From what I gather, at its best it’s a critique of modernism, but it seems like many have taken it as an invitation to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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Bell-curve, brother; many can’t understand the nuances of thought.
P.S. Apologies, but that was stone-cold assessment.
P.P.S. I am not an elitist. Everyone matters.
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I wouldn’t say that they were opposed to universal human rights because they were postmodernists, but postmodernists have unwittingly helped opposition to universal ethics and human rights by providing arguments that can be used against the concept by reactionaries and fundamentalists.
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So, postmodernism is dead thought. We can’t help the reactionaries and fundamentalists further their destruction of modern man.
Postmodernism is terrorized to death…
Lots of “regular folk” in this big ol word can get painted with that fundamentalist brush.
So, stand up, and tell the fuck-ups to shut up!
I know.
that’s why I think it’s important not to hand over any arguments in the contest of ideas. Even very silly ones.
Every argument matters.
What does handing over mean? Publishing?
Cause, you know, E=mc^2 has some pretty disturbing applications…
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So, I’m going to come at this question of the value of postmodernism to science with a response I haven’t seen yet, and one that may be a little out of left field. I think even the most vacuous & warped varieties of critical literature are useful to the project of science in ways that have nothing to do with whether or not the statements they make are true.
Ultimately, when we’re doing science, we’re trying to debug our model of the world. We have a model of the world, and we know that it doesn’t properly match reality in many cases. Often, a flawed model will have such a relationship to reality that incremental changes to the model will always result in a worse fit: our model’s correctness is at some local maximum, but there’s some signficiantly more correct model many leaps away in the solution space.
One way to eat away big chunks of solution space more or less at random is to engage with deliberate provocations and counterfactuals: what would it mean for some absurdity to be true? (You can learn a great deal over a diverse range of fields by taking such a provocation seriously: consider Randall Munroe’s “What If”, the Dune Encyclopedia, and thought experiments like the single-electron universe.) Any academic work that is both original and laughably wrong can be seen as a long string of counterfactuals to explore. Another way to eat away big chunks of solution space is to add arbitrary constraints so that the most natural path to traverse for everyone else is less natural for you; you will end up travelling a different path, and increase the likelihood of digging up things that other people haven’t.
As for vacuous statements: interpretation is a dance, and it takes two to tango. Meaningless statements can have huge varieties of interpretations read into them. Barely meaningful statements supply unusual constrants which take mental gymnastics to resolve. Interpreting meaningless statements as though they are meaningful is, therefore, a potentially useful habit for provoking unusual insights, so long as you remain sufficiently self-aware to acknowledge that you’re providing a meaning that comes from your experiences & has only a very tangential relationship with the text itself.
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What is Postmodernism?
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I mean, like, I’m really asking the question.
No. Really.
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Don’t know the answer but that is definitely the question here.
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Oh, right. I haven’t quite got the hang of… this.
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It’s an umbrella label for a lot of things so it’s harder to pin down (much like modernism), but the general commonality of postmodernism is a set of responses to modernism in art, architecture, lit crit, philosophy, and other fields starting more or less around the 50s-60s that rejected various central principles of modernism in those fields. In this thread the main focus of the discussion has mostly been on academic postmodernism in the humanities, esp. re philosophy of science, where Popper’s a key modernist, while Kuhn’s response is the start of postmodernism (Kuhn became a darling of postmodernists in the humanities for his work of pointing out the shakiness of phil of sci’s foundations). In criticism and philosophy, deconstruction and post-structuralism are the main postmodern schools. With general trends towards self-referentiality, irony, and relativism it’s often slippery to pin down by design.
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Thank you good explanation.
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So it’s defined largely by what it is not?
It’s a term for placing schools of thought into taxonomies, so it’s really generic. It can just mean “schools of thought immediately following Modernism” which posits a thing (and also explains what it isn’t). It’s also one of those topics where drilling into specifics can help tack things down a while lot more. Postmodern architecture has little to do with postmodern criticism, or postmodern literature. Then in criticism you can talk more about deconstructionism or post-structuralism, both are postmodern schools of thought, a little more directly.
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this may be worth reading.
Yes, it’s centered around architecture, instead of science, but just analogize and generalize.
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