As I said on this forum before hearing people talk about postmodernism as if it is the current "thing" within continental philosophy circles is really odd. It hasn't been for a decade or more.<p>The backlash against these methodologies has been pretty severe within continental philosophy itself. For example, Meillassoux's critique of correlationism pretty much says that the whole epistemological manoeuvres, perhaps vulgarised by postmodern turn, by which it is claimed there is nothing "real" without a human correlated to it and that "reality" cannot be truly accessed, only reality as it appears to human beings, distorted by power, ideology etc etc.<p>There is a good description here though might be pretty high level. <a href="https://euppublishingblog.com/2014/12/12/correlationism-an-extract-from-the-meillassoux-dictionary/" rel="nofollow">https://euppublishingblog.com/2014/12/12/correlationism-an-e...</a>
Jordan Peterson has made a few great videos on postmodernism. If anyone is interested, "Postmodernism: How and why it must be fought" [0] is fairly short and to the point.<p>I try to apply the scientific method to my internal beliefs. I've changed my mind many times when presented with a sufficiently strong argument and evidence to back it up. I'm wrong about stuff all the time, and one of the main ways to find out and fix it is to talk about it!<p>This is a large part of why I'm opposed to silencing people, instead of letting them talk and honestly engaging with them. Righteous indignation might make you feel good, but it probably won't convince anyone to change their views. You can change someone's mind by being polite, doing your research, and chatting with em. Daryl Davis shows us a prime example of this: How One Man Convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan Members To Give Up Their Robes [1].<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf2nqmQIfxc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf2nqmQIfxc</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convince...</a>
These straw man arguments always annoy the hell out of me. Please give me some textual evidence that postmodernists and co are anti-rationalists! How does Deleuze, the postmodernist philosopher par excellence, undermine rationality? He wrote two worshipful books on Leibniz and Spinoza, who were both rationalists. These "takedowns" always read like someone who has never attempted to grasp postmodernism either philosophically or sociologically, and someone who certainly has never attempted to grasp Leibniz!<p>People seem to talk around the simplest postmodernist theses, usually by knowing nothing about postmodernism. In my mind, there are two:<p>1) Doubting the truth of all knowledge, and
2) an incredulity towards all metanarratives.<p>Now, please, please recognize, that disbelieving the truth of knowledge is not the same as disbelieving truth! The Popperian concept of verisimilitude could easily be construed as an extremely rational form of this doubt. Is any scientific theory, strictly speaking, true? Or are they all models that approximate a reality we can never ultimately reach? If you think I'm being too kind towards the postmodernists with this interpretation, then you don't understand postmodernism.<p>With respect to 2), incredulity towards metanarratives was not an assertion in Lyotard's essay, but an observation about the state of our society. And is this not, obvjectively, what we observe? Don't kill the messenger! Certainly not when the messenger is Lyotard, a man who was extremely politically engaged in the Algerian revolution and whose disillusionment ultimately led him to question all grand ideologies.<p>tldr; these essays are strongman arguments that show they don't understand postmodernism or even their own terms.
This is embarrassing and supercilious.<p>The alarm-bells began to ring from the point at which I realised that the author thought too much of himself to bother to actually engage with any post-modernist. It's easy to impute a series of highly contrived 'rhetorical manoeuvres' to someone if you don't do the hard work of unpacking their thought.<p>As for the substantive first-order claims, it's hard to know where to even start.<p>The author describes the 'troll's truism' as an equivocal statement that rides on a truism to make wild claims that it cannot in fact support. When the wild claim is pushed, the proponent retreats to the truism. The truism here is social constructivism, and the wild claim that illicitly rides on this truism is the denial of a mind-independent world. First of all, I don't know in what possible sense social constructivism is a 'truism'. It only rose to any kind of institutional prominence during the 'linguistic turns' of the 20th century. And it probably remains - in philosophy departments, certainly - a minority position. I suppose that perhaps depends on what one takes to be social constructivism; but the brevity of the author's treatment does not allow for this kind of basic detail. The statement quoted from Fish is not 'trivial' in the least.<p>Second, the real question is the one that Wittgenstein struggled with between his early and late works: is language a device with a single veracious use for the naming of objects in the world, or is it something that is defined by its use as a protean tool of social communication among humans groups through historical time. I have never since any convincing response to Wittgenstein's defence of the latter in the Philosophical Investigations. And if that follows then, whether one has the ontological view that a mind-independent world exists, one is nevertheless committed to a form of linguistic contextualism, i.e. a given statement only has force relative to the criteria of language-use that prevails in the particular social context in which one is speaking. But the author simply collapses the ontological admission of a mind-independent world into an admission that linguistic contextualism has no epistemological purchase - which is completely <i>not</i> the case.<p>I can't be bothered to sift through the rest of the paper. The treatment of Foucault is especially vacuous.<p>P.S. I am not a post-modernist.
Found this interesting after recently listening to a lot of Jordan Peterson talks - especially the latest Joe Rogan Experience episode #1006 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G59zsjM2UI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G59zsjM2UI</a>
Argggh. Professors!<p>You could nitpick the absolute shit out of any non-trivial work in the humanities--even the great ones--but most people have enough sense not to.<p>BTW, Foucault is actually readable. Who knew?!
As long as analytical tradition keeps reducing philosophy into "logical programming," it'll always fail to appreciate the meaning and value of interesting continental ideas such as postmodernism.<p>This paper is just a very typical example of that failure. Getting buried under `P and Q, therefore R` statements, nitpicking individual examples, missing the whole, thinking <i>mechanically</i> and all...<p>For example, the author confuses Foucualt's notion of "truth" with basic "truth conditions" and refers to Tarski's "material adequacy condition" to "debunk" Foucualt's reasoning as "false theory."<p>The author also mechanically replaces the word "truth" in Foucault's quoted writing with Foucault's so-called "definition" of truth and expects a fairly reasonable reading to come out as if English semantics was as mechanical as <i>Lisp</i>.<p>Sorry, the paper has failed to pass the <i>facepalm</i> test while attempting to "expose" the most cited author in the whole field of Humanities as "false."<p>This kind of mechanical, logic based reasoning ignores the poetic style, metaphors, and most importantly, the whole <i>context</i> of writing by focusing on the details and missing the whole.<p>It's like teaching an AI to understand Shakespeare's poems but AI constantly finding "contradictions" that "does not compile."<p>Foucault's philosophy is mostly "political philosophy" and has nothing to do with truth conditions. He also deliberately does <i>not</i> ground his arguments on definitions after definitions. Rather, it is more like an ongoing, deep, open reflection on power, truth and subjectivity in general.<p>As to "social construction" of truth, you would be amazed at how beautifully Foucault traces back the emergence of "free market" as a "site of veridiction" for "truth" starting from 18th century and how that interacts with "power," "governance" and "subjectivity," all constructing a "regime of truth," covering multitude of implications that a "syntactic analysis of English grammar" cannot explain.<p>I think there are more things to be found that would interest a hacker in postmodern thought yet gone missed.
It is a shame this fell off the front page so quickly.<p>I'll tell you my problem with this paper. It's not that it doesn't seem, to a certain extent, well reasoned. That it does. My problem is that it does not correlate with what meagre bits of Foucault and Rorty I've encountered. (I've, uh, never heard of Bloor and to this day I haven't read Lyotard) I've come away from these encounters enriched. Certainly I get a sense of the respect that they have for the millennia-hulking colossus that is the history of ideas. I want to say to Shackel, yes, you <i>may</i> be correct but so what?<p>Here is Rorty on Truth, 1m:41s long: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzynRPP9XkY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzynRPP9XkY</a><p>I dare anyone not to be seduced by that. Whatever could he mean? What could he be getting at? There goes five years of your life.<p>These interrelated issues are not as simple as Shackel make them out to be. The game is not to pick out crappy definitions of Truth or Knowledge from your opponent's texts and to shred them into little pieces, douse them in gasoline, and then set fire to them. That's not the game. That game is <i>boring</i>.<p>Speaking of Truth and Power, and speaking Truth to Power, here is Shackel on Wikileaks: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/dec/29/wikileaks-free-speech-discretion-bearing-witness" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/dec/29...</a><p>“There is no precedence between them and in this case how they balance is heavily influenced by questions over who is our neighbour and how close they are. Whose side are you on? How much discretion do you owe? How much indiscretion must we tolerate? The answers to these questions matter a lot and are hard to agree on.”<p>I'd say we have a good idea whose side Shackel would be on if push came to shove. Does that make his philosophical arguments about t/Truth invalid? No. But if one doesn't want to rock the boat then the kind of t/Truth you're going to like is a very apolitical asocial truth thank you very much. And that's not the kind of t/Truth a lot of Continentals and Post-modernists are interested in.
Wow, looking at all the comments here, I am amazed by all the negativity around post modern theories.<p>It's strange to me to see this on hacker news, especially since we as computer scientists, do understand much better than anyone else the complexity of the human mind.<p>Post-modernism is first and foremost a realization that modernism was a failure. In modern times, people thought that we could find some universal mechanism that describes nature, and that from there we could find a logical language (or structure) that could explain the way everything works.<p>Great. But then we realized that things were way more complex than they appeared. We found that combining a large number of simple rules quickly resulted in a mess that was nearly impossible to describe. Take for instance the double-rod pendulum or 3-body problem. Physicist admit they don't fully understand what glass is, let alone playdoh, etc.<p>Nature is not neat and tidy, and neither is the human brain or human societies. That's mostly what postmodernism is about.<p>I don't really see what the problem is with that...
TBH, I've never been able to form a coherent picture of "postmedernism," I don't really understand what either proponents or oponents mean when refering to it.<p>That said, I think the place where postmodernism enters normal (non academic) human thought is not disimilar to funkier parts enlightenment era philosophy.<p>Take Des Cartes famous meditations, remembered mostly for his "stage 1" of rejecting all knowledge of anything but ones existence. He then attempts (IMO fails) to rebuild a foundation of knowledge based on pure reason, without any faulty assumptions.<p>What impact did des cartes have on normal people's thought? Almost no one is convinced by his proof of god. No one is convinced to reject all knowledge and stop there. People are still better for going through the exercise. Challenging assumptions & knowledge authorities. Aknowledging knowledge dependencies, how do I know this.<p>Des Carte's solipsism doesn't end anywhere concrete, but it opens the door to less ambituous but much more practical epistimology like Karl Popper's.<p>Likewise, I don't think that enlightement (and subsequent) ethics goes anywhere concrete. Utilitarianism, deontology or whatnot all lead to their own little absurd conclusions if you go down the rabbit hole. Very few people "adopt" them. But, the process does sometimes result in usable ethical frames for situations that do not involve a fat man in a cart.<p>So that's essentially (oops, no essences!), a lot of modern philosophy in a nutshell (are nutshells structures?). Reject earlier thoughts. Attempt to rebuild with mixed success. Meanwhile, get a better understanding of the limits of knowledge.<p>So... postmodernism... Like I said, fuzzy on what postmodern means......<p>But....I think it's a similar contribution. Reject existing frames. Criticize traditional systems. Try to find alternatives. Hopefully evolve in the process.<p>I think postmodernism opens up some doors to ideas like Yuval Noah Harari's description of human history. A big part of his ideas start with recognizing "fictions," all the things which aren't really real. Things that were made up by people. Tribes, nations, corporations, named places, kingships.... He then asks what are these for? When were they invented? What role do they play..<p>Postmodernism probably contributed something towards this way of thinking, or the public interest in it.<p>As to the methods used by postmodernist academics.... I've got no idea.