Have humans lived in a pluriverse of worlds? No, they haven’t
“In the modern West, we take it for granted that reality is an objectively knowable material world. From a young age, we are taught to visualize it as a vast abstract space full of free-standing objects that all obey timeless universal laws of science and nature. But a very different picture of reality is now emerging from new currents of thought in fields like history, anthropology, and sociology.”
So begins a bewildering article by historian and critical theorist Greg Anderson, published recently on the blog of Oxford University Press. It’s a good example of academic anti-colonialism run amok, as well as a good illustration of the self-contradictory nature of epistemic and moral relativism (more about that here, from my friend and colleague Maarten Boudry). Let us take a closer look.
After that beginning, I was bracing myself for yet another essay presenting the multiverse theory nowadays so popular among some physicists, and which is a good example of bad science. (Don’t trust me, read what a physicist has to say about it.) But in fact, this was much, much worse, and I should have gotten a clue from the end of that initial paragraph, which doesn’t mention quantum mechanics but rather anthropology and sociology.
