On 25 Jul 2002 at 9:31, Walpurgis wrote:
>
> > What bothers many critics is how postmodernism defies
> > elementary logic.
>
> Good. Logic is not the only way one can/must think. Non-logical
> statements, emotional statements have their own validity.
>
Most sexist and racist statements are emotionally grounded.
>
> > Consider the statement "Everything is subjective." This idea is
> > nonsensical, anti-postmodernist Thomas Nagel has written, "for it
> > would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can't
> > be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it
> > can't be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective
> > claim, including the claim that it is objectively false."
>
> and
>
> > Postmodernist Paul de Man, for example, believed literary theory
> > should uphold "a radical relativism": No interpretation of a text is
> > better than another, because language is inherently unstable. He
> > conceptualized his approach in a sentence that used "sign" to refer to
> > language: "Sign and meaning can never coincide." But de Man's theory
> > breaks down when applied to his own words. They are themselves signs,
> > used to mean something. To communicate his method, he has to draw on
> > the property of language he denies it as having.
>
> This isn't a postmodernists problem. The logical positivists had the
> same difficulty with their (very logical) "verification principle". the
> problem here is one of language and self-reference, not logic or
> lack thereof.
>
The verification principle inductively proves itself with every successful scientific
prediction. The reason that it cannot be given the status of an absolute is
Popperian falsification. One can observe a million black swans, and not absolutely
conclude that the statement "all swans are white" is true, but the observation of one
black swan ineluctably proves the statement faslse. One cannot forclose the future
in which contrafactual evidence might appear; however, the difference between
100% certainty that the verification principle is valid and the present degree,
corroborated by literally billions of experiments, is so miniscule as to be only a bow
to statistics, not rationality.
>
> Dismissing such a disperate movement as "postmodernism" in its
> entirity doesn't seem very rational to me.
>
What is of value needs to be saved from itself. See COMPLEXITY AND
POSTMODERNISM by Paul Cilliers.
>
> Walpurgissss
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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