The Disagreement Thread

[Timothy Schoonover]

Sqwark also posted his views in the To Hell with my Genes! thread. Hop over there if you want to jump in on the conversation.

On the subject of Postmodernism:

There has been a somewhat informative discussion of Postmodernism in the God is Dead thread in the Roundtable forum. I have not read Intellectual Imposters / Fashionable Nonsense yet, but perhaps I should expedite that goal. So many books, so little time....<sigh>. At any rate, I think that I will officially suggest it in the Book Suggestion Forum. It would provide some lively and energetic conversation at least, unlike Unweaving.

However, I am continually perplexed at how so many people can point to Sokal and Bricmont as if they had thoroughly 'debunked' postmodernism once and for all. When I hear statements like this I wonder how much the person really knows about postmodernism. I mean, those persons who call themselves postmodernists cannot even delineate the boundaries of their own position, not because those boundaries are inherently ambiguous as it is construed, but because postmodernism is a term used to refer to a vast number of diverse categories. Many people are happily willing to throw out all of postmodernism when they cannot even define poststructuralism, culteral relativism, pragmatism, deconstruction, epistemic relativism, etc. To complicate matters, any given 'postmodernist' may or may not subscribe to any of the above categories. Moreover, these would-be critics often don't even know the arguments as to why postmodernists believe what they do. They simply reject one or two of the more prevalent conclusions, such as reality is unknowable or truth is relative, and laugh at the great absurdity of it all.

Postmodernism means different things to different people and what is being done with postmodernism today is different than the theories which gave rise to its name. Personally, I think that anyone who subscribes to anything that has ever been attributed to postmodernism is a looney, but its takes more "sloppy logic" as Sokal would say, to believe that postmodernism has been debunked than it does to understand that at the heart of it, postmodernists raise a valid critique many basic western assumptions.

I'm sure that there have been some amazingly ridiculous theories put forward in the name of postmodernism, just as there has been with Quantum Physics and Relativity, as Zach pointed out, but we are doing ourselves a great disservice by dismissing it as some sort of intellectual mysticism.