In this field communism made the same mistake of the postmodernists: it couldn’t conceive of objective science without an agenda hidden somewhere. Genetics was labeled “bourgeois science” and thus not worth learning. A classic example of rejecting a good idea because of who happened to say it.
I’d say argue it’s not a complete mistake, and indeed can be a very useful guide, to assume that there is an ideology behind everything, even science. There are, however, a number of mistakes one can make given this statement, the first being to divide all ideologies according to familiar political divisions (capitalist/communist) rather than imagine there might be local ideological divisions in any given field, across arbitrary dimensions. And the second being to think biased results are useless (a coin being biased doesn’t make it an ineffective random number generator).
I find it useful to think in this way when reading papers (in physics) : it’s entirely possible, even pretty certain, to miss very clear and simple ideas because the ideological background in which things are presented does not have room for them (the classic Kuhnian idea). In this way I see postmodernism (and a good part of continental philosophy) as a useful warning, albeit like most useful warnings it can be taken too far into paranoia.
I’d say argue it’s not a complete mistake, and indeed can be a very useful guide, to assume that there is an ideology behind everything, even science. There are, however, a number of mistakes one can make given this statement, the first being to divide all ideologies according to familiar political divisions (capitalist/communist) rather than imagine there might be local ideological divisions in any given field, across arbitrary dimensions. And the second being to think biased results are useless (a coin being biased doesn’t make it an ineffective random number generator).
I find it useful to think in this way when reading papers (in physics) : it’s entirely possible, even pretty certain, to miss very clear and simple ideas because the ideological background in which things are presented does not have room for them (the classic Kuhnian idea). In this way I see postmodernism (and a good part of continental philosophy) as a useful warning, albeit like most useful warnings it can be taken too far into paranoia.