What is Postmodernism?

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https://youtu.be/PotnyAxuO2Q

That was surprisingly reasonable. Except, the guy portrayed rejection of absolute truth as something 'unreasonable'.
Just to be clear: psychologybis currently going through a thing called 'the replication crisis' - the researchers tried to replicate some very fundamental psychological experiments and found they couldn't do it - but all sorts of theories are constructed on top of these experiments. No one knows what, if anything, is actually based in correct results, and what is built on accidents.

Then go to a physicist and ask him/her if the universe is a multiverse and/or a hologram and what exactly is dark matter - oh, right, an invention to make the equations work. No one knows what it is.

Objective truth may be out there. But what does objective mean? What's an object anyway?
Let alone 'truth'...

Postmodernity isn't a reaction to modernity, really, but rather it is modern ideas of inquiry turned against themselves and the tools (like language) we use to describe our knowledge.

And, yeah, the language postmodernists use is more like conceptual poetry.
But so is scientific language. Just everyone agrees not to talk about what is meant by a word like 'atom'.
Some sort of probabilistic energy fluctuation in space, which is the thing that allows probabilistic energy fluctuations to exist, but is somehow also generated by them...maybe?

Does anyone here support postmodernism?
To me, it seems to be an anti-rationalist philosophy, the antithesis of my POV...
Jordan Peterson has no time for it at all...
And neither do I at this point...

Last edited by Pepe on 26 Apr 2019, 5:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I always use the argument that part of "objective truth" is the irrelevancy of humanity...
I.E. The universe will still exist without the existence of any sentient, self-aware entity...
No matter how philosophically advanced, any self-aware entity is ultimately and in a total sense inconsequential...
Humanity is simply narcissistic if it thinks differently...

Eh, Armored Sceptics analyis tends to be rather shallow.

It's not unreasonable in and of itself, but from what I've seen from people who probably subscribe to Postmodern thinking, I'd describe it more as a "gleeful embracing of the lack of truth to anything".

Well, it's a good place to start rather than be bogged down by in-depth analysis...
One has to learn to crawl before one can walk...

But I'm not sure I want to study postmodernism to any great degree based on what I have discovered so far...

I'm starting to read 'Eros and Magic in the Renaissance' by Ioan P. Couliano and I see a lot of the signs that he was using some tools of literary critique in looking at the history of ideas. For example in the first chapter he was looking at a bit of a nonverbal tiff between Marsilio Ficino and Giovani Pico Della Mirandola (I'm well familiar with both of them from other studies) in which - to save a long explanation - Ioan demonstrated that triumphalism was as well alive and kicking then as it is now and that Ficino was showing reverence to the framing of certain ideas, by certain authors, that hearkened back to an earlier 12th and 13th century precursor to the Renaissance, ie. Arab Platonism and the like, whereas Pico Della Mirandola was showing a bit of his young and brash 'if it's not current interpretation its crap'. There are a lot of interesting side bar comments he makes about how various historians from then until now have taken part in the same mistakes.

Something he said rather explicitly in examining history:

It's not that you can't or shouldn't have an encyclopedic catalog of the ideas and their contents, just that such an archive of ideas is ultimately subordinate to the context of those ideas in terms of how you might be able to derive meaning across time and figure out the real value of a statement rather than comparing it to a current model, seeing it doesn't fit, and declaring all of the content inferior for mostly superficial reasons.

I think if postmodernism's going to be applied well it's best served as a tool for going back to examine various moments in context, the sorts of conceptual filters held in various decades in various places across the history of information and cultural development, to really get a sense of how much of how we got here today was based on real boiler-plate knowledge gained about the world we live in (and to be fair there's been a good amount of that) vs. how much of this has been accident of history or incidentals like war, economic changes, outbreaks, etc. that arbitrarily sidelined the development of certain ideas. I know Rupert Sheldrake has been beating the history of ideas drum about the current assumption of materialism (ie. completely unconscious universe outside of biology) as being more of an accident of historic philosophic cleavages such as Descartes's dualism getting emptied of half of its contents when his dualism might not have made on such solid grounds to begin with.

In the end though I do think criticism of historical assembly of ideas and their procession through time is critical if we don't want to try mooring our culture on Swiss cheese, or worse - 'brand new' ideas (blind borrowing) dissociated from historical knowledge, made enthusiastic by a lot of money or popularity. I think that last concern, ie. utopian blunders, is one of the uglier side effects of what happens when people take triumphalism too seriously. While I think we're much more guarded and cynical now than we were in the 20th century about totalizing philosophical solutions for problems we're still in a place where large blocks of our economy and body politic can go off the rails chasing something blindly and that'll only be accelerated by AI. The right way to use this stuff is to close gaps in our knowledge, not tell ourselves that there's no such thing as biological sex or that reality should break down along the lines of feelings and offense.

Fair enough, but DoctorLayman has an interesting and not terribly boggy response vid to AS, which is worth a watch.

He had an hour live chat lecture about old literature from October:

Postmodernism purports to question the value of modernistic intellectual constructs in its totality...
To me, it seems to be purely a destructive philosophy...
Do you agree?

Are there any positive aspects of postmodernism?

I couldn't find any youtube podcasts where DoctorLayman talks about postmodernism...
Could you supply a link?

What has this got to do with postmodernism?

It's a close cousin topic - ie. textual interpretation and criticism. It doesn't go off the deep end into nihilism on its own (as my earlier post mentions) but when you get to the point of eviscerating the basis of just about anything we call knowledge it means you've forgotten about both context and consequence. Context, in literature, is critical to understand not just what's there and/or overstated but also what's missing.

I know shlaifu has spent a lot more time reading through this stuff and he might be able to point out where it went from thinking about how to orient isolated facts through historical texts accurately over to taking on the assumption that texts could be interpreted as many ways as they have readers and thus have no stable meaning.

Taken in it's absurdist versions I'd agree - it's something akin to animals feeling like they got trapped in nets of reason and logic and then trying to pull themselves back out to go anti-vax, flat-earth, or whatever feels right to them.

I think Focault maybe had one of the more practical approaches, ie. pulling out history as current and consequential rather than just museum pieces and considering how it's shaped our way of thinking about things in ways that are more accidental than anything else. In the pursuit of truth though that's probably about all it's worth, ie. testing the timbers your standing on.

techstepgenr8tion should know this by now: If I find myself in a philosophical cul-de-sac, I cut my losses and move onto something more relevant/pragmatic/useful...
DoctorLayman Mentioned that the philosophy of postmodernism is actually on the decline in popularity...
In essence, it is losing relevance...
Do you agree with this?