It's a fair question, though, especially considering you characterizing yourself as one who is at least in pursuit of truth. We may very well be lacking in understanding of post-modernism, and surely are lacking in understanding of what you are criticizing, but is there some way you came to understand "post-modernism itself", a way which is open to us as well?



I'd also note that while I know these names, I agree with @Cavacava that this is more of a historical period -- and sometimes I think the generalization of what post-modernism states seems to me to be unfair to what particular thinkers associated with the period actually state.

It's mostly the young folks with open... — Pierre-Normand

When those research programs become "degenerative" (Imre Lakatos), then those scientists often are happy to ignore more productive areas of research, and they keep on hammering screws with a sledgehammer. — Pierre-Normand

So, some scientists do this and others do that. Those who do this tend to be older than those who do that. Got it.

I am also questioning the reductionist assumption that material composition of the ordinary objects of the human and natural worlds are any more fundamental or determinative than other equally significant (in point both of definition and behavioral determination) formal and relational features of them. — Pierre-Normand

It doesn't bother entomologists. It is possible for some of them to never utter or write the word "quark" throughout their entire professional life. Or even proton for that matter.

I am also questioning the reductionist assumption that material composition of the ordinary objects of the human and natural worlds are any more fundamental or determinative than other equally significant (in point both of definition and behavioral determination) formal and relational features of them. — Pierre-Normand

Why should reductionists bother entomologists more than - say - nudists?

I am rather arguing that such material sciences aren't any different from other sciences in point of reliance on (often merely tacit and uncritical) interpretation of the scope of their claims (e.g. the interpretation of their "laws", and of what would constitute falsification of then, or admissible auxiliary hypotheses, or genuine boundaries of the domain of the specific science, — Pierre-Normand

Put in such general terms, it is true to the point of banality.

So, some scientists do this and others do that. Those who do this tend to be older that those who do that. Got it. — Frederick KOH

I was responding to your claim that "The last time things became degenerative, physicists rushed to the new paradigm." History of science show this to seldom be the case unless your idea of a "rush" is a community wide process that spans decades to centuries. You also are ignoring the main point, relevant to this thread, that even in the odd case of a successful and rapid scientific revolution, the former set of tacit assumptions and unreflexive interpretive practices necessarily gives way to another.

I was responding to your claim that "The last time things became degenerative, physicists rushed to the new paradigm." — Pierre-Normand

And I was responding to your claim that

When those research programs become "degenerative" (Imre Lakatos), then those scientists often are happy to ignore more productive areas of research, and they keep on hammering screws with a sledgehammer. — Pierre-Normand

Put in such general terms, it is true to the point of banality. — Frederick KOH

What is true to the point of banality is a fortiori true. Yet, it is the most common thing to be denied by typical critics of "post-modernism".

What is true to the point of banality is a fortiori true. — Pierre-Normand

When something is banal , its the banal and not the a fortiori that people notice.

And I was responding to your claim that... — Frederick KOH

Yes, and you didn't contradict it, whereas mine was contradicting yours. You also still are dodging the main point regarding the inevitability of an at least tacitly understood background of conceptual practice and shared concerns and interests for sustaining claims of scientific objectivity.

Yes, and you didn't contradict it, whereas mine was contradicting yours. — Pierre-Normand

then those scientists often are happy to ignore more productive areas of research, and they keep on hammering screws with a sledgehammer — Pierre-Normand

In the generation that included Bohr and Heisenberg and many more. You are contradicting reality.

You also still are dodging the main point regarding the inevitability of an at least tacitly understood background of conceptual practice and shared concerns and interests for sustaining claims of scientific objectivity. — Pierre-Normand

Banalities don't need to be dodged.

When something is banal , its the banal and not the a fortiori that people notice. — Frederick KOH

Scientists are people too, they tend not to notice what you and I now seem to be agreed on, and indeed to angrily take exception to what you now claim to be banal. They tend to object to is as philosophical nonsense, "post-modernism", relativism, etc.

Scientists are people too, they... — Pierre-Normand

They? Most don't care.

In the generation that included Bohr and Heisenberg and many more. You are contradicting reality. — Frederick KOH

I singled out Bohr and Heisenberg as beacons of light. They were vanguard of a philosophical revolution that is quite antithetical to the "shut up and calculate" attitude that has been wrongly ascribed to them. They never shied from discussing the philosophical implications of the new physics. Most contemporary physicists still happily ignore this revolution and hope for an as of yet undeveloped interpretation of quantum mechanics that would restore something akin to the metaphysical realism that permeated the old Newtonian/Laplacian view of an "objective" mechanistic/deterministic universe that has its salient empirical features determined quite independently from our scientific practices.

Wrong.

It is a sign of a successful discipline when expansion and specialization occur. Some shut up and calculate, others work on the philosophy of quantum mechanics, others do philosophically tinged popularizations and some do combinations of the three.

You seem to need a caricature for banal arguments to be effective against.

You seem to need a caricature for banal arguments to be effective against. — Frederick KOH

Did you not notice the topic of this thread, the content of the original post, or the arguments advanced by the original poster? It would seem that my views fall squarely into the "post-modernist" tendency that s/he laments. But you assert that my views are true and banal. Maybe you think that the prejudices about science and philosophy expressed by folks like Sam Harris, Alan Sokal, Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and the original poster, are "caricatures" that ought to be ignored. Since this is a philosophy forum, and the OP purports to be advancing a philosophical argument, I am responding to it seriously rather than insisting that we ought not to care about philosophical arguments.

So you have real targets instead of carricatures.

But I am dissapointed Steven Weinberg is not on your list.

I suggest you fight him instead of shadow boxing. He is good on reductionism. You want a real fight, fight him.

But I am dissapointed Steven Weinberg is not on your list.

I suggest you fight him instead of shadow boxing. He is good on reductionism. You want a real fight, fight him. — Frederick KOH

I had assumed the OP in this thread was a human being rather than a shadow. I was a big fan of Steven Weinberg when I was a student in mathematical physics. His Gravitation and Cosmology was the textbook that we used in the general relativity class. I greatly enjoyed his Dreams of a Final Theory and the broadly Kuhnian (and somewhat anti-naive-empiricist) approach to the philosophy of science that he advocates there. His defense of reductionism, though, is fairly naive, philosophically uninformed, and sharply contradicts the pluralistic/pragmatist viewpoints that I have defended here and that you claim to be "banal". If you've been swayed by his defense of reductionism, I would recommend either George Ellis: How Can Physics Underlie the Mind? Top-Down Causation in the Human Context, or Michel Bitbol, Downward Causation without Foundations (scroll down or search the title in the page; there is a direct link to the pdf file) as counterpoints to reductionism that are both scientifically and philosophically informed.

On edit: By the way, another antireductionist paper that might interest you is Bjorn Ramberg (whom I had the chance to meet in Oslo a couple years ago), 'Post-Ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson', published in Blackwell's volume Rorty and His Critics, Brandom ed. This is the best piece in the volume, in my estimation, and maybe also in Rorty's own estimation. He had this to say in his reply: "Most of my responses in this volume are, at least to some extent, rebuttals. But in the case of Bjorn Ramberg's paper, I find myself not only agreeing with what he says, but very much enlightened by it..."

Good luck finding that opponent outside of the junior leagues. — Frederick KOH

It seems like the junior leagues are the only place that a struggle between "modernism" and "post-modernism" is actually relevant. Who else is it that sits around trying to reduce scientific truth to cultural relativism? Is there honestly any serious reason or rhyme to adopt a post-modernist attitude other than the complete over-application of skepticism toward the merits of reason and empiricism?

The only motive I can think of for someone wanting to essentially equivocate science with magic, and ritual human sacrifice with democracy, is that they're uncomfortable with the moral and epistemological condemnation that emerges from the contrast between such systems. If post-modernism is actually all about better quantifying "truth", they're not bringing much to the table by hitting the Cartesian reset button on reason and gluing it down when it comes to morality.

This iteration of post-modernism reminds me of a psychological phenomenon called "semantic saturation", which is when you continuously repeat a word until it seems absurd and loses it's meaning. If a moral thinker has no grasp of the moral roots of democracy, then in the world at large it would seem like some over appealed platitude which is just arbitrarily defined as morally superior or more pragmatically sound to other forms of governance. Likewise, an epistemological thinker who does not understand the source and scope of "scientific truth", especially in the modern world which is downright lousy with science, might take the presumed or apparent absolutism of science as something worth questioning for the sake of questioning. When a rational thinker who does not understand where reason comes from or why we use it decides to apply skepticism toward the entirety of reason itself in order to test it's robustness, is that a form of irony or just run-of-the-mill failure?

I guess the answers post-modernists are(n't) looking for or haven't found are as follows:

Scientific truth is not absolute, but as it changes and improves itself it becomes something that more closely approximates absolute truth. The evidence is it's increasing and overwhelming reliability.

If we can agree on moral ends then we can use reason and observation to discriminate between more and less effective moral positions and systems as we continually seek to improve our own. The evidence for the moral superiority of democracy, along with many other moral positions we consider to be progress, is their reliability to promote a society that is not harmful to it's citizens and their happiness. For instance, it's a moral fact that in the current world collective punishment, slavery, and female genital mutilation are all practices which are detrimental to happiness and prosperity as social or moral objectives.

The attempt at complete disassociation between reason and truth is a backward slide toward what is at best a coarse whetstone which can be used to sharpen and reaffirm the merits of applying reason to the world around us. Before our more sophisticated reasoning we more or less had magic; we could use logic to some extent, but for everything else of import we were left to adopt superstitious nonsense. Using actual meteorological observations in order to predict the weather is much more reliable than subjectively interpreting the entrails of a disemboweled goat. Likewise, the outcome of a battle can be more reliably predicted by understanding the principles of war and the size, strength, and skill of the groups involved than it can be predicted by appealing to an ancient prophecy which may or may not have any basis in reality.

Until the reliability of reason oriented "truth" declines, it's extreme value will continue to stem from it's vast utility. It's not perfect, and our body of knowledge and ability to reason still has room to improve (and is doing so), so I guess in a way "post-modernism" as I have defined it here can be be described as nothing but dissatisfaction with the moral, social, and scientific fruits of modernity.

this is more of a historical period — Moliere

According to Chomsky it was around the 1970s when a group of Parisian intellectuals and maoists (e.g. Julia Kristeva & Co.) could no longer deny the atrocities in Asia for which other maoists had been responsible. So, did they reconsider? No, instead they became outspoken post-structuralists who rejected the self-sufficiency of right, wrong, true, false, good, bad and so on. As I understand it they exploited problems of philosophy as a means to get away with a dubious past.

Not all Parisian intellectuals were maoists, of course. But most of them had (or still have) an obfuscatory style of writing which has the illegitimate benefits of making themselves (or their interpreters) the sole intellectual authorities of their claims, and thereby also immune to criticism. If one does not blindly accept their claims one runs the risk of being intimidated and accused for being ignorant.

I think postmodernism has little to do with philosophy, although demarcation seems to be a recurring theme. Kristeva, Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault, Deleuze etc. became intellectual rock-stars by making all kinds of outrageous claims embedded in impenetrable jargon which attracted the intellectually curious as well as those with a grudge against established knowledge, skills, or habits.

It is not over yet, though. Currently many professors at our universities are old fans of these rockstars. Most graduates from my school of architecture know very little about how to build, because many of their teachers think it is naive to believe that there would be right or wrong ways to build. As if an absence of right and wrong would make us creative. But the way we build will therefore be determined by power instead of knowledge or rightness. I don't think that's so creative.

What I wonder is why somebody with an interest in philosophy would want to debate a 'post-modernist'. Isn't one of the main joys of philosophy the diversity of perspectives available to us? Personally I find more emotional power and beauty in some works of Beethoven than I find in any of Mozart, even though I love Mozart too. But I can't imagine anything more pointless than having an argument with a Mozart fan about whether the Requiem is better than the 5th symphony.

Perhaps the anti-PM enthusiasts feel that's a bad analogy because they feel PM has no worth whatsoever. Well, I am unable to find anything in John Cage's 4'33", yet I am undismayed that some people do, and don't think that I am 'right' and they are 'wrong'.

I very much like some ideas some post-modernists have put forward, and there are others that I strongly dislike. If one that I dislike has actual social implications, I will argue against it on a political level. But that's arguing against the idea, not against a nebulous 'ism'. Further, the argument is aimed at persuading not the interlocutor, but the audience of the debate. Hence I am not constrained to use techniques that the interlocutor accepts as valid. All that matters is that the audience sees them as valid.

Or they could being doing it just so they don't have to work at Mc Donald's, which really isn't all that different than what you said, :-|

If I had to do one or the other, it would be a difficult choice.

Rorty and His Critics, Brandom ed. — Pierre-Normand

Actually I brought up Bouveresse v Rorty earlier in the thread - also in the volume. This debate is more "classical" in terms what you would expect in a realist v postmodernist fight.

His defense of reductionism, though, is fairly naive, philosophically uninformed, and sharply contradicts the pluralistic/pragmatist viewpoints that I have defended here and that you claim to be "banal". — Pierre-Normand

My eyes glaze over when I see claims like this, these critiques, when unpacked and compared with the exact words actually said by the target, usually show themselves to be talking about something else from what philosophically mature scientists mean.

Actually I brought up Bouveresse v Rorty earlier in the thread - also in the volume. This debate is more "classical" in terms what you would expect in a realist v postmodernist fight. — Frederick KOH

I know, which is why I brought it up, and also because of Rorty's portrait in your avatar. I thought you might have been open to considering Rorty's own views regarding reductionism. The contributors to the volume comment on various aspects of Rorty's intellectual legacy. There is no such thing as "this debate" that is uniquely being discussed across all the essays. Bouveresse makes one argument, Ramberg another.

But most of them had (or still have) an obfuscatory style of writing — jkop

I feel your pain. They will say something like

There is no self-sufficient and uninterpreted use of the formalism of quantum theory that can be of any use in making predictions of empirical observations. — Pierre-Normand

to make the same point as

doing washing machine settings based on what the manual says — Frederick KOH

There is no such thing as "this debate"... — Pierre-Normand

I was referring specifically to the Bouveresse v Rorty debate....

I thought you might have been open to considering Rorty's own views regarding reductionism. — Pierre-Normand

From this sentence of yours alone, I am very sure you have no idea what they are.

My eyes glaze over when I see claims like this, these critiques, when unpacked and compared with the exact words actually said by the target, usually show themselves to be talking about something else from what philosophically mature scientists mean. — Frederick KOH

"Mature scientists" seldom are mature philosophers and they engage in as much pseudo-philosophy as any other intellectuals (including philosophers) do when they venture strong opinions about subject matter that fall outside their fields of expertise. Since I have Weinberg's book in my library, I read it, and used to be utterly taken by it (during my naive scientistic youth) then maybe you can tell me what specific pro-reductionist argument Weinberg makes that strikes you as being very strong and/or generally ignored in the philosophical literature. (By the way, it was one of my physics teacher, Jean Le Tourneux, who had informed me of the Sokal affair, while it was beginning to make waves in 1996, and who referred me to Weinberg's piece on it in the New York Review of Books.)