Best arguments against post-modernism?

[Jamougha]

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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.


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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?

[tame_deuces]

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.

[SNOWBALL]

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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.

[SNOWBALL]

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.

[Pokerdemic]

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.

[madnak]

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.

[Michaelson]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

[Phil153]

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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
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.

[Michaelson]

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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 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.

[captZEEbo]

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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.