Your refusal to swallow claims has precisely no effect on their validity.
Again, your certainty about the validity of your own belief does not constrain reality.
Since I have no trouble at all assigning meaning to the propositions you claim lack meaning, your claim is false.
That’s rather confusing.
Do you accept that time dilation is a thing? Do you accept that different frames of reference can have different observations of an event?
Frames of reference and moving coordinate systems are abstract things. They don’t observe anything anymore than unicorns do.
Can different observers have different observations of an event? Sure, nothing counterintuitive or strange about that.
Have you ever seen each of two clocks in motion relative to each other “tick” slower than the other or two measuring rods in motion relative to each other be shorter than the other?
Not correct. Those propositions have no meaning for you. Confine your claim about meaning to yourself and you’ll be fine. You framed it as a universal claim that there is no meaningful content to the propositions, a claim that can be falsified if others do assign meaningful content to them.
I’m one of those weirdos that, despite being a researcher, find the questions of philosophy more “important” than those of science. Questions of values, morals, ultimate existence are all the domain of philosophy and not science (though science can obviously weigh in on various points). Still, I don’t have any hope that philosophy will ever converge to an answer to any of its questions the way science seems to be doing with a falsifiable method. I don’t read a lot of academic philosophy (and probably would not understand much of it anyways), so perhaps I only find it useful because I know the basics and the stuff relevant to my research, such as epistemology.
In a similar way, I find postmodernism to be a useful exercise even if it doesn’t have much “practical” use outside of teaching us to question our assumptions and biases. In other words, I find philosophy and postmodernism “useful to me and my thinking” but perhaps not as “useful to the world” in its current state compared to something like engineering. When I was an undergraduate, I remember having this strange realization that the reason we need more engineers nowadays is we have more knowledge of the world but don’t always put this knowledge into useful practice. Mathematics is a good example: mathematical results tend to eventually be useful to engineers, but sometimes this is a good distance out from their initial discovery. And some mathematicians even try to come up with mathematics that they think do not have any practical applications, but us engineers keep finding ways to put it into practice 
I’ve heard people say it violates the law of non-contradiction by being two (mutually independent) things paradoxically. I’m not sure if there’s some way to synthesize this, but I do think modern physics is very strange and certainly goes against the way we may “expect” a mechanistic universe (in a Laplacian and Newtonian sense) to behave.
Oops. Hit “post” when I wanted to save for later. Sorry.
Has anyone else read/Is anyone else reading the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on Postmodernism that Jay shared? I’m working my way through it.
I am particularly interested in thoughts from scientists (including students of science/s) regarding this section, which is in section 2 of the article, “The Postmodern Condition”:
Lyotard points out that while science has sought to distinguish itself from narrative knowledge in the form of tribal wisdom communicated through myths and legends, modern philosophy has sought to provide legitimating narratives for science in the form of “the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth,” (Lyotard 1984 [1979], xxiii). Science, however, plays the language game of denotation to the exclusion of all others, and in this respect it displaces narrative knowledge, including the meta-narratives of philosophy. This is due, in part, to what Lyotard characterizes as the rapid growth of technologies and techniques in the second half of the twentieth century, where the emphasis of knowledge has shifted from the ends of human action to its means (Lyotard 1984 [1979], 37). This has eroded the speculative game of philosophy and set each science free to develop independently of philosophical grounding or systematic organization. “I define postmodern as incredulity toward meta-narratives,” says Lyotard (Lyotard 1984 [1979], xxiv). As a result, new, hybrid disciplines develop without connection to old epistemic traditions, especially philosophy, and this means science only plays its own game and cannot legitimate others, such as moral prescription.
The compartmentalization of knowledge and the dissolution of epistemic coherence is a concern for researchers and philosophers alike. As Lyotard notes, “Lamenting the ‘loss of meaning’ in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative” (Lyotard 1984 [1979], 26). Indeed, for Lyotard, the de-realization of the world means the disintegration of narrative elements into “clouds” of linguistic combinations and collisions among innumerable, heterogeneous language games. Furthermore, within each game the subject moves from position to position, now as sender, now as addressee, now as referent, and so on. The loss of a continuous meta-narrative therefore breaks the subject into heterogeneous moments of subjectivity that do not cohere into an identity. But as Lyotard points out, while the combinations we experience are not necessarily stable or communicable, we learn to move with a certain nimbleness among them.
Postmodern sensibility does not lament the loss of narrative coherence any more than the loss of being. However, the dissolution of narrative leaves the field of legitimation to a new unifying criterion: the performativity of the knowledge-producing system whose form of capital is information. Performative legitimation means maximizing the flow of information and minimizing static (non-functional moves) in the system, so whatever cannot be communicated as information must be eliminated. The performativity criterion threatens anything not meeting its requirements, such as speculative narratives, with de-legitimation and exclusion. Nevertheless, capital also demands the continual re-invention of the “new” in the form of new language games and new denotative statements, and so, paradoxically, a certain paralogy is required by the system itself. In this regard, the modern paradigm of progress as new moves under established rules gives way to the postmodern paradigm of inventing new rules and changing the game.
I would agree that a type of “scientism” is not a great approach for the individual or for society at large. The idea that “if it isn’t science then it isn’t true” is a very misguided approach to life. There may be scientists who do follow this type of scientism, but in my experience scientists are like the vast majority of people in other walks in life. Most scientists embrace concepts of subjectivity, human emotion, and cultural legacies. While most scientists may not pursue philosophy in an academic sense, I sense they carry around a common person’s basic philosophy. People of all belief systems and religions can be found within the scientific community.
At the same time, scientists do tend to have an extra sensitive bovine excrement sensor. This may lead scientists to voice their skepticism of questionable cultural beliefs and overreliance on subjective opinions. Scientists are trained skeptics, so it can bleed over into other areas of life. I would also agree that today’s (Western) culture is tilted more heavily towards objectivity and empiricism than it was in the past. I can see how modern culture may view spiritual concepts and beliefs in a different context than previous centuries due to the increasing incorporation of science into our lives.
Withdrawn by author. Posted in a different location than intended.
Time; there’s never enough.
A discussion at supper, which brought HR (Human Resources) departments to mind, reminded me of this quote from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Postmodernism:
Heidegger’s contribution to the sense of de-realization of the world stems from oft repeated remarks such as: “Everywhere we are underway amid beings, and yet we no longer know how it stands with being” (Heidegger 2000 [1953], 217), and “precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence ” (Heidegger 1993, 332). Heidegger sees modern technology as the fulfillment of Western metaphysics, which he characterizes as the metaphysics of presence. From the time of the earliest philosophers, but definitively with Plato, says Heidegger, Western thought has conceived of being as the presence of beings, which in the modern world has come to mean the availability of beings for use. In fact, as he writes in Being and Time , the presence of beings tends to disappear into the transparency of their usefulness as things ready-to-hand (Heidegger 1962 [1927], 95-107). The essence of technology, which he names “the enframing,” reduces the being of entities to a calculative order (Heidegger 1993, 311-341). Hence, the mountain is not a mountain but a standing supply of coal, the Rhine is not the Rhine but an engine for hydro-electric energy, and humans are not humans but reserves of manpower.
I know that there is much controversy to find in postmodern thinking and criticism, but the recognition that Heidegger was on to something important with this statement (and Marx as well with similar), makes it worth study for me. Lenses that bring our basic assumptions under scrutiny and which show their immorality in a new light are important tools, which shouldn’t be rejected outright. “Those degenerate Postmoderns!” Weird as some of them may be, and as impenetrable as their writing and ideas can be, there’s much to value in their work.
The cause of an auto wreck usually isn’t in the driving of a person for the whole day but only the a last minute or two. So yeah, total condemnation isn’t helpful. What is needed is to point out the mistake made. This is not to say that a philosophy cannot be set for disaster from the beginning with aims made from the start which are contemptable. Even then, just because their aim is subverted, it doesn’t mean that nothing in their efforts will not prove useful in a different context.
Quite often in the history of philosophy, those who come after will pick up tools created by a philosopher and repurpose it for their own objectives. This can be (and often is) so different from the original intent that the previous philosopher might well be turning over in their graves. LOL
I like the crash analogy.
Do you see any particular postmodern thinkers setting out with contemptable aims?
By contemptable aims, I don’t think either of us mean to make language incomprehensible, in spite of their success at that. Their writing needs an overhaul from editors, who really do excel in transparency.
Not that I am aware of. But perhaps I haven’t read enough of their stuff to make such a judgement.
What was in my mind as I said this were things like “Mein Kampf,” Marx’s “Communist Manifesto,” and Lenin’s “What is to be Done.”
Got it. Yeah, those don’t count as PoMo, but certainly as contemptable.
Terry, I’m not at all sure what you’re getting at. Maybe addressing someone else’s post?
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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