Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

Anyone have some good arguments against post-modernism?

I'm new to this idea, and so far it makes perfect sense (in my head) as the best ideology. On wikipedia, they quote Noam Chomsky in the criticism section as follows:

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There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.

– Noam Chomsky

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which IMO sounds like his premise is: I don't really understand it + I am the smartest man alive = it's bunk.

Can anyone add anything?

P.S. I suck at search so sorry that this was probably asked before. You can just point me to links if you want to.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

How is post-modernism an ideology? And if it is, plz explain it.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

I believe that what Chomsky is talking about is the writings of a group of people who have ensconsed themselves in the academic establishment by applying the label 'postmodern' to themselves while producing worthless drivel.

Postmodernism is a broad term and you're probably thinking of something a somewhat different.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

It's one of those words which has come to mean something completely different pending on which 'branch' uses it, and the only common denominator would seem to be a protest against something 'accepted' (could be anything from a political stance to a popular painting technique) and denial of absolute truths.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

Chomsky's point is that if it can't be explained clearly then it's not worth taking seriously.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

Which ironically is (partially) what many postmodernists protest against, claiming that sometimes simple views on complex problems can lead you away from reality.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

[ QUOTE ]
How is post-modernism an ideology? And if it is, plz explain it.

[/ QUOTE ]well, it's kind of an ideology if you apply the principles of it to your daily life. Also, from what I hear, it was originally intended to be something indefinable, but it's been refined enough that it's close enough to definable to become an ideology.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
How is post-modernism an ideology? And if it is, plz explain it.

[/ QUOTE ]well, it's kind of an ideology if you apply the principles of it to your daily life. Also, from what I hear, it was originally intended to be something indefinable, but it's been refined enough that it's close enough to definable to be an ideology.

[/ QUOTE ]

So what are the principles? (yes, I looked at the wiki, but it left me confused)

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

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Chomsky's point is that if it can't be explained clearly then it's not worth taking seriously.

[/ QUOTE ]do you guys consider that to be a valid criticism?

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Chomsky's point is that if it can't be explained clearly then it's not worth taking seriously.

[/ QUOTE ]do you guys consider that to be a valid criticism?

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes. By 'clearly' Chomsky means 'intelligibly'. There is no reason to take an unintelligible view seriously. In fact, an unintelligible view is no view at all.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

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[ QUOTE ]
Chomsky's point is that if it can't be explained clearly then it's not worth taking seriously.

[/ QUOTE ]do you guys consider that to be a valid criticism?

[/ QUOTE ]

It is valid criticism if it ultimately mean that whatever theory you propose is obfuscated by trying to cover your back from 'everything', a typical postmodernistic fallacy - but it isn't the postmodernistic ideal.

The postmodernistic ideal is more of accepting that your truths are often ultimately subjective, sometimes simple and may not always cover reality very well.

Chomsky is ultimately a structuralist (the belief that you can learn about a system through studying its structures and the relationship between them), something which is often rejected by postmodernists because whatever structures you perceive may be a subjective perception. (For instance if we as 'westerners' study some unique Papa Ny Guinea culture, we may see structures that aren't there, miss structures that are there) So it should be noted that he has some 'beef' with them.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

Since you read the wikipedia article on postmodernism, you probably saw the link to the Sokal Affair, which seems to me to be a pretty strong indictment of the whole field:

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The Sokal Affair was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a pseudoscientific paper for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal's words: "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."

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Sokal's paper on the hoax is here.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

Also worth reading is Sokal's book Fashionable Nonsense web page. It is on the general abuse of science in PM writings.

D.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

[ QUOTE ]
Since you read the wikipedia article on postmodernism, you probably saw the link to the Sokal Affair, which seems to me to be a pretty strong indictment of the whole field:

[ QUOTE ]
The Sokal Affair was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a pseudoscientific paper for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal's words: "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."

[/ QUOTE ]
Sokal's paper on the hoax is here.

[/ QUOTE ]I don't get it. Just because you fool some editors of a magazine that believes in PM, that doesn't mean the entire field is worthless. Also, maybe the editors published it, because they knew it would create more awareness of postmodernism and cause more people to question what they believe.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Since you read the wikipedia article on postmodernism, you probably saw the link to the Sokal Affair, which seems to me to be a pretty strong indictment of the whole field:

[ QUOTE ]
The Sokal Affair was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a pseudoscientific paper for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal's words: "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."

[/ QUOTE ]
Sokal's paper on the hoax is here.

[/ QUOTE ]I don't get it. Just because you fool some editors of a magazine that believes in PM, that doesn't mean the entire field is worthless. Also, maybe the editors published it, because they knew it would create more awareness of postmodernism and cause more people to question what they believe.

[/ QUOTE ]

the only thing more ridiculous than their publishing the paper was their explanation of why they did it.

luckyme

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

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I don't get it. Just because you fool some editors of a magazine that believes in PM, that doesn't mean the entire field is worthless.

[/ QUOTE ]

It was not a magazine, it was an academic journal edited by practitioners of the discipline who are supposed to be able to tell the difference between a contribution to their field worthy of publication and gibberish. They couldn't. Need I remind you of the remarks you quoted from Chomsky?

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

A belief in something with predictions that can never be falsified is faith. A belief in something that doesn't even make predictions, falsifiable or not, is a waste of time. A belief in something that you can't explain well enough to know if it even makes predictions or not is just plain stupid.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

I've tried to argue against postmodernists, but have always run into the problem that when I ask them "What is postmodernism?" they are unable to help me. It makes it hard to argue against if it cant be articulated.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

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I don't get it. Just because you fool some editors of a magazine that believes in PM, that doesn't mean the entire field is worthless.

[/ QUOTE ]
Let's be clear. This is not a magazine, but rather an academic journal, published quarterly by the Duke University Press.

I'm certainly not suggesting that the entire field is worthless. I have nothing against sociology and cultural studies, PM literary criticism, etc. But a lot of PM academics rest their theories on a foundation of hostility toward science and reason. I think this is problematic for obvious reasons.

If an academic field is so disorganized and undisciplined that a work of self-indulgent nonsense can be mistaken for a legitimate academic work, I think this is strong evidence that there is a problem with the field.

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Also, maybe the editors published it, because they knew it would create more awareness of postmodernism and cause more people to question what they believe.

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I'm not sure what you're getting at, but either the editors knew the paper was nonsensical, or they did not. Neither alternative is very appealing.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

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Chomsky's point is that if it can't be explained clearly then it's not worth taking seriously.

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His point is that some of the top practitioners are frauds. They make something sound profound because it is written so densely no one can understand it, but when closely interrogated, the arguments are either trivial or smoke.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

[ QUOTE ]
I don't get it. Just because you fool some editors of a magazine that believes in PM, that doesn't mean the entire field is worthless. Also, maybe the editors published it, because they knew it would create more awareness of postmodernism and cause more people to question what they believe.

[/ QUOTE ]
Read the paper, or at least the couple of page intro, it's well worth it. It is pure and utter nonsense and [censored] (much of it referencing writings from luminaries in the postmodern field). The fact that they couldn't intinctively recognize such nonsense and [censored], from a field they regularly critique, shows that their methodology for determining truth from fiction is entirely bankrupt.

A similar hoax (though nowhere near as egregious) was perpetrated on a physics journal dealing in string theories and the like. It showed that a decent portion of that field was masturbatory nonsense.

And a similar hoax was done on these board, where a computer generated postmodern article was passed off as the real thing. I fell for it, and it quite adequately showed that my familiarity with postmodern writing isn't that deep.

As for your OP, it's hard to critique a whole field, which in itself isn't even defined. A lot of things get published under the banner of postmodernism. But in general, postmodernism is the idea that everything is relative, that no branch or knowledge is inherently more valuable than any other, and that while male scientists and politicians are to blame for the world's ills (I was half kidding about that last one).

The trouble with postmodernism is that it has a flawed focus. It believes that the world is socially constructed and everything is filtered through social knowledge. To give you an analogy: this is like me believing that what I see is entirely constructed by my brain's visual system, and that to understand what I see, I should spend all my energy on learning about and critiquing my visual system. It's not that can't gain some valuable insight - it can - but it's a small portion of knowledge, and only a minor correction to existing truth - not a framework for understanding it or removing it. And some postmodernists go as far as claiming that the only thing that truly exists is my visual system.

Anyway, this is hard to do without examples, so feel free to post a postmodern work that you think is valid, and we'll critique it [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

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I'm new to this idea, and so far it makes perfect sense (in my head) as the best ideology.

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Can you expand on this?

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

The best essay I've read arguing against post modernism is by Richard Dawkins' :
Postmodernism Disrobed

This essay draws a lot from this book.

The piece can be found, along with many other wonderful essays in Dawkins' book: A Devil's Chaplain

-cheers

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

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I'm new to this idea, and so far it makes perfect sense (in my head) as the best ideology.

[/ QUOTE ]
Can you expand on this?

[/ QUOTE ]Well, the way I am currently applying it to my life is generally being more open and welcome to strangers. A small step, and maybe not even representative of PM, but just as I understand it, it makes sense. For example, trying not to make stereotypes of people based on money, science, religion, politics, race, gender, etc, etc, etc. Most people are fundamentally the same, but their beliefs are usually masked by institutions they support. Religious zealots tend to be closeminded about others beliefs. Same goes for every other institution I just mentioned. Tearing down these institutions and treating people like they're all equal, but have different institutions that are currently blocking what they truly believe but are afraid to admit because of shame, scorn, and other such negative emotions.

This might not actually apply to PM, because I'm still new, but it has made me a much happier person to assume that everyone has worth, just in different ways. Capitalist societies tend to make money their institution, which ends up creating much distance and hatred between those richer and poorer than us and people can end up hating more people. This similarly applies to any other institution. But this is just one example of how I can apply it to my life.

When you treat people with respect and assume they are your intellectual equal (but know stuff about the world in different ways), you can be surprised. My girlfriend made some witty banter with a gas station clerk who turned out to be the same anti-govt smart person that my girlfriend was. In the past I would have just assumed anyone poor enough to be working at a gas station would not know the true nature of politics. But she just gave respect to someone by talking to them like an equal, and got pleasing banter out of him.

However, just because I'm PM, doesn't mean I think all aspects of learning not PM are useless which is what most people in this thread seem to think. For instance, I still greatly value science as a tool to learn about the world as one of the more true aspects of learning. But it's still completely biased towards advancing the human species, because of the money involved. But science isn't the be-all end-all of knowledge. And science isn't inherently better than social development. It just turns out we concentrate more on science than social development, because most seem to equate money with happiness. It's just that science can make more money than social development, but ultimately doesn't necessarily lead to anymore happiness than social development. Although this is easier to say when you have a cushion of money being in a 1st world country. I would postulate that money currently is the leading cause of happiness, except for people that have more than enough and realize that spending != happiness. But this is all relative to today's age. I'm assuming about 100-300 years from now, most of the world will have the basic necessities of life to not have to work a majority of their lives to get the basic necessities required for happiness (food, safety, shelter, etc). Once that happens, people will start to reject the dollar as a form of happiness and truth.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

What you're describing is not really postmodernism (and definitely not academic postmodernism), but rather openness to experience and suspension of judgment. I'd say this approach is philosophically more similar to empiricism than postmodernism.

To truly go to postmodernism, you'd have to argue that a native's belief in spirits haunting the forests and causing the weather, has no more validity than your own beliefs that weather is caused by pressure gradients and moist air rising from the oceans, since the world is socially constructed.

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This might not actually apply to PM, because I'm still new, but it has made me a much happier person to assume that everyone has worth, just in different ways.

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Having mutually fulfilling encounters with a whole range of people is a worthy and interesting goal...it's something that's hard to master and that few people can do. I don't consider someone successful in life until they can do this well, since it's so important for your impact on the world and your own personal awareness. And it opens up so many opportunities.

I'd just suggest not to confuse this skill, and the mindset that goes with it, with being non judgmental and relativist. The latter isn't necessarily required.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

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But science isn't the be-all end-all of knowledge. And science isn't inherently better than social development. It just turns out we concentrate more on science than social development, because most seem to equate money with happiness. It's just that science can make more money than social development, but ultimately doesn't necessarily lead to anymore happiness than social development. Although this is easier to say when you have a cushion of money being in a 1st world country.

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I agree with you to a degree...there are scientific truths and social/moral/aesthetic ones, and the epistemic supremacy of science is often used to squash the latter in many ways.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by social development though.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

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Most people are fundamentally the same,

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I'd be interested in the way you measured and determined that from within PM ?

luckyme

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

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and that while male scientists and politicians are to blame for the world's ills (I was half kidding about that last one).


[/ QUOTE ]

Haha, for all the criticism against postmodernism in this thread, this is actually the one that really hit a mark. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

I asked my girlfriend to give some counterarguments to what you've been saying, but unfortunately she doesn't have time to respond to all the criticisms, but here's one from her:

I believe that what Chomsky is talking about is the writings of a group of people who have ensconsed themselves in the academic establishment by applying the label 'postmodern' to themselves while producing worthless drivel.

Postmodernism is a broad term and you're probably thinking of something a somewhat different.

------------Obsurdity as a critique. Don DeLillo. Kurt Vonnegut. Absurdity helps people push themselves to a level outside of power-structured ideology. No label universally fits everything. There is no metanarrative.


Quote:

Quote:
Chomsky's point is that if it can't be explained clearly then it's not worth taking seriously.

do you guys consider that to be a valid criticism?



Yes. By 'clearly' Chomsky means 'intelligibly'. There is no reason to take an unintelligible view seriously. In fact, an unintelligible view is no view at all.


--------------- But the real question becomes "unintelligible as defined by whom??" And hasn't "intelligible" been defined differently over time?? So, then, it seems that the word unintelligible is not a term which can be easily applied or understood. Which historical definition of "unintelligible" do we use? Isn't what is "intelligible" only a reflection of a power structure? so, it seems intelligible or unintelligible a view is worth assessing and considering.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

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But the real question becomes "unintelligible as defined by whom??"

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No. the real question is - why write something while admitting the reader could get an equivalent level of understanding what is intended to be communicated by studying tea leaves?

luckyme

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

[ QUOTE ]
But the real question becomes "unintelligible as defined by whom??" And hasn't "intelligible" been defined differently over time?? So, then, it seems that the word unintelligible is not a term which can be easily applied or understood. Which historical definition of "unintelligible" do we use? Isn't what is "intelligible" only a reflection of a power structure? so, it seems intelligible or unintelligible a view is worth assessing and considering.


[/ QUOTE ]

So far, a descriptively adequate grammar is necessary to impose an interpretation on a descriptive fact. Suppose, for instance, that a subset of English sentences interesting on quite independent grounds is, apparently, determined by the ultimate standard that determines the accuracy of any proposed grammar. Presumably, this analysis of a formative as a pair of sets of features appears to correlate rather closely with the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol. A consequence of the approach just outlined is that any associated supporting element does not affect the structure of the levels of acceptability from fairly high to virtual gibberish. Let us continue to suppose that a case of semigrammaticalness of a different sort is not to be considered in determining problems of phonemic and morphological analysis.

Does that make things clearer?

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

In all fairness people are picking on the worst parts of postmodernism, and when we do that to some paradigm we can always rip it apart with ease.

Postmodernism was also incredibly healthy because it took up the battle with a tendency to steamroll simplicity where it wasn't always good to do so. And it also really got in the extremely good point that for many sciences (esp. social ones), cultural differences will often make it moot to look for the 'holy grail' of the generalized model.

Fields where the postmodernistic view shines is history and the literary sciences - away with the fake layer of objective academics and back in with the fact that the researcher is indead subjective either he/she wants to or not. It has also definitively given small injections of sensibility to a lot of other sciences.

Also from alot of posts here you'd get the impression that postmodernism is some uniform movement, which it isn't. It is an extremely wide term, is often used used loosely and encompasses many different branches where it will have very different meaning.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

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which IMO sounds like his premise is: I don't really understand it + I am the smartest man alive = it's bunk.

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to use PM language, I think he is saying "there's no there there" and I believe he is right.

Check out the post modern essay generator. This stuff is just claptrap. They don't even understand what they are talking about, but they all defend eachother, and cross-reference eachother, and none of their theories are verifiable or intelligible so no one can really say anything. To an outsider, it appears that there is a "there there" because there is a vast internal conspiracy of silence that all these "theorists" are FOS.

Basically, these people created their own discipline, which has no real content, i.e. explanatory or predictive merits when analyzing data. They did this IMO because they were academic dead fish with no pond to swim in, so they invented their own game. It's like people who make up their own martial art and become experts in it, but they never enter real combat. These people do that because they suck. It's plain and simple. These people suck.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

I actually have a special hatred for post modernism, because I believe it is a disease that specifically targets people who are smart, and genuine. Like many diseases, it is progressive, and after a while, the afflicted is overcome, and is no longer themselves.

Specifically, I have known many smart people who had attitudes similar to Zeebo's. They genuinely felt there was something wrong with the way that knowledge was constructed, and they were right. They thought that marginal groups of people, such as nonwhites, or women, were being shorted in society, and that the academic establishment was complicit in this.

Somehow, instead of deciding to make sense out of the world, by, for example, reading Chomsky's own <u>Manufacturing Consent</u>, on the nature, and logic of mainsteam media, they read some other books. Somehow, instead of joining a political organization, or getting involved in a union, they joined a reading circle. Somehow instead of studying economics, or history, or political science, they decided to study "critical theory" or "women's studies". They went further and further down the rabbit hole, until their own methodology and worldview became so detached, so hermetic, so convoluted, that they passed the point of no return.

Usually what happens to these people is they become so self-satisfied in their enlightenment that they forget why they went down the rabbit hole in the first place. Let me tell you one thing. If your goal is to overthrow "patriachy" or capitalism, the odds against you doing so are zilch when the only people you talk to speak klingon.

I'm not saying that the CIA is behind this or anything. However, if the CIA were to devise a blind alley for idealists, do you think it would be significantly different than the PM rabbit hole?

cliffs notes: If PM didn't exist, the CIA/FBI would have to invent it.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

FWIW, the thinkers Chomsky references in that quote are more closely aligned with high post-structuralism, not necessarily postmodernism; Baudrillard and Lyotard are two of the highest of high postmodernists, and I haven't seen them surface in this thread.

We should probably make a distinction between some of the useful insights of postmodernism and the sometimes preposterous way it swept through academic circles, a phenomenon that led to odd slogans about death of the real in favor of the image.

Many of the thinkers Chomsky references came to the United States from France via departments of comparative literature and then through English departments. At the same time these ideas surfaced, comp lit and English departments went through an employment crisis due to budget cuts, and less than 50% of PhDs who were graduating were getting jobs. I think this in some way contributes to the radical obfuscation of much of the writing of the thinkers who took up PM in America. It simply paid to say outrageous things and that was one way to professional advancement. There was a similar culture in France at the time, much of it because of the sheer competitiveness of academics.

I think the intellectual legacy PM will be known for was its rebellion against “grand narratives” and its insistence that we know the contemporary world more so through fragmentation than any sort of complete picture. While I am not in total agreement with some of its heavy emphasis on subjectivity and its insistence on lack of agency, its ideas did lead to a healthy reassessment of the way knowledge is made, especially in some of the social sciences, where it was wrongly assumed during high positivism that you could observe human behavior objectively without bringing any of your own cultural baggage.

Slavoj Zizek is the most entertaining philosopher I know that argues against PM. Terry Eagleton does it as well in some of his literary criticism. For a good history of the Sokal Hoax, you can check out Michael Berube’s essay in his book _Rhetorical Occasions_. FWIW, I think much of Berube’s writings are an example of how postmodernism’s ideas can be used responsibly and lucidly with the goal of political action.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

There's an approach to PM that is valuable and that many people ignore. I think it's the most essential approach, and I think it resolves some of the semantic issues here.

The approach is just to take what you get out of PM. It doesn't matter if it's actually coherent or intelligible, so long as it can be the source of coherence or intelligibility. The basis of the Rorschach test was a game children played, in which they spilled ink on the ground and tried to find images in the blots. People also sometimes look up at clouds and look for images there. I think these sorts of activities can be fruitful. Postmodern philosophy is similar to ink blots and clouds in that almost everyone comes up with some interpretation, but each interpretation is a bit different. I think it's great - it's Escherian language, it contains syntactic patterns that allow meaning to be constructed (very literally) by the audience - and while the actual PM writings may be obscure or even outright meaningless, that doesn't matter as long as the reader is able to find something compelling within the text.

You can enhance this technique by getting way stoned first.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

[ QUOTE ]
The trouble with postmodernism is that it has a flawed focus. It believes that the world is socially constructed and everything is filtered through social knowledge. To give you an analogy: this is like me believing that what I see is entirely constructed by my brain's visual system, and that to understand what I see, I should spend all my energy on learning about and critiquing my visual system. It's not that can't gain some valuable insight - it can - but it's a small portion of knowledge, and only a minor correction to existing truth - not a framework for understanding it or removing it. And some postmodernists go as far as claiming that the only thing that truly exists is my visual system.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm no expert, but that sounds an awful lot like Kant's project in his Critique of Pure Reason which is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophical works since the enlightenment. I'm not saying that we should spend all our time thinking about and critiquing our 'visual system,' but it is an important first step to understanding exactly what we can lay claim to knowing and not knowing.

[ QUOTE ]
I agree with you to a degree...there are scientific truths and social/moral/aesthetic ones, and the epistemic supremacy of science is often used to squash the latter in many ways.

[/ QUOTE ]

Could you name an example of a social, moral and aesthetic truth? I can't, but maybe you define them differently.

I personally do not consider myself a postmodernist, but I do share with them an "incredulity toward grand narratives" or whatever Lyotard said. I also find it frustrating when people carelessly draw a characture of postmodernism before claiming it's all bunk (which I am not claiming the poster I quoted did, btw, though others in this thread have). Apart from anything, in my experience it seems as though 'postmodernism' is a label used almost exlcusively by critics of 'postmodern' writers, and not by those writers themselves, which makes the claim that "postmodernists can't even define what postmodernism is" particularly absurd.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

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Could you name an example of a social, moral and aesthetic truth

[/ QUOTE ]
Wine is more interesting that water
Picasso is richer than random paint splatter
The highest need of the soul is freedom
Appealing to people's good side will create a better world
There is more to life than we can imagine

As for postmodernism...deconstruction fails to understand the creative power of that which already exists. "Grand narratives" are fodder for the creative mind to make something better - even when they're wrong or slightly biased against female menstrual cycles.

I'll have to think about the visual system and get back to you.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

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[ QUOTE ]
Could you name an example of a social, moral and aesthetic truth

[/ QUOTE ]
Wine is more interesting that water Interesting how? Is someone who prefers water to wine mistaken?
Picasso is richer than random paint splatter Richer? So Picasso &gt; Jackson Pollock I guess, definitively
The highest need of the soul is freedom What about the person who contends that the highest need of the 'soul' is community or camaraderie? And what is freedom? It's not exactly the simplest concept to pin down.
Appealing to people's good side will create a better world 'People's good side'? How, and by who, is the meaning of that phrase determined?
There is more to life than we can imagineThis is a broad enough statement that you could construe it to mean many different things, but on the face of it it seems fair enough. I guess this is this a 'social truth'?

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As for postmodernism...deconstruction fails to understand the creative power of that which already exists. "Grand narratives" are fodder for the creative mind to make something better - even when they're wrong or slightly biased against female menstrual cycles.

I'll have to think about the visual system and get back to you.

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If I chose to put on my postmodernist hat, which I guess I already have in this thread, I would ask "better how" and "better for who"?

It's hard to avoid, I think, that ideology and systems of thought are to a very large extent subjectively based. To take an issue that got me thinking about this sort of stuff again recently (and given your somewhat flippant remark concerning bias against the female menstrual cycle), What should we make of the increased sexualisation of young women in western culture? Is it a natural trend within a capitalistic and individualistic society, or is it more indicative of ingrained chauvenism? Perhaps it's a bit of both, or perhaps it's something else altogether. Any number of plausible explanations could be put forward, and down the track it is a question that will probably become 'settled' and there will broadly speaking be agreement about what accounts for it and what it indicates about the society we live in yada yada yada. And, when relevant, people will defer to the agreed upon attitude concerning the increasingly sexualised presentation of women in our society when they're discussing, for instance, questions about censorship or feminism. But the initial question will only ever be 'settled' artificially, because no one will ever be able to say, definitively, that the trend is attributable to X or Y.

Anyway, that's all a bit crude, and attitudes about all sorts of things continually evolve. But there is definitely truth, I believe, in the claim that much of what we take for granted is founded on assumptions made for us, from debates that have already taken place, about issues that will for all eternity resist categorical resolution by human minds.

That's not to say that everything is as subjective as whether purple is better than green, just that for human beings a lot of big complex questions are at the end of the day settled by making educated guesses, and you only need to look around the world to see how different systems of thought can emerge based on differences of opinion concerning basic questions with elusive answers. So yes, the explanation of how echidnas got their spikes offered up by aboriginal dreamtime mythology won't hold up against contemporary theories based upon understanding of genetics, biology and evolutionary theory. However, on matters cultural, moral, political and aesthetic I think it's complacent at best to make categorical claims of thruthfulness.

Re: Best arguments against post-modernism?
 

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Could you name an example of a social, moral and aesthetic truth

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Wine is more interesting that water ...nope; to you, perhaps, but not all, or even most
Picasso is richer than random paint splatter...again, no
The highest need of the soul is freedom...possibly, but probably not
Appealing to people's good side will create a better world...nope (think about exploitation)
There is more to life than we can imagine...obviously true, but you can boil that down to "since humanity is not all on the same page, and not all having 100% shared thoughts, we obviously can't imagine everything there is to life as of now

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Do you find it troublesome that it's so hard to find moral, social, and aesthetic truth but yet society/govt/any institution tries to mandate (by law, shame, etc) it to other people? I think PM helps defeat that kind of troublesome thinking.