[Nppracph]

Originally posted by Sandman
You sure about that? There were plenty of atheist capitalists. That doesn't keep them from screaming"Godless Commies" to scare people.

[yharmon6614]

Originally posted by Odin
IMO Just stop right there. What you know about socialism could be weitten in one post.

[NKUDirectory]

Originally posted by Aivo½so
I wonder why people always vehemently ridicule everything that bears the slightest hint of being related to postmodernism, most often without actually even seeming to have much knowledge of what it is all about? I've noticed that psychoanalysis also often receives this treatment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair

Not even the %$#@! PoMos themselves know what PoMo is "about." The whole philosophy is a thinly disguised attack on the idea of objective reality, endorsed by contrarian perverts.

[doctorzlo]

It's not that hard to understand, is it? He submitted complete gibberish, including several sentences which made absolutely no semantic sense, and got it published in a respected journal. When confronted, the journal's editors claimed that the text still had merit somehow...due to the PoMo hypothesis that meaning resides in the reader rather than the text itself. Which basically turns all reading and critical examination into a variant on the Rorschach test, but never mind, it's non-hierarchichal and non-exploitative towards alternative paradigms and such and such.

Sokal's also written a whole book filled with ludicrous statements by major scholars with regards to physics. Check out the Richard Dawkins article linked to by the wiki entry. One of them claimed that the square root of negative one is related to "the erectile organ," and one woman asserted that fluid mechanics are less well known than solid physics because men, with their rigid genitals, fear the chaotic fluidity of women's menstrual cycles. PoMo's response to the book: Sokal didn't understand their philosophy adequately. They didn't deny that the mathematical postulate "i" might (in their opinion) arguably be connected to a man's penis in some sort of meaningful way, but in the right light it makes sense? WTF?

I've also encountered plenty of their BS during my time in college. Thankfully I probably won't run into any more during this last semester before I graduate, but they've done absolutely horrible things to Shakespeare.

[Veronnisa]

The problem with PoMo, is that for them, everything is reduced to language. Since everything we perceive in the world is mediated through our understanding of language, there is no reality other than language. We can never hope to gain an understanding of objective reality, only our own subjective realities. This is the source of "politically correct" speech. Change the language and we'll abolish oppression. Well, we see how well that worked out. Heck, anyone who'd ever worked with the retarded could have seen how that worked out, since no matter what euphamism social workers ever used, it quickly became an insult.

Basically, PoMo inverts the world on its head. Sadly for me, many PoMos consider themselves Marxists, to much chagrin amongst us real Marxists. Interestingly, it was a Marxist, George Novak, who first wrote a rather trenchant rebuttal to PoMo before it even emerged, when he took a trend in Western Marxism to its logical conclusion to show how absurd it was.

[beneitpedro]

The fact that it is heterogenous doesn't mean it doesn't have a common core. After all, a philosophy that says the objective is nothing and the subjective is everything is going to have extremely different results based on the specific individual.

[JosephNF]

Originally posted by Aivo½so
I think postmodernism actually is a so heterogenous phenomenon that the sweeping statements people often make about it are mostly misdirected. The same is true for the Enlightenment. Never stopped the postmodernists, though.

[Mjxhnapi]

I am in the group that thinks that the complete objective is unknowable..

JM

[Tilmbeinymn]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
... a philosophy that says the objective is nothing and the subjective is everything ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern
The term defies easy definition, but generally comprises the following core ideals:

A continual skepticism towards the ideas and ideals of the modern era, especially the ideas of progress, objectivity, reason, certainty & personal identity, and grand narrative in general
The belief that all communication is shaped by cultural bias, myth, metaphor, and political content.
The assertion that meaning and experience can only be created by the individual, and cannot be made objective by an author or narrator.
...

Skepticism towards metanarrative denial of objective reality.

Meaning and experience being subjective "language is everything."


It's a sad day when wikipedia makes more sense than the Che.

[Tzqowwyt]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
I actually agree that what language you have determines what thoughts you can (easily) think..

That doesn't stop new thoughts/words/etc from being developed.

That also doesn't stop things from being reality, language only restricts what parts of reality you can (easily) grasp, it doesn't mean that reality is dependent on language.

JM I think you're describing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or something like it. It's been pretty thoroughly discredited. For example, even peoples whose language lacks words for linear time can still understand the concept perfectly well. It has to be suggested to them first, and in awkward language, but to suggest that such a thing occurs because of language limitations is to turn the situation on its head. Rather, they have no words for such a concept because their way of thinking about time without it never made a word necessary. When they develop new ways of thinking about time, they develop new words for it...as you suggest.

WRT the other stuff: My culture affects the way I perceive the world, yes, but to conclude based on that premise that all points of view are equally valid is absurd. That's like saying that, because I can only photograph any given subject from one angle at a time, all photographs of that subject are equally good.

The "framework of their ideas" is, so far as I can tell, nonexistent. It's a mess of empty jargon based on random prejudices. You can make any statement Postmodern (provided it is sufficiently stupid and left-wing) by:

1. Replacing as many simple words as possible with more obscure terms which mean the exact same things. My favorite is "larger contemporary discursive networks" instead of "what his peers were saying about the subject at the time." This ensures that, instead of your reader not understanding your point because it's nonsense, your reader will not understand your point because it's too arduous to decode. As a result, most readers will conclude that your statements are too profound to be understood, where they might have just realized you're full of crap.

2. Adding quotation marks to whatever simple words you cannot or do not eliminate, in order to indicate that you are at least sufficiently trendy to doubt the existence of simple concepts. It's not a text, it's a "text." Remember, once you stop quibbling over the limitations inherent in human language, you'll be forced to actually discuss the ideas themselves. And no postmodernist is equipped to handle actual ideas on their own merits.

3. Adding modifiers and corollaries, et cetera, wherever you see a solid and definitive statement which might otherwise be verifiable. The modifiers in question should be as vague as possible, because the purpose of this step is to cover your butt from people sniffing for BS. Instead of claiming "Mount Rushmore is a giant clitoris," you should assert that the monument "contains strong clitoral subtexts in the context of Derrida and [other name drop]'s dynamic." If pressed to pin down what you mean by "strong subtexts," spin off a dissertation on the problematic nature of tasks to define "meaning." The idea that there might be something intrinsically ridiculous just in associating two such utterly disparate elements can be suppressed by leaving the exact nature of their ostensible relationship undefined.

4. Following the example of pulp novelists and continuously dropping terms related to sex and violence, even if they appear completely out of place in the current discussion. Freud set the precedent for this sort of thing, after (correctly) inferring that people have a tendency to read anything that gives them an excuse to think about sex or violence. Your readers' appreciation for the intellectual charade you maintain to hide the basic sensationalism of your argument will drive them to overlook the silliness of what you're actually saying in it.

5. Adding cynical references to oppression and censorship, with the implication that all communication is under threat from tyrannical overlords. It helps to continually cast the hypothetical as straight, rich, white and male, in order to tap into our culture's collective guilt problems on the one hand and the victim mentality prevalent in minority studies on the other. It's also beneficial in that any ideas involving conspiracies and secrecy will sell due to pure sensationalism, regardless of their independent merits. Just look at "The DaVinci Code."

6. Finally, remembering this cardinal rule: the longer, the better. The linchpin of good PoMo writing is a bombardment of tangents and contexts so massive as to paralyze the reader's ability to analyze it. Ideally, said reader should be stuck in a neverending process of trying to untangle the vast web of ideas. Since the ideas are connected to one another in an extremely dubious fashion (see #3 above), just keeping straight what exactly it is you're saying demands all mental energy. The reader should not be able to step back and examine your argument without forgetting half of it. The only way out is to give up and call it genius, or else play chicken with a massive academic establishment.

[vigraxtru]

Originally posted by Blaupanzer
The key problem for postmodernism is how do you advocate anything if nothing is true. I doubt any good postmodernist would assert that "nothing is true."
"Nothing is uniquely true" is more likely.
Or perhaps "There's always an alternate narrative."

Problem?
'A question raised for consideration or solution?' Yes.
'Trouble: a source of difficulty?' No.

So, to paraphrase:
The key matter of inquiry for postmodernism is 'How do you advocate anything if no frame of reference is uniquely true?'

Seems like a silly use of the brainpower available to such people.
I dunno.

Seems like a reasonable thing to me, given that a key source of difficulty for 20th century thought was "How do you advocate anything if nothing is objective?"

[jenilopaz]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
I am in the group that thinks that the complete objective is unknowable..

JM That ain't what I said. The totality of ojective reality is not knowable because we are finite beings and there is an infinite amount of information. What PoMos argue is that you can know nothing of the objective.

[gkihueonhjh]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
What PoMos argue is that you can know nothing of the objective. I smell empiricist BS.

PoMo stands in opposition to modernist metanarrative.
So, yes, they would mostly observe that the 'objective' is 'unknown' except within the terms of a given n"ar"r`at'i"ve.
I happen to think that's a perfectly reasonable observation.

Now Quine is certainly no PoMo. But he makes much the same observation.
The dogma of reductionism survives in the supposition that each statement, taken in isolation from its fellows, can admit of confirmation or infirmation at all. My countersuggestion, issuing essentially from Carnap's doctrine of the physical world in the Aufbau, is that our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body

And PoMo is less fatalistic than you make it out to be. It poses the question "How can we speak meaningfully about xyz if there is no final appeal to an absolute code of knowledge?"
So knowledge of the objective is a matter for inquiry. Not some discarded impossibility.

[Phouepou]

Originally posted by Terra Nullius
It's not a great example, but consider the relativistic/ quantum model. How can two, logically distinct systems both describe the same world? Is there anything useful we can say about the relationship between the two systems?
You don't know what you are talking about.

JM

[8Uxtkz7F]

Relativity works just fine in its region (the super fast, macro region).

Quantum mechanics works just fine in its region (the small).

It is looking at the very small and very fast region that we start to run into problems...

JM

[NeroASERCH]

It depends on where they are describing it.. and then the issue is looking at the boundaries..

And they aren't really logically distinct, I have heard (I don't know much s sym or string theory).

JM