Philosophical movements seldom have clear aims or objectives. — ssu

Then I'm glad you've got the pomo state on your list of concerns, saves me the hassle. The third quote in your response answers your reply to the second, so I'll leave that.

Starting from people studying the social sciences, which ought to use similar questioning, objectivity and try to refrain from subjectivity even if the answers cannot be gotten by performing laboratory tests as in the natural sciences. — ssu

This seems to be the sort of totalitarianism of metanarrative that's in dispute. I'm not sure that can be the answer. If the objection is that it's called 'science' (however soft), yeah I agree.

I just think it is unwise to reject empirical validation (or refutation) as it turns philosophy into a freewheeling imaginative discourse. I see the idea by Rorty et aliquem (e.g. Quine, so it was not just a pomo idea) that we should dispose of a representationalist account of knowledge and language as literally beyond philosophy and science, as an invitation to treat philosophy and science as just another kind of literature. — Olivier5

If your objection is to the "science is a social construct" line, I have bad news for you. Science is most definitely a social construct. Personally this doesn't injure my ego any: I had no illusions that science was anything other than something people do, disseminated via language. Perhaps your conception is closer to divine revelation.

In terms of literature, scientists also call it "the literature", but more broadly "text" doesn't just mean words.

Not only do I agree with you that empirical validation is essential, I'd say that postmodernism has nothing at all to say about facts generally, and Rorty agrees. It only concerns texts, including texts about facts. If facts are critical -- and we agree that they are -- then it is all the more important that we minimise the bullshit in our narratives about those facts. This is why people like Kuhn and Latour are important. Irrespective of their bullshit, they did out us on ours.

Because postmodernism is centred around diverse discourse, it doesn't really matter about a particular piece of pomo BS. Scientific BS is much more important to science though.

You're basically saying quantum mechanics can't work. :confused: Okay.

What he proved is that a leading pomo journal could not distinguish sense from nonsense. And that's a fact. — Olivier5

As I said dude, not here to change minds, just gathering thoughts. Your take is yours, and I don't really have any questions about it.

That was precisely Sokal's position, that pomo does NOT represent a significant threat to science at all. — Olivier5

And I'm sure he really understood that and didn't just say it to seem less petty. Nonetheless a) he was inspired to it by a pre-existing animosity toward criticism of scientific realism and scientific objectivity (Gross & Levitt), and b) since all his hoax proved is that a non-peer-reviewed journal isn't peer-reviewed, he clearly had no hopes of demonstrating much of anything at all. It seems like pure retaliation to me.

A distinction which is now blurred in modern gender studies, queer studies, fat studies, etc. i.e. the industry of grievience studies stemming from Pomo. — Olivier5

Yeah I kind of figured this is where you were going. So all along you were asking me what _my_ criteria were distinguishing between what _you_ consider sense and nonsense. Which is, of course, a nonsense question. I'm not here as a missionary; I'd rather listen to your argument as to why diversity is nonsense than try to convince you that it's not.

What specifically is there in pomo that is of use to thinking about science that stands out as opposed to say, Humean skepticism or some other variety of common sense? — Manuel

Good question. I don't think the difference generally lies in the form the criticism might take, although I think certain preoccupations are present, such as a) whether the narrative science uses to describe itself is apt, it b) whether a given scientific narrative is biased. I'd say probably the stance/motive of the critic and their methodology in reaching their criticism is more what makes it pomo. What do you think?

Yet isn't the problem when those that should use the scientific method reject it as being part of the modernist agenda? — ssu

Do you have a sort of person in mind? Scientists should use the scientific method. In my view more things should take a scientific approach. But it can't be forced on people.

Who do you think decides what just is valid or invalid criticism? — ssu

I was talking from the scientist's point of view. Science rolls on pretty merrily amid, for instance, every thread you've seen on here declaring that science doesn't work! It's pretty resilient. Which only makes it more unwise to go off on one when it is criticised. The threat of 'science being undermined' was just never credible imo.

When religion trumps science, science doesn't get stronger, it simply loses. A great example in history is what happened to science in Islam after "the Golden Age" in medieval times. People are people, even scientists. — ssu

I don't think postmodernism is aiming to take over the running of the state and, if it did, my principle concern wouldn't be for the health of scientific research. Postmodernism concerns discourse. Religion's need to dominate and crush doesn't obviously translate.

Ok, conservative meaning he's for those old ideas about science from the age of Enlightenment. Got it. — ssu

Again, no. Conservative meaning he feels he needs to defend those ideas from other ideas that might undermine them. I get that this wasn't the answer you wanted, but you don't need to rewrite my arguments for me.

How does it get stronger, if you don't believe in the goal of objectivity in science, but start from the idea that it's just a subjective power play? — ssu

I'm not sure that question makes sense. How science gets stronger has nothing to do with what a non-scientist believes, at least not in this instance. As mentioned above, Latour was very anti-science and saw (wrongly) an opportunity to make religion's candle glow comparatively by dimming science's. His criticism, however motivated, whatever his beliefs, was valid when it was valid and invalid when it was not. Invalid criticism isn't something to fear: it can be met quite simply to the scientist's satisfaction, if not the critic's. Valid criticism needs to be taken on board, and it was, to science's betterment hopefully.

And it's telling that you describe Sokal to be a conservative, which he isn't. As typical, anybody criticizing postmodernism has to be from the right. — ssu

No, I'm not talking about his politics, I'm talking about his position on science. Sokal and many like him considered criticism of science practice as an attack designed to undermine the rightness and truth of scientific realism. In reality, science only really gets stronger through criticism.

I refer to distinctions between sense and nonsense, not between sense and sense – p0m0's botorious lack, or avoidance, of (in/formal) standards of intelligibility. — 180 Proof

Specifically in the part I quoted you were referring to an obfuscation of distinctions. And I'm arguing that clarifying others' distinctions is part of the pomo toolkit. Whether something makes sense to you or not is not something I'd weigh in on.

Even shit pomo (like the aforementioned social psychology) is perfectly intelligible. That's how you know how shit it really is.

Okay, so how would you make this distinction between sensical Pomo and nonsensical one? What criteria would you use? — Olivier5

The same criteria as any other publication: internal consistency, language that is parsable and referable if not plain, and has some relevance to a broader context. This isn't a pomo distinction, it's just the distinction between sense and nonsense.

Dichotomies do this to us. We can imagine a good person, who aims to help the most helpless, aims to never harm another, isn't greedy or selfish, keeps enough to get by but puts back in. Then we can imagine the opposite, someone who takes but never gives, someone who enjoys harming others for the sake of it, greedy, selfish person. A good person and an evil person, pretty uncontroversially I expect. Jose Mujica and Hitler maybe.

Most (all) of us lie in between. We might occasionally pat ourselves on the back for a crappy 3 mile charity run or dumping coins in a beggar's cup, but might also lash out in pain, verbally or physically. We probably hoard more than we need but don't mind being taxed in general because roads are good. We're MMM: mostly morally meh.

So short answer: evil is an extreme that isn't particularly useful until someone special approaches it.

Ah that makes sense.

On the other hand, we're sure grateful you aired your irrelevant feelings. Speaking of irony... How'd you choose your handle?

This seems to have always been p0m0's raison d'etre to occult, or obfuscate (i.e. "defer"), any distinctions — 180 Proof

That doesn't seem accurate. Deconstruction (if we're counting post-structuralism) is to a large degree about discovering distinctions that the author has obfuscated.

:up:

I am asking for your opinion on the matter. Or anybody else for that matter.

Can a distinction be made between nonsense and sense in a postmodernist framework? — Olivier5

Then yes, in my opinion. I haven't read much in the way of pomo journals, and probably a weirdly high proportion of that is social psychology which really is rubbish (but click-bait in a Guardian sort of way). Other than that, the odd article about science (natch) and literature or cinema. Nothing too pseuds-corner compared to your common or garden English literature thesis. (For some reason, I had a string of English lit student girlfriends and always ended up reading their theses.)

Still, the question remains: what passes for nonsense and what doesn't, in a Pomo frame? — Olivier5

Are you asking my opinion or the criteria of journals? Because as I said there's no reason I'd have in-depth knowledge of the latter.

I notice from it that the first tenet of Carroll's belief system is that 'There is only one world, the natural world.' That is something I find hard to reconcile with Carroll's other role as cheerleader in chief for the many-worlds intepretation of quantum physics.

Carroll argues that the many-worlds theory is the most straightforward approach to understanding quantum mechanics. It accepts the reality of the wave function. In fact, it says that there is one wave function, and only one, for the entire Universe. Further, it states that when an event happens in our world, the other possibilities contained in the wave function do not go away. Instead, new worlds are created, in which each possibility is a reality.

It seems a contradiction to me. — Wayfarer

"World" here just means "branch". It's not the same as a whole separate universe with its own wavefunction. I think it's an unfortunate ambiguity, not a contradiction: world can mean 'everything there is' or 'term in the universal wavefunction'.

P S. I feel that, because the Sokal affair inevitably comes up, too much time is probably spent by me defending postmodernism from hypocritical ad hominem, when I have much stronger allegiances to science than to postmodernism. Truth is, there are also bad anti-scientific postmodernists and protopomos, such as Feyerabend and his ilk. Bruno Latour ended up pointing some really useful things out, things that are taught at least in my old physics department, but he mostly talked crap and was a hypocrite.

I think a lot of dubious people of little worth flocked to postmodernism, but I guess that's what postmodernism is about: if you want diverse discourse, you're going to get dipshits. Question is whether the freedom to be utterly wrong is a reasonable price to avoid things like medicine for women falling well behind that for men, or getting stuck in an orthodox rut.

In another, less popular recent thread of mine, I suggested that memetic inbreeding -- echo chambers -- are actually a really good way of rapidly generating new thought, so long as the emerging ideas are allowed to grow up and defend themselves in the big wide world.

After the Sokal affair, Sokal himself was a regular contributor to efforts to bring humanities and science together. Latour changed his position on science and latterly dedicated himself to awareness-raising. By the above criteria, I'd say we came out okay.

Social Text was non-peer-reviewed. I don't know which journals are and aren't peer-reviewed. Any reputable science journal is but I'm not sure whether it's better that nonsense papers get through peer-reviewed scientific journals or non-peer-reviewed humanities ones. Either way, it doesn't seem a very strong basis to attack a particular field. The end result is, irrespective of the platform, Sokal authored a nonsense paper, which is what he's remembered for. And rightly so.

Such hoaxes are useful, if only to put reviewers and publishers on notice that they'd better work diligently. — Olivier5

I can agree with that: it's like a security or penetration test, it's better to not have the shortcomings but second best is to at least be aware of them.

However:

a) This is not what Sokal was doing. He wasn't providing a useful service to Social Text or academic publication in general. His hoax was a bludgeon to attack a very particular kind of target, one that he felt threatened the status of science. In that regard, yes, he was an arsehole with a conservative axe to grind.

b) We can't be hypocrites about this. We can't support Sokal's effort to discredit a particular journal on the one hand and then, when the same happens to science journals, go 'Well that just shows how useful hoaxes are' and let science off the hook. What's bad for the goose is bad for the gander.

Do you have evidence of that? — Olivier5

I think I misremembered, apologies. It was Social Text that rejected the paper several times, not different journals. They didn't think it was philosophically very strong.

I've been on a cinema binge since the beginning of the pandemic so might I recommend Mulholland Drive — Maw

I've recently rewatched Inland Empire for the first time since it came out and was inspired to write a draft thread about it. Lynch is amazing!

There's different levels and then there's wrong? No? If we say Derrida says nothing is true and nothing matters, do we not challenge and to some extent scorn that reading? — Tom Storm

Does Derrida say nothing is true? There is a difference between something being true and us knowing it or, if we know it, knowing that it's true. Let's say some philosophical theory happens to be true... How would we know? As per Wittgenstein, the theory cannot legitimise itself, nor can a theory outside of that theory legitimise it.

For example, we believe (rightly imo) that a scientific theory is legitimised by empiricism, but what legitimises empiricism? Somewhere along the line, you hit an overt or covert preference for one thing over another and find that, if you prefer the other instead, you get a different narrative. This doesn't mean that the other is better or that the first is necessarily untrue. If you compare a scientific review of climate change to a Trump rant about climate change, one does come off better than the other. But you can't elevate the former to the status of truth that way either, otherwise you're doing this:

Scientists tend to confuse models with reality, which amounts to perpetuating the myth that science is basically divine revelation, some set of incantations that opens a portal through the walls of our subjectivity that gives us direct access to nude reality itself. — Kenosha Kid

Every theory basks in the glow of truth only until it's successor arrives.

I'm no scientistic person by any means, but if I were to start saying something like masculine power can be seen to be manifested in general relativity, I would be ridiculed, rightly so. — Manuel

Would you say that, at the time, masculine bias was manifest in medicinal science?

He goes on to say that science is "imperialistic". — Manuel

He says similar of all grand narratives, that they're "terrorising" and "totalitarian", "silencing" other discourses.

My view on this, and Lyotard did later recant some of the stuff on science, is that his error was mistaking the scientific method for a narrative when it's an algorithm. The real narrative in question is a narrative _about_ the scientific method which was a fertile area of study (Kuhn before, Latour after).

My personal belief is that we should take a bit more care not to deceive others and ourselves when it comes to communicating science to the outside world. Scientists tend to confuse models with reality, which amounts to perpetuating the myth that science is basically divine revelation, some set of incantations that opens a portal through the walls of our subjectivity that gives us direct access to nude reality itself. We're smart people, we don't believe this, but others do.

Feynman was a great layperson's pedagogue: no bullshit in his books. He's a good model for how other scientists should talk about their work and science in general.

But then arguably structuralism is also postmodern, at least insofar as it attacks meaning in written language, which is the language of philosophy, science, etc. — Kenosha Kid

Semipomo.

What gets me in the willful obscurantism. If they have something to say, say it clearly. Foucault could be quite clear when he wanted to. To say that there are many different perspectives and that one should be critical of what scientists say, is not particularly hard to state or understand, I don't think. — Manuel

True, but not a pomo-specific thing. I think more a French and German thing, right? (I'm thinking of the French and German existentialists in particular.) Lyotard, of what I've read, isn't particularly difficult in the scheme of things.

Umberto Eco? I love him but never saw him as Pomo... ? — Olivier5

Yeah I see him as a structuralist philosopher but a postmodernist author. But then arguably structuralism is also postmodern, at least insofar as it attacks meaning in written language, which is the language of philosophy, science, etc.

However, I would think that someone like you would be concerned when serious physicists like Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont show how many of the figures belonging in this school of thought, make science a total metaphor, making meaningless statements about how math and physics relate to politics or power. — Manuel

The Sokal affair seemed to me pretty stupid on both sides. Sokal got his paper rejected from several journals before finding one stupid enough to publish it. I don't think it says much of anything at all other than Sokal was an arsehole with a conservative axe to grind and Social Text had trouble unpacking his paper and ill-advisedly published it anyway.

If we are to make the claim that the worst is a synecdoche of the whole, science fares no better than postmodernism, since they returned the favour with a slew of nonsense papers that got published in peer-reviewed science journals. The auto-generated paper fiasco more recently also demonstrates that there are plenty of science journals out there that aren't as exacting as we pride ourselves on or, worse, willing to lower scientific standards in exchange for cash (viz. every pay-to-publish journal, looking at you Elsevier!). Which fits exceedingly well into the postmodern critique of science. Who's the idiots here?

It's just not an argument imo, and yet it's usually the first thing that comes up. (Kudos to us it took three pages.)

It also depends on if it is correct to label Heidegger as a postmodernist, which is not clear. But then he would be the very best of pomo, in my opinion. — Manuel

I think, as 180 showed, you could argue for centuries back to decentralising, relativistic, or sceptical precursors, proto-pomo-contenders, and things that started it all. The interwar period seems as good as postwar to me. The Third Policeman was written then iirc.

As an aside, not referring to you, but it bothers me that Descartes gets so much crap these days. It's not as if a scientist born in Descartes time would've obviously come up with general relativity, or would've obviously had seen how thought and matter cannot be metaphysically distinct. — Manuel

No, I wouldn't criticise him for dualism. I think his meditations were absolute tosh even at the time, though.

Silly. That's like asking which sacred scriptures were concerned with abortion or secularism? — 180 Proof

It would be if you were saying that a philosophy concerning abortion was already covered by the Bible. And it would be an equally apt question :)

Maybe you're right. I doubt that anyone coming out of the postwar West would have used that term or even agreed with what it came to mean. If the question is that of information and control of people, the PR industry, was ahead of all of them, clearly. They actually impacted the world to a degree which is hard to conceptualize. — Manuel

But it's not like the idea is that WWII happened, the postmodernists said "We're pomo now," and people started acting all pomo. The fallout of WWII, including in commerce, was an input to pomo theory, not an output.

So it's not as if pomo came and suddenly people became aware of different perspectives. — Manuel

Again this seems back to front. Early pomo writers like Lyotard and Baudrillard weren't spawning different perspectives: they were writing about things that had already happened... Fall of metanarratives, symbols without symboliseds, etc. These were already real before the postmodernists got involved. Or at least that's the question raised in the OP.

Maybe now I'm the one being confused but the birth of modern philosophy was with Descartes, who said that it was a good idea to, at least once, doubt everything. — Manuel

Except God. And the limitless capability of the rational mind. Perhaps he did doubt these once each, in a perfunctory manner.

Bear in mind that Indians had been organizing efforts to rid themselves of the British Raj since before WWI. — Bitter Crank

Yeah and we shot a lot of them.

No, I absolutely do. I also don't believe that nature is in the habit of finding two ways to do the same thing, so our social biology most definitely underpins our morality. However it is social biology designed to cope with small groups who fare better if they help one another. It's not designed for cities of people who don't know one another, can't possibly help everyone who needs it, and have no reason to assume reciprocity. That seems to me where social biology fails and moral philosophy enters.

However, since we have mostly been blissfully unaware of why we feel the way we do and act the way we do, moral philosophy had been forced to a) place a priori truths instead of impulses, drives and capacities, and b) confuse post-hoc rationalisation with reasoning (the fallacy at the heart of Rationalism). That's not to say that reason plays no role, rather that morality is not fundamentally reasonable (Kahneman's System 2 taking credit for everything).

Yes. But I ask you, what aspect of pomo had not been articulated previously by other people many, many years ago? I mean the sophists were a kind of postmodernism. — Manuel

I think since pomo started out as a sort of global state of the infoNation, it's less a question of precursors and more a question of contemporaneous relevance. As 180 pointed out, there were lots of precursors, but clearly Darwin wasn't talking about advertising and computing, nor was Copernicus, nor Wittgenstein, not Einstein. Nor does a philosophical precursor translate automatically into a worldwide change of view: philosophy is largely constrained to academia, even more so than science. Postmodernism started as a report on the postwar West. It was empirical first of all, not theoretical.

This is sort of jumping the gun a bit, but if we accept that the postmodern era happened at all, then we're accepting an event prior to which there was a general belief in special neutral, objective frames of reference from which you can judge the truth of certain statements and after which there was a general belief that no such frame exists (scepticism about authority): everything that uses language does so within a language game, with its own assumptions, biases, hidden dichotomies and preferences, axioms, contradictions, etc. There's a nice analogy with quantum mechanics here: observing an experiment makes you part of the apparatus... You can't not play the game.

In this regard it seems to me that something like deconstruction is warranted. The lack of a neutral perspective justifies a wariness about accepting the perspective of the author without examination. Otherwise we can take the position that, while metanarratives fell out of favour, they're not necessarily wrong, that there's an optimum set of metanarratives that are objectively true. Which is what the next thread was going to be about

In reading this thread I'm beginning to see a distinction between an era and a people. The OP had me thinking merely of an era (post-modern); but subsequent posts discuss a person (a post-modernist). The latter could be a person like me, who: 1. simply thinks the era is/was real, 2. embodies the characteristics of the era; 3. embraces the characteristics of the era; or 4. merely happens to live in the era. I might be #1 and #4 but don't know enough about myself or the characteristic to know if I qualify for #2 or #3. Still reading. But I think it might be helpful to me if the distinction was made. Maybe I'll just have to struggle to discern from context. — James Riley

Yes, this is why I stated the OP as I did. Postmodernism started out pretty much as a description, even a criticism, of trends. Some postmodernists are not in favour of postmodernism, they're just also not in favour of sticking their heads in the sands. Others do embrace it, some ironically, some not. Some flit between opposing it with respect to their metanarratives and endorsing it with respect to other, less-favoured metanarratives, a position that's pretty easy to deconstruct which we might consider the start of post-truth.

My point is that p0m0 says nothing new that has not been said clearer, more insightfully and more applicably since the late 16th/early 17th century. — 180 Proof

Which late 16th/early 17th century texts were concerned with advertising and computers?

Nice quote. I've read Derrida reject the accusation that deconstruction levels the playing field, an accusation I've never understood. Just because you can deconstruct any text, it doesn't follow that all texts are shown to be equally incoherent or unstable. No deconstructionist is going to hear a Trump speech and read a Nature article and conclude that they're much of a muchness.

I'm not wanting to pooh pooh pomo (poohmo?) criticism; I would like to hear more, but there are strong whiffs of substitution, straw men, and other fallacies in almost all critiques I've heard. Chomsky's criticism is pretty well known and well-quoted, and it's... huh?!? When something makes very clever people say very stupid things, it's worth checking out.

Ah! So everything that has precursors is a waste of time? I'm not so sure...

Darwin is a good shout, mind, and displays his merits by still being rejected on grounds of incompatibility with that most pernicious of grand narratives, completing Copernicus's good work.

But it's interesting isn't it, that simultaneously Darwin could be a good contender for The Start of it All with his godless universe and Kant is in the running for his godfulness. The problem with pomo is very dependent on what axe needs grinding.

Morality is the icing on the cake, the rationalization, for our emotional and social behavior. — T Clark

Yes, I also agree with this, yet disagree with

I think our social instincts are a major source for our moral attitudes, but thinking of empathy as a sort of proto-morality is putting the cart before the horse. — T Clark

One of us hasn't got your post right.

RESURRECTOR!!!

:100:

So you're sympathetic to postmodernism? — Manuel

I think like a lot of things it's got some vital stuff and some guff, but the reason I started this thread is because of various conversations I've had with people here that showed me that what I thought was vital/guff was not what they thought was vital/guff.

I think it's difficult to separate postmodernism from its detractors, which have never struck me as thorough. I think it's also difficult to separate descriptions of pomo society from endorsements of it, hence this thread. (I'm very surprised that so many people believe that postmodern era occurred, which is an implicit agreement that some postmodern philosophy was necessary, although not necessarily the one we got.)

Mostly my feeling is that pomo was fundamentally accurate, but no one really knew what to do with it, much like existentialism which I think of as early postmodernism. A lot of it also seems to come down to matters of taste, or rather of distaste of things held beyond criticism being criticised.

In short, there's something there, and it deserves a fairer shake, both by people outside of it and by its researchers (pomo needs a better class of postmodernist).

I'd expected to have to sum over the Yeses, but it appears that people are more split between options 2 & 3 than between 1 & 2 (given that the two-thirds in favour of 1 appears pretty consistent). I'd love to hear more from the 2s and 3s. I don't think anyone has posted a comment explicitly in favour of 2.

Don't forgot that designer drugs are also dependent on crude oil. We are burning our own ability to make medicines.

There is a growing distrust in Western medicine which strikes me as one of the many modes of postmodernism. It seems to me right now that a lot of people are willing to bet their health on it.

Yes, I was thinking something similar about the physical sciences and mathematics after relativity and old quantum mechanics. Very furtive days. Empiricism does make it easier to put yourself out there though. You _have_ to grow up in science, or you die.

I wonder whether we could predict this pattern in other kinds of information systems beyond biology, philosophy and the sciences...