Colbert on Epistemology
December 11, 2009, 2:46 pm
Posted by Cathleen Kaveny
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Andy Schlafly | ||||
|
||||
Advertisement
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment
Hello Cathy (and All),
I don’t watch the Colbert Report that frequently but I did see the show with this segment. I’m just not sure what to make of this guest. Out of curiosity I took a look at his counterpart to Wikipedia, Conservipedia. (Hope I spelled that right.) I don’t think I’ll go back to it.
I suppose this gentleman would claim I have been too corrupted by liberalism, but I have frankly been very impressed by how factually accurate Wikipedia is and how little bias in any conservative or liberal direction I find in any of the articles I have studied. Someone suggested to me that the reason Wikipedia is relatively reliable is precisely because anyone can revise a Wikipedia article. Apparently when someone puts something up on Wikipedia that is factually wrong, others tend to move in and correct the mistake.
It is hard to take seriously Schlafly’s claim that “Conservapedia” is a necessary corrective to Wikipedia’s “gossip” and “liberal bias.” I think you’re right, Peter, about Wikipedia’s efficiency. The irony is, a few years ago Colbert-the-character was praising Wikipedia because it operated on the principles of “truthiness.” (He caused a lot of headaches for the Wikipedia gatekeepers when he sicced the “Colbert Nation” on its entries about elephants.) But now Wikipedia has a good enough reputation for disseminating actual truth that those who prefer truthiness have to create a competing forum!
I suspect a number of Conservapedia’s contributors are pranksters, testing how far they can go parodying right-wing conspiracy theorists without getting caught. But maybe that’s just what I’d like to believe…
“Most of Jesus’ parables were economic parables. And they were free market parables.”
This makes me want to vomit. My hands are literally shaking with disgust.
It just shouldn’t be this easy to make some people look like idiots.
Hello Thomas (and All),
I had forgotten that little tidbit, so thanks for reminding me. I couldn’t help but wonder if this guy really believes such nonsense. And as usual, Mr. Colbert did a simply wonderful job of keeping a straight face throughout the segment.
Hello Mollie (and All),
“It is hard to take seriously Schlafly’s claim that “Conservapedia” is a necessary corrective to Wikipedia’s “gossip” and “liberal bias.””
I agree with you, but I certainly know of people who surely appreciate the “corrective” character of Conservapedia. For example, on my one and only visit to this site, one of the blurbs that appeared in the “Did you know this factoid” is the claim that very few Jewish people are homosexual. (It only takes a visit to a handful of the “most important categories” listing that appears in their welcome window to learn that the editors want their readers to take more seriously the claim that homosexuality is a chosen set of behaviors and not an involuntary orientation. (I am well aware that my previous sentence contains a category mistake. I’m just trying to accurately report what I read.)
I wish I had the know how to edit the corresponding entries on Conservapedia. Even if this factoid were true (I certainly have no idea.), it would imply that we have an easy way to eliminate nearly all homosexuality in our culture (which I think I may fairly conclude the Conservapedia editors want). All we would need to do is all convert to Judaism. Somehow I don’t think the editors of Conservapedia want that.
I would like to see a Catholicpedia, based upon the format of “Wikipedia”, so that whenever error appears, before it could beget more error, it would simply disappear.
Hello All,
I got to wondering about Mr. Schlafly’s religious affiliation, so I did a bit of web exploring. (If he’s Roman Catholic, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he gets invited to appear on Raymond Arroyo’s EWTN program to discuss his Conservapedia.) I didn’t learn Mr. Schlafly’s religious affiliation, but I did learn that he is a son of Phyllis Schlafly — yes, that Phyllis Schlafly. Evidently Ms. Schlafly is Roman Catholic. I’ll bet Andy Schlafly’s oldest brother is not much of a fan of Conservapedia.
Somewhat off topic (and unthematic) but . . .
Does the proliferation of various “pedia” knock-offs go a long way to validate one of the post-modern claims that no viewpoint is neutral, that “objective” viewpoints are not only not possible, but maybe not even preferable? Colbert’s interviewee says he believes in objective truth, but really? Does he? Why call it “conservapedia”?
In undergrad, I took a course on feminist political theory and a lot (if not most) of the readings seemed to coalesce around the idea that most ideas — and, frankly, most knowledge as well as one’s thoughts flowing from that knowledge — are heavily, heavily conditioned (and conditional), and that we have lots of layers of subjectivity to break through before we reach a more “objective” plateau (I once asked my professor this question: “Is the idea behind feminist political theory something like this: human beings have for centuries been trapped in an epistemological prison, and men are the wardens withholding the key?” Her answer was: “Yes.”).
Some of those feminist writers I read that semester believed there was no ultimately objective stance and no objective truth; others believed in objective truth but in a much different version than the garden-variety Western version; while others seemed somewhere in between. Anyway, it seems that various people or groups always want to present their side of the story, their side of the “way things are,” and that despite earnest efforts to present their version as the true revealant of reality, the whole project in fact reinforces that there is no true version, that the feminist and post-modern account is indeed correct: there is no neutral stance. We cannot escape the shadows on the wall.
Thoughts?
Hello Matt (and All),
In my own experience, people who claim that at bottom there is no objective truth don’t consistently believe their own claim. One who really believed in such claims would be committed to believing that the Holocaust deniers views are on equal footing with those of conventional historians of the Holocaust, that people who think women should not share equal political rights with men are on equal footing with people who believe women and men should all share the same politcal rights, that racists are on equal footing with those who oppose racism, and so on.
As for Mr. Schlafly, I suspect he would respond to you that indeed he believes in objective truth, and that his web encyclopedia is called Conservapedia because the conservative view on any matter is objectively true. (To be sure, I would not agree with all the words I have just put into Mr. Schlafly’s mouth.)