Best arguments against post-modernism?

[Phil153]

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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. 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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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]