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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2935 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 9, 2023

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I’m having a body snatchers moment, ever since Dase jumped in angry in a ‘da juice’ discussion I was having with SS where I was just pointing out the imho postmodern trappings of his argument. I thought with all the bitching about wokes, the criticism of postmodernism was baked in, but it appears it’s a major fault line on the board. So how many of you are postmodernists?

That depends on what you mean by "postmodernism". Not trying to be cheeky. It's an incredibly vague term and most of the philosophers who get labeled as "postmodernist" never applied that label to themselves.

A lot of 20th century French and German philosophy - i.e. the guys who get called "postmodernist" - was essentially footnotes to Nietzsche. A lot of those later guys were socialists who disagreed sharply with Nietzsche's politics, but they inherited his basic outlook on the nature of language, subjectivity, and truth: that the particular way we divide up the world into objects and concepts is essentially arbitrary, that our ability to introspect about our own mental states (beliefs, desires, motivations) is not nearly as strong as is typically assumed, that there is a fundamentally affective dimension to all allegedly "rational" discourse, that our (political, philosophical) beliefs are first and foremost grounded in who we are as biological/economic/social creatures rather than in our ability to be responsive to rational argumentation. A lot of these points are already familiar to Rationalists - see for example Scott's classic "The Categories Were Made For Man" post.

Am I a postmodernist in this sense? I would give a weak and qualified "yes". It's a set of views that's worth taking very seriously, at any rate. If you were talking about some other sense of the word postmodernism, then you'll have to specify what it is.

Fine, everyone’s least favourite part: definitions .

Wiki (I’ll bold what I find objectionable in the theory):

Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse[2] characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism; rejection of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning; and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power.[3][4] Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism,[5] with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses.[4] The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism;[4] it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.[6][7]

Initially emerging from a mode of literary criticism, postmodernism developed in the mid-twentieth century as a rejection of modernism,[8][9][10] and has been observed across many disciplines.[11][12] Postmodernism is associated with the disciplines deconstruction and post-structuralism.[4] Various authors have criticized postmodernism as promoting obscurantism, as abandoning Enlightenment rationalism and scientific rigor, and as adding nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. (Amen)

I also gave examples of my various run-ins with it on the sub in my comment to rafa.

I don't know where to start. Should I explain the problem with those claims?

For example, if you dismiss objectivity , you have a license to be as partial and biased as you want.

rejection of epistemic certainty

This is definately me. There are very, very few things that one can actually be epistemically certain about. If we are to reason, we must reason from uncertainty. On the other hand, I think this is neither a novel insight nor a peculiar one to Postmodernists. Epistemology has been recognized as a hard problem since the Greeks, if I'm not mistaken.

[rejection of] the stability of meaning

I'm not sure what this means, exactly. I think people can twist meaning in ways they find convinient, more or less arbitrarily, and then use coercion to enforce those twisted meanings, and further than they can do this for considerably longer than the normal human lifespan. On the other hand, I argue forcefully that human values and assessment of meaning have not changed since before the invention of writing, and I don't think they ever will. Sooner or later, the twists unravel, and the truth reasserts itself.

and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power.

Ideology definately has an absolutely massive role in maintaining political power.

Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism...

I do not think this matches me. I am willing to believe that you are trying to be as objective as possible, and I am likewise. If you can actually demonstrate something with evidence, I am not ever going to dismiss it with a stoner-style "what even is reality, man". What I'm not willing to do is accept as evidence things that aren't actually evidence, or apparent evidence that I have reason to be skeptical of, or to ignore the observable ways in which evidence assessment is shaped by priors, which are shaped by things other than evidence.

What I'm also not willing to do is accept a claim that intellectual questions should be assumed to be straightforwardly tractable, when I spent a couple decades explicitly believing that and over and over and over again learned, to my immense frustration, that I was wrong.

with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses.

I am pretty sure I have never done this or anything even remotely like it.

The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality

I'm not sure what this means, but I don't think it describes anything I argue.

epistemological relativism

I don't think this describes me, but you may disagree.

moral relativism

HA!

pluralism

Not past what is necessary for talking to people who think very differently from myself, I don't think.

it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization

Not entirely sure what these mean either, but they don't sound like me, I don't think.

Thoughts?

This is definately me. There are very, very few things that one can actually be epistemically certain about.

I think it's just word games between 100% certain and 99,99..% certain. So when they say 'it's not certain'(meaning 100%), people, in accordance with the common meaning of that phrase, think "then it must be 50% or something", when in reality it's still 99,99..% certain. They then use the ‘it’s not certain’ gambit on any statement they don’t like.

with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses.

I am pretty sure I have never done this or anything even remotely like it.

Hehee. What about, you know, axioms? You can spin a yarn on the conditional nature of knowledge with the worst of them.

it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization

Not entirely sure what these mean either, but they don't sound like me, I don't think.

Rejects the validity of beautiful and ugly, right and wrong, so-called prosperous societies versus less-so (on any criteria), all categorizations of sex and race, that sort of thing. I know you and the motte don’t agree with that, that’s why all the rest was such a schock.

But it is what this leads to. You're skirting the border already. They choose what is beautiful and morally right like you choose your ideology. You’re one deconstruction séance away from your entire world turning into total gobbledygook, my friend.

So when they say 'it's not certain'(meaning 100%), people, in accordance with the common meaning of that phrase, think "then it must be 50% or something", when in reality it's still 99,99..% certain. They then use the ‘it’s not certain’ gambit on any statement they don’t like.

There is a very significant difference between "I don't like your conclusions, so what even is truth, tee hee", and "you are claiming that evidence works in a way that I know, for a certainty, that it does not". I agree with you that there is evidence that is 99.99...% certain. I agree that reality intrudes, sooner or later, no matter how subtly humans may attempt to wall it out.

Where we disagree:

you appear to believe that 99.999...% certainty is the norm for questions of significance, especially questions centering on humans and the things they do. It is not, and evidence that it is not is one of those 99.999...% bits of evidence that we do in fact actually have.

You appear to think that it is easier to tell the truth than to maintain lies. This is true, if we're talking about truths we have ready access to. It is not true for things no one involved actually has comprehensive knowledge about. For those things, lies are easier, because they allow you to skip the laborious process of actually figuring out what the truth is. The truth will catch up, eventually, but we have historical accounts of how this can take generations to occur.

What about, you know, axioms?

an axiom is an assumption about the nature of reality that is taken to be self-evident, and then used to evaluate and interpret evidence. That is, it does not rely solely on evidence or proofs for its adoption, but allows one to reason about evidence and proofs without resorting to infinite regression or dishonesty. It is a directly-observable and entirely-unavoidable process of human reason in all times and in all places, and this fact can be ascertained to a very, very high degree of certainty.

How does this connect to "conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses"?

But it is what this leads to.

No, it doesn't. I take Truth and Beauty, Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice as axioms, as hard foundations from which I reason. I've chosen these as axioms not because I was forced to by a deterministic process of accumulated evidence, but because when faced with mixed evidence for all of them, I chose a specific interpretation out of a range of plausible options. I chose that option because it seemed better to me than the alternatives. It seemed better in part because of evidence, but the evidence was not remotely decisive; rather, I had a choice of theories to pursue, and that choice was made for reasons other than pure rational calculation, reasons like intuition and values-resonance. Having made that choice, I then made many subsequent choices that have served to cement me into it quite firmly, perhaps irrevocably, and a large part of that could be described as accumulating evidence: a big part of the reason I chose what I did is because I thought it would lead to a better life, and it has in fact led to a better life, beyond what I'd imagined possible at the time. Postmodern deconstruction has no appeal to me because it has nothing I want, and never will.

They choose what is beautiful and morally right like you choose your ideology.

In the sense that when I drive to church and a jihadist drives into a crowd of people, we are both "driving". The problem with what they do isn't that they choose what to believe, it's that they choose badly, and for bad motives.

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