The debate has moved beyond the simple terms that you have described. Have a look at:

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/whats-the-use-of-truth/9780231140140

I guess a post-modernist just can't take themselves (and their truth) very seriously :) .

I think I know the bit of sophistry you're referring to, it goes something like this:

P1: Absolute certainty is not achievable through empirical evidence.

Therefore,

C1: Evidence doesn't matter.

It's a pretty silly piece of reasoning, so my advice is to embrace it on behalf of your opponent in order to show them where it leads.

If evidence doesn't matter, then paying detectives to solve crimes would be a complete waste of time.

If evidence doesn't matter, then neither do the conclusions that evidence points to.

If evidence doesn't matter, then we have no way of evaluating the truthiness of any statement whatsoever. "Injecting heroine in the mornings is conducive to human health" is just as likely to correspond to reality as it's inverse, so far as we know...

When someone questions the very value of evidence itself during the course of a debate, it's probably because they have none of any quality. Point out why your evidence is stronger than theirs and you will have done your due diligence. If someone is resorting to the old"well you cannot be absolutely certain of anything" line, just tell them "we cannot be absolutely certain shit stinks, but we don't need to test that possibility with every single bowel movement".

It's a pretty silly piece of reasoning, so my advice is to embrace it on behalf of your opponent in order to show them where it leads.

Good luck finding that opponent outside of the junior leagues.

I have my own more advanced terms that I hold in reserve. The thing is, I'm looking for a deeper conception of the postmodern view of the problem. I, personally, find the argument superfluous. Post-modernism and modernism are a continuum. The post-modernism only flowers when it is expressed in reality, which then makes it modernism by every account. Postmodernism might still be logos, but it's not the expression of logos (like modernism.) The expression of logos is already in reality, whereas the logos itself isn't. The logos is the conception, and modernism will always require for the conception to have expression. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is an expression of the logos that can only exist in the logos. It is essentially the error of logos until it manifests itself in reality, and does (in reality) what it was predicted to do.

The greatest aspiration of postmodernism is to be modernism, basically. That's how lacking postmodernism is; which I think ought to be enough to prove it's inferiority to modernism. The postmodernist, then, of course, asks "is inferiority such a problem" .. his sad Nihilistic soul believes nothing. But in the same breath, you can't present any truth that a postmodernist won't shit on. Truth's only defense is being, and being is a fragile state.


If a postmodern idea comes into reality and does as it was not predicted to do, your postmodernism is basically in error. At which point, modernism takes over again to make a declaration of virtue. Modernism is still in error when it predicts results too, of course, but it's always right enough to express itself in reality (since that's required with a main axiom of truth -- it's evidence.)

Postmodernism ultimately has the least credibility for producing "good" results OR "true" results, in my view. I read "what's the use of truth" and found both of their arguments lacking, but the postmodern view was unsurprisingly more lacking. My problem is that I'm still not quite sure how to reshape the argument, but maybe I should just keep working on it. If that book can be interpreted as the pinnacle of debate on the issue, I guess it could be worthwhile.

In any case, I hope people keep arguing so I can sharpen my views on the topic.

One thing that inevitably works is sharpening your teeth. Heh.

In my view, the modernist always win an argument based on truth. But I'd like to hear how this is argued out, by others. — BenignParadigm

This is quite a common view on this and the old pf forum. An odd thing is, the assertion is rarely backed up by an actual quote from an actual post-modernist, duly critiqued.

There are many analytic philosophers who have a 'deflationary' view of truth and the odd postmodernist who bangs on about it far too much; the more I've read, the less obvious does this supposed contrast seem to me.

Oddly enough, in the arts, my view has always been that modernism did the opposite to your claim; rather, it problematized 'truth'. If you take 'The waste land', Eliot presented a diverse range of voices with no clear overarching 'truth' at all (although later he became a Christian). If you take the novel, Woolf or Joyce or Dos Passos presented us with a plurality of subjective voices as against the Victorian era novel where you always knew what the author would think. If you take painting and sculpture, the Impressionists, Picasso and the Cubists inaugurated devastating assaults on old ways of truth-telling. Take 'The rites of Spring' and Schoenberg...where is the sanctuary of truth in all this?

The thing is, I'm looking for a deeper conception of the postmodern view of the problem. — BenignParadigm

The best representative of that side is Rorty. On the plus side he writes as clearly as any analytic philosopher. Other than the other book I mentioned, look at Bouveresse and Rorty's reply in

https://www.amazon.com/Rorty-His-Critics-Robert-Brandom/dp/0631209824

I'd say truth's sanctuary is an eternal compulsion to be.

Or more accurately, it's eternal compulsion to be. Truth can be reproduced. It has logos, prior to logos.

I like Fredric Jameson's thought that Postmodernism is a historical period, one that started in mid fifties around the time of the Civil Rights movement in the US, after Abstract Expressionism, after Sputnik. This period changes how things are conceptually framed, it denies any master narrative.

He looks at the role the curator plays in our museums. The following is from his “The Aesthetics of Singularity: Time and Event in Postmodernity”

“The collective avant guard has in our time and in postmodernity been replaced by the single figure of the curator who has become the demiurge of these floating and dissolving constellations of strange objects we still call art. Maybe we don’t have great artists anymore, we have great curators”

You don't! It's a trick question. They reject truth and logic as tools of Western oppression. Hence, they are to be dismissed, not argued with.

...

What are you trying to argue?

If your trying to build an argument based on 'truth', I would be a little careful. We can construct 'truth' through mental constructions in our own mind but these 'truths' are only truth because we label them as such. When dealing with reality, our mental constructs can adequately represent the things we perceive some of the time; but not perfectly. This isn't a big deal unless you are dealing with issues such as ethics, certain philosophical questions involving non-trivial problems, etc.

While many sciences have 'truths' which are really just information on how to deal with such and such, 'truth' in philosophy can take on a grandiose meaning if you are not careful where you use it. I personally prefer the terms 'data' and 'information' than the term 'truth' when dealing subjects since those terms make it obvious they are only useful in certain contexts and subject to change.

Hopeful this advice helps you if your argument is being undermined by using the term 'truth' in ways that displeases others; otherwise I have poorly spent my time by writing this.

Postmodern "thought" is among the most pernicious anti-intellectual movements in modern times. In philosophy it matters little (most of it is sophistry) but in practice it matters quite a lot when teachers and intellectuals obfuscate right and wrong, true and false, good and bad. When large parts of the population no longer know or care about what is right or wrong, they are more susceptible to irrational decisions, unethical management at work, unethical research, or whatever power tells them to think or buy. Only might makes right in a postmodern society.

...

What exactly do you mean by post-modernism? And who are the post-modernists?

Not when the claim is supported by good reasons. But to say that no reason is better than another would be dogmatic, because without the possibility to distinguish the quality of a reason from another one would merely think what is good or true (or whatever some threat or power makes one think) without the support of good reason.

...

It's a bit more complicated than that.

Someone like Rorty would leave science alone but take issue with the philosophy of science.

He hopes that we will eventually abandon the debates of the philosophy of science for the reasons that we have already done so for the consubstantiation/transubstantiation debate - not because we have settled the issue one way or another but because we have outgrown the question.

He would agree with Richard Feynman that a scientist needs philosophy as much as a bird needs ornithology.

Postmodern "thought" is among the most pernicious anti-intellectual movements in modern times. — jkop

But my earlier point is, people are often saying this sort of thing, but not citing the apparent purveyors of it. Who are these postmodern 'thinkers'? What is the detail of their claims? How do they get to be so influential? Why is it so hard to name or quote them? It would be good to get to grips with them.

In education in the UK, for instance, we are currently moving - well, have moved - from a child-centred vogue following the 60's to a highly centralised school curriculum with more and more narrow testing and centralisation. This is not the spread of postmodern thinking, it's the opposite. Where is all this perniciousness coming from, and what is it affecting?

But my earlier point is, people are often saying this sort of thing, but not citing the apparent purveyors of it. — mcdoodle

The authors criticized in "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science" for starters.

Who are these postmodern 'thinkers'? — mcdoodle

Oh please. You have access to the Internet and Google.

Or Roger Scruton's Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands.

Oh please. You have access to the Internet and Google. — Thorongil

My point is that the op and others also have such access. In a philosophy forum I would like to see specific remarks quoted and debated. That's the intellectual pleasure of it. Exchanging waffley rhetoric I can do just as well down the pub after a couple of drinks.

The authors criticized in "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science" for starters. — Frederick KOH

Well, that was 20 years ago, and quite a lot of ink has been spilt over it. Of course the Sokal hoax was brilliant. Still, I thought there was nothing intrinscially wrong with Lacan, for instance, using maths as metaphor, but that what he did with such metaphor tended to degenerate into pretentiousness, ideas in love with themselves. Nevertheless there's stuff I've learnt from Lacan, even if I wouldn't remotely go down the psychoanalytic path. Two interesting ideas of his would be that Descartes opened a subjective can of worms via the cogito, a subjectivity which we have yet to come to terms with; and that the belief that we can arrive at a 'language of truth' or metalanguage is impossible. There is no metalanguage. A formal language is not language like our language and the one cannot be assimilated to the other.

All academic language can be made to sound ridiculous. I'm studying analytic philosophy now, at a ripe-ish old-ish age, and immersed in that Anglo-American enterprise, it doesn't seem to me that French intellectuals have any kind of monopoly on pretentious bollocks, though they can be amazingly good at it. Among the analytics, arcane writing about knowledge and justified true belief, for instance, runs Badiou pretty close.

I am, to say again, arguing for clarity. Let's not just come here and pompously declare our prejudices. Let's get down to the details of what we think and discuss and argue over them.

He would agree with Richard Feynman that a scientist needs philosophy as much as a bird needs ornithology. — Frederick KOH

Science is not tied necessarily to any particular philosophy. One can be a Young Earth Creationist and still practice science as effectively as anyone else (although a YEC might not think as creatively in the fields of cosmology and palaeontology, for example, as some others might).

On the other hand every scientist enacts some kind philosophy, just as all other people do. Birds don't need, and in fact cannot have ornithology (or philosophy) because they are (presumably) not conceptually self-aware beings. Scientists are, as human beings generally are, conceptually self-aware; so the analogy is a pretty poor one, I think.

On the other hand every scientist enacts some kind philosophy, just as all other people do. — John

Philosophy only in the sense of what's left after you take out the formal and empirical parts of your area of inquiry. Or to borrow from another phrase, "discipline of the gaps".

Sure, but a scientist will necessarily have a self-understanding that determines, at least in part, the way they work as a scientist. There are no absolutely pure "formal and empirical' parts of the discipline, that is an absolutist fantasy.

Equations and experiments.

Equations must be interpreted, and experiments conducted, by homo philosophicus. There is no getting around that fact.

It is also possible to "shut up and calculate".

And by your use of the word pure, nothing is.

Equations must be interpreted, and experiments conducted, by homo philosophicus — John

Then making coffee is also philosophy.