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Eh, I don't think this is very accurate. "Postmodernism" (a terribly indescript term if I might add) had nothing to say on the order of David Hume like "hey ju
by imbnwa 6y ago
Eh, I don't think this is very accurate.
"Postmodernism" (a terribly indescript term if I might add) had nothing to say on the order of David Hume like "hey just because the sun came up today and yesterday doesn't mean you can prove it'll come up tomorrow", which is how we got Kant arguing that you can't perceive reality without fundamental laws being true, and so began modern philosophy.
The writers that are grouped under "postmodernism" were more like post-marxists: they were interested in describing social production independent of the traditional Marxist theorem that all social production (culture/ideology/religion) is a reflection of the dominant mode of the production of material things.
Michel Foucault, a pivotal writer for many other writers on post-colonialism that have become of consequence today, was explicit in interviews and his writings that the model of the "hard" sciences was what he aspired to, which is to say describing reality indendepent of human narrative interpolation.
It was the "soft" sciences of anthropology, psychology, criminology, and others, that Foucault was after. These he saw as social productions and he wanted to describe their cause, how they came about, without referring to some inherent rationalism (these studies are possible because we can make an assumption about the nature of human cognition) or Marxist historical materialism (they are Capitalist apparatuses of control).
This is what all his work is about and I hope it helps dispel this myth that "the postmodernists" are responsible, it would be more accurate to say that the interpretations and applications of those writers by American Humanities departments that the contemporary "identity politics" (post-colonialism seems more accurate to me) derives from.
- hertzrat 6y agoDetails aside, I do think we are in the midst of a cultural trend where nihilism and relativism are taking hold. I used to be more of a relativist myself, but those ideas are hard to reconcile with an engineering degree. In engineering, you have real consequences for being mistaken about how reality works. For most people though, reality means the social systems around them, and truth and meaning in that world is highly relative. The internet sort of accentuates this, right? Everyone’s social webs are growing and more points of view are shaping things. It’s just a shame it leads to distrust of science
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoAnd part of what comes along with "everyone's social webs are growing" is that more and more people have in their social web some kind of science crank. "All the mainstream people are wrong; they're ignoring the evidence that my theory is right." And some of these people can sound very convincing if you don't know the field. But when they say "all the experts are wrong", they're undermining the public's faith in science. Now, sometimes the experts are wrong, but that kind of situation doesn't get resolved by someone running a PR campaign on Facebook to support their pet theory. It gets resolved by hard data from careful experiments.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- imbnwa 6y ago> Details aside, Sure, it just strikes me that you're willing to sorta handwaive an entire body of work that you likely only have a passing understanding of when that looks eerily close to people waving off the body of work that is science, which they likely in turn only have a passing understanding of, if that. Hard to demand people hold a higher standard when you don't do the same. You attempted to explain a social antagonism by posing some corrupting Other badly influencing the youth, figuratively speaking, that's no different than people being anti-science which appears to them to also either be some corrupting influence or controlled by such. Social problems require more rigor than that.
- redis_mlc 6y agoYou're referring to classical (old-school) postmodernism, while the GP is referring to today's SJW/feminist/intersectionalist effort to attack "power hierarchies" (ie. undermine scientists and mathematicians because patriarchy.) Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dr. Gad Saad debunk the latter in great detail on Youtube. They invest their time in doing so to preserve the Western enlightenment for future generations, at great cost to themselves in terms of time, effort and professional standing. Note that Dr. Saad is a biologist, so simply can't concede that males and females are identical, as the current wave of feminism promotes.