God is dead.

arcAngle · Almost a regular Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 28 Gender:

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Timothy says:

Calling into question the supremecy of truth is no less damnable than calling into question the idea of God; for in a way, both are one and the same.

In what way is that?

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And then Timothy says some more:

Postmodernism is the denial of knowable absolutes. This is not to say that everything is completely relative. That is a grave misreading of the statement. Rather, everything has a degree of relativity which can never be totally reduced. Thus reality is contextualized for every individual. The only reality that we can ever know is the reality each of us constructs through the process of perception. There is a distinct version of reality for every person percieving it. Not only that, but the culture (the context) one exists in strongly determines how and what the individual percieves. Reality, in this sense is determined by culture.

While personal viewpoint might determine perception, this perception does not change reality. Example - the blind wisemen and the elephant. Their perception did nothing to change the reality of the elephant. The process was internal, not external. Lack of internal comprehension will not change the reality of the external world. I do not understand physics. That doesn't mean the theories of physics do not work for me.

Lynne

Timothy Schoonover · Sophomore Joined: 22 Nov 2002 Posts: 269 Gender:

pctacitus

It is a paraphrase of Friedrich Nietzsche in "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense".

...a mobile army of methaphors, metonyms, and anthromorphisms - in short a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people.

Nietzsche has been likened to the grandfather of postmodernism and a intellectual force in his own right. Some have said that the common man or woman is closer to the apes than to Nietzsche.

Nietzsche's famous utterance "God is Dead" as heralded by his "Madman" is a prophecy of the death of western thinking that finds its seeds in Socrates and becomes fully realized in modernity. The irony is that this eulogy has become the battle cry of those it laments.

Thank you for participating.

Jeremy1952 · Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2003 6:29 pm Post subject: Re: God is dead.

Timothy

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The notion of paradigm shift originates from Thomas Kuhn in his work, Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Karl Popper, on the other hand, was a rationalist opponent of Kuhn who promoted an evolutionary model of knowledge, similar to the one you seem to hold.

oops

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Regarding neurology, I'm not sure I understand how this is at odds with postmodern thought? Could you elaborate?

Postmodernism relates the subjective reality we build to the language that we use. We have learned from neurology that language is only one of many systems our brains use for understanding our environment. Shape, color, smell, and affect are all handled separately. Meaningful statements about human thought require at least a basic understanding of brain structure and function.

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years and years of research

Research?

wmmurrah · Almost a regular Joined: 03 Feb 2003 Posts: 28 Gender:

The problem I have with postmodernism is that it rests on the assertion that there are no absolutes. But the assertion "there are no absolutes" is an absolute. Therefore this statement is a self-contradiction. If postmodernism were correct I would simply have to say that reality as I perceive it is objective and the postmodernist, by his own premise, would not be able to disagree.

Having said that, I would also like to say that I do believe postmodernism has added to present day thought. If by no other means, by forcing us realists to more clearly define our understanding of reality. Remember the beautiful thing about the scientific method is that it allows for the consideration and critique of any ideas.

Edited by: wmmurrah at: 4/16/03 7:10:44 pm

Timothy Schoonover · Sophomore Joined: 22 Nov 2002 Posts: 269 Gender:

wmmurrah

That particular analysis of postmodernism has contributed significantly to the discrediting of the theories among the those members of the population newly aquianted to postmodern ideas; although, in the last instance, I don't think that this particular critique is sophisticated enough to abolish postmodernism as fallacious, owing especially to the fact that it presumes the necessity of internal conformity.

Let me try to explain. Postmodernism is not so much a denial of the existence of absolutes as it is a denial of the knowability of absolutes. Once the latter assertion is accepted, the distinction between the two--that is the existence and knowability of absolutes--becomes rather irrelevent. If you can't know an absolute (even if it does exist), it doesn't really matter if it is in fact absolute. Postmodern critiques at this point like to charge that postmoderns are simply in denial of objective reality, accusing that one's perception of reality does not alter fact. This is often expressed in terms like, "if a postmodern jumps off a cliff, he or she will fall regardless of how sincerely they believe in the ability to fly." While seemingly convincing, these accusations are a misrepresentation of what is being said about knowledge. The postmodern is not denying that the material universe functions in certain ways; instead, it is a denial that our particular definition of the way in which the material universe functions can ever achieve an absolute correlation with objective reality.

Truth then is not the propositional correlation of a statement, model, or theory to reality. Truth, rather, is a particular social group's commendation of a statement, model, or theory of reality based on how well it works for that particular social group. If something works, it is commended (labeled if you prefer) as true. When something comes along that works better, it in turn recieves the commendation of true.

Essentially, truth is divested of its deified metaphysical status and becomes a practical definition with no special designations assigned to it. In this sense, truth can exist alongside contradiction and paradox without experiencing the effect of exclusive marginalization. When truth, in the metaphysical realist sense, encounters paradox, the offending beliefs and/or phemonena are often marginalized, regardless of their validity. Science's quest to comprehend all of reality in a totalized system invariably disservices those aspects of reality which do not conform to the dominant system. Even systems of description as fundamental as mathematics do not escape the constraints of parology (paradox) as Godel has shown us. Postmodernism above all is a hesitancy and skepticism of any claim or attempt to enframe all of reality withen a systemmatic and coherent body of description. This is not to say that postmodernism discourages a scientific understanding of our reality. That would be a category mistake. A more appropriate view would be to say that postmodernism encourages a more open scientific understanding of a reality which is inexorably tainted by a myriad number of distorting factors--social, perceptual, biological, economic, etc.

wmmurrah · Almost a regular Joined: 03 Feb 2003 Posts: 28 Gender:

Timothy,

I have a few questions about your previous post. I would like some clarification on an apparent contradiction in your defense of postmodernism. Early in your post you claimed:

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Postmodernism is not so much a denial of the existence of absolutes as it is a denial of the knowability of absolutes.

I take this to mean you do not believe we can know anything with absolute certainty. But you then go on to assert several absolute statements.

For example:

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Truth then is not the propositional correlation of a statement, model, or theory to reality. Truth, rather, is a particular social group's commendation of a statement, model, or theory of reality based on how well it works for that particular social group.

Have you not just claimed, however implicitly, that you know something absolutely?

Another:

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The postmodern is not denying that the material universe functions in certain ways; instead, it is a denial that our particular definition of the way in which the material universe functions can ever achieve an absolute correlation with objective reality.

How can you know that we can never develop a definition of the material world that correlates with reality?

In other words: You claim to know with certainty that you can't know anything with certainty. Of course to claim you can't know anything with certaintly you must know that you know you can't know anything. knowing that, you also must know that you know something. Therefore, you now know that you can know something and that your knowing that you can't know anything with certainty certainly wasn't known to you after all. Know what I mean? $:\$

In all seriousness, the assertion that truth is subjective or relative is absurd. Even your attempt to allow for the existence of an objective reality while maintaining that humans are unable to gain access to this reality requires, at least implicitly, that you adopt the basic assumptions of a belief in an objective reality. You commented in your post that my analysis was not "sophisticated enough to abolish postmodernism as fallacious." I disagree. I believe the utter simplicity of the "analysis" is what makes it so devistating.

cinnamon321 · Eligible to vote! Joined: 30 Jan 2003 Posts: 21 Gender:

I'm a philosophy noob. I don't know that much about it. I read everyone's posts and all I can say is that when I hit my head really hard on the wall I know the wall is there. And when a friend hits his or her head on the same wall, he or she knows it's there as well. Even though I don't engage in this activity regularly, I see it as evidence enough of a tangible objective reality. The existence of the wall is "fact" and that particular fact is "true". Therefore, truth is not subjective either in my opinion.

Timothy Schoonover · Sophomore Joined: 22 Nov 2002 Posts: 269 Gender:

I hope that you do not think that by describing your argument as unsophisticated, I was implying that your ability to critique a theory was also unsophisticated, or that the argument in this context was invalid and undeserving of discussion. Both are categorically false. The statement was an honest evaluation of how this particular argument ultimately fairs against the arguments of postmodernism. In other words, while I admit that it is problematic in certain regards, I don't think that it fatalistic to postmodernism as a whole, nor is it an issue that hasn't, in my opinion, been adequately dealt with by various philosophers in the past.

The ultimate problem with the argument, in my mind, is that it is a misinterpretation of the postmodernists position--not an intentional misinterpretation, but one that stems from the way in which realists understand reality. When a realist says, "true knowledge must correspond to reality," he or she is making a positive assertion about what truth is, and as such, must avoid self-contradiction in their claims. The postmodernist (or pragmatist), however, suspects the validity of this claim and argues that the nature of truth is not axiomatic (as the realist suggests), or that the nature of truth is anything at all. The postmodern is not making a positive assertion. The postmodern is not making an assertion at all, as far as what they feel the nature of truth to be. Rather, the postmodern is merely making a negative statement about the positive claim of the realist. However, because the realist cannot believe that anyone would question the "self-evident" nature of truth as they posit it, they interpret the position of the postmodern as another positive assertion about truth and attempt to innappropriately apply their system of logic to it and erroneously conclude that it is self-refuting and relativistic.

Richard Rorty describes it like this:

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However, it is not clear why "relativist" should be thought an appropriate term for the ethnocentric third view[**], the one which the pragmatist does hold. For the pragmatist, is not holding a positive theory which says that something is relative to something else. He is, instead, making the purely negative point that we should drop the traditional distinction between knowledge and opinion, construed as the distinction between truth as correspondence to reality and truth as a commendatory term for well-justified beliefs. The reason that the realist calls this negative claim "relativistic" is that he cannot believe that anyone would seriously deny that truth has an intrinsic nature. So when the pragmatist says that there is nothing to be said about truth save that each of us will commend as true those beliefs which he or she finds good to believe, the realist is inclined to interpret this as one more positive theory about the nature of truth: a theory according to which ttruth is simply the contemporary opinion of a chosen individual or gorup. Such a theory would, of course, be self-refuting. But the pragmatist does not have a theory of truth, much less a relativistic one. As a partisan of solidarity, his account of the value of cooperative human inquiry has only an ethical base, not an epistemological or metaphysical one. Not having any epistemology, a fortiori he does not have a relativistic one.

The merits and demerits of pragmatism and realism do not stand or fall on the basis of this argument. Instead, the realist discrediting of pragmatism according to the argument that it is self-contrading is shown to be invalid. What must be done in order to begin dismantling the disbeliefs of postmodernism is to verify that truth has a self-evident, intrinsic nature. This is an essential antecedent to the idea of objective knowledge, but it is the very thing postmodernist doubt can ever happen. This is the realist's monumental task, but most realists aren't even aware of what is required of them.

Jeremy1952 · Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2003 10:21 pm Post subject: Re: God is dead.

Timothy

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What must be done in order to begin dismantling the disbeliefs of postmodernism is to verify that truth has a self-evident, intrinsic nature. This is an essential antecedent to the idea of objective knowledge, but it is the very thing postmodernist doubt can ever happen. This is the realist's monumental task, but most realists aren't even aware of what is required of them.

Realist, scientist, and philosopher all agree that there can be no ultimate proof that truth has an intrinsic nature. All Rorty is doing is dressing solipsism in yet another new suit. So us realists have no "monumental task" and no "requirement"; we simply eschew solipsism and get on with it. Solipsists and postmodernists eat, shit, and come in out of the rain just like everyone else. Every day in every thing you do you acknowledge that the realist is right and you are wrong. The only useful thing to do is to acknowledge that we can never have ultimate certainty, understand that it doesn't matter, and move on.

Timothy Schoonover · Sophomore Joined: 22 Nov 2002 Posts: 269 Gender:

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Realist, scientist, and philosopher all agree that there can be no ultimate proof that truth has an intrinsic nature. All Rorty is doing is dressing solipsism in yet another new suit. So us realists have no "monumental task" and no "requirement"; we simply eschew solipsism and get on with it. Solipsists and postmodernists eat, shit, and come in out of the rain just like everyone else. Every day in every thing you do you acknowledge that the realist is right and you are wrong. The only useful thing to do is to acknowledge that we can never have ultimate certainty, understand that it doesn't matter, and move on.

If, as you say, realists, scientists and philosophers all agree that there can be no ultimate proof that truth has an intrinsic nature, then we'd all be pragmatists. However, that is not exactly the case. The realist believes in the intrinsic nature of truth as a metaphysical entity that has the capacity to correspond to reality despite the fact that no proof is possible. In order to support such a position, the realist invents an epistemology in which the procedures of justification of beliefs are seen as more than localized models of what-works, they are seen as natural aspect of reality. Again and again the realist tries to refute the postmodern using the rubric their self-imposed epistemology. Again and again the realist disdainfully throws examples of physical phenomena in the face of the postmodern as evidence of 'objective reality' when in fact it is only demonstrative of the self-evidence of reality in general and speaks nothing to the fact of whether or not that reality is objectively knowable. If truth is something for which no epistemology is valid, then we can only know what works for us according to the various models we construct. But just because a model works for us right now, doesn't mean that it objectively represents anything.


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