Incredable article on post-postmodernism.

[jwright82]

In my own ideas about apologetics, and I am desighning an intro to apologetics curriculum now, I insist that the christian and/or apologest must understand what I call the apologetical situation. It is basically this, every apologist in every age and culture must analyze the current culture, concerns, and critiques to know what we now must be developing an apologetical response to. We must know what is the current philosophy of the day. In that vien here is an absolutly incredable article on post-postmodernism.
The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond | Philosophy Now.

I didn't know that this magazine exists so I have some reading to do. But what do you all think about it? How close to the truth is it? I look forward to any and all. I wrote a paper in college, I have not finished college yet, about how postmodernism destroys the individual and that this was represented in the movie Lost In Translation, it was a class on movie as narrative art.

 

[No Name #5]

"Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised."

This statement is the fulcrum upon which the entire argument that the writer postulates turns. But in keeping with the writer's initial definition of postmodern ("postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge"), we *still* could be said to live in a postmodern era. Postmodernism is obviously a slippery term, and some postmodernists (most famously Roland Barthes) have in fact advocated the "death of the author". Whether we're a victim of the simulacra a la Baudrillard or the intentional fallacy of Barthes' literary theory, it's the elusiveness of truth that unites the postmodernists, as far as I can see. In the writer's novel term, though - "pseudo-modernism" - the elusiveness of the truth /still/ remains, even with the cooperation of the spectator/us supposedly making the truth. If the truth is something we allegedly create, then it naturally winds up going down many different, mutually exclusive avenues, varying from person to person. If that's not elusive, I don't know what is.

You obviously liked the article, though. What'd you like about it?

 

[Pergamum]

And the argument that postmodernism is over has already been made philosophically. There are people who have essentially asserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not any more, and from now on we’re going to believe in critical realism.

What do you think about critical realism?

 

[Shawn Mathis]

Thank you for the article.
Interesting analysis.

Still digesting.

"The roots of pseudo-modernism can be traced back through the years dominated by postmodernism...To a degree, pseudo-modernism is no more than a technologically motivated shift to the cultural centre of something which has always existed (similarly, metafiction has always existed, but was never so fetishised as it was by postmodernism)."

I do think this is helpful and illustrates the dangers of technology for those not rooted in the Christian faith with its emphasis on the written Word.

"A culture based on these things can have no memory – certainly not the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or future."

 

[No Name #5]

And the argument that postmodernism is over has already been made philosophically. There are people who have essentially asserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not any more, and from now on we’re going to believe in critical realism.

What do you think about critical realism?

I've never read a primary source book on the topic, but from what I understand by reading sources second-hand, Alvin Plantinga's attacks on epiphenomenalism & folk psychology could possibly provide a defeater for critical realism (CR). The main espouser of CR - Roy Bhaskar - argued that the scientific method, merely by explicating on a culture as precisely and honestly as feasible, could provide a criticism of said culture - thereby supposedly destroying the fact-value dichotomy. Now, epiphenomenalism is one of the most popular philosophies among intellectuals that are passionate about the science of human beings, and it dictates that "mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). If that's true, how could evolution (the dominant view of scientists) dispose of false culture criticisms and promote true culture criticisms instead, being only concerned with adaptive behavior, and not truth? And more relevantly, how could conscious criticism of a culture (a mental event) play a valuable, truthful part in its explication (a physical event), thus destroying the fact-value distinction like CR claims? To quote Alvin Plantinga in Warranted Christian Belief:

"Which beliefs (if any) an organism had, under this scenario, would be merely accidental as far as evolution is concerned. It wouldn't make any difference to behavior or fitness what beliefs our cognitive mechanisms had produced, because (under this scenario) those beliefs play no role in the production or explanation of behavior."

I think this argument could apply well if Bhaskar were an advocate of the folk psychological view of the causal relations of belief & behavior as well. The problem lies with evoluton: since natural selection is concerned with adaption and not truth, & false belief does not necessarily equal maladaptive behavior, how could we trust CR? Says Alvin Plantinga again:

"Perhaps a primitive tribe thinks that everything is really alive, or is a witch or a demon of some sort; and perhaps all or nearly all of their beliefs are of the form this witch is F or that demon is G: this witch is good to eat, or that demon is likely to eat me if I give it a chance. If they ascribe the right properties to the right witches, their beliefs could be adaptive while nonetheless (assuming that in fact there aren't any witches) false."

I'd be curious to hear from a person more knowledgeable on CR on whether or not these arguments are valid.

 

[CharlieJ]

This argument seems to be based on Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991. If you read the first chapter, you'll get the point.

 

[jwithnell]

This article had an instinctive appeal to me regarding what we have observed over the last decade. There was a book out a few years ago called -- I, something or another -- about a woman terribly exploited in her developing-country childhood. The whole story turned out to be totally falsified, yet was widely defended in academic circles as important because the author provided an "authentic voice." The Janet Cooke stories about the 8-year-old heroin addict followed the same path, with public officials "verifying" the story publicly, and even after the story was demonstrated to be false, one of her Washington Post editors stated: "It is a brilliant story—fake and fraud that it is. It would be absurd for me or any other editor to review the authenticity or accuracy of stories that are nominated for prizes." Yikes.

 

[jwright82]

You obviously liked the article, though. What'd you like about it?

I thought that it was fascinating how much technology has changed our ideas about things. In both modernism and postmodernism the author had sway over the reader. In this post-postmodernism that is reversed through technology so that now the reader has sway over the author, to a degree. That is one thing.

What do you think about critical realism?

I think in the context what she means is a more humble realism, critical realism. This is a pretty common reply to postmodernism in general. Whether or not it is a good thing depends upon your view of the history of western thinking.

If you hold to a more traditional apologetics than you read history much different from a VanTillian view and will see this as a good thing. It will avoid the overkills in both modernism and postmodernism. The modernist claims that we can have a god’s-eye-view of things and arrive at absolute certainty regarding everything. The postmodernist disagrees and rejects this view in favor of an irrationalism regarding those same questions. The critical realist will say sure we can know things as they are but we can never have absolute knowledge of everything and absolute certainty. They would adopt a more scientific view of knowledge. That is that every idea can at some point be disproven.

The VanTillian would regard this view as a novel attempt at trying to resolve the same old problems facing autonomous philosophies. Sure it has good qualities but at the end the day it will at its most fundamental level prove to be one more failure of the unbeliever to do things apart from God. Since every attempt to reason apart from God’s revelation (both general and special) must fail, than this one must fail to. I hold to this view so I would say that it is not a good thing. But as the saying goes to each their own.

 

[jwright82]

This article had an instinctive appeal to me regarding what we have observed over the last decade. There was a book out a few years ago called -- I, something or another -- about a woman terribly exploited in her developing-country childhood. The whole story turned out to be totally falsified, yet was widely defended in academic circles as important because the author provided an "authentic voice." The Janet Cooke stories about the 8-year-old heroin addict followed the same path, with public officials "verifying" the story publicly, and even after the story was demonstrated to be false, one of her Washington Post editors stated: "It is a brilliant story—fake and fraud that it is. It would be absurd for me or any other editor to review the authenticity or accuracy of stories that are nominated for prizes." Yikes.

Yeah you’re right. Or look at all the postmodern “readings” of things. You can get a feminist or homosexual “reading” of books that had absolutely nothing to do with those subjects. But they “read” them as though they were about those subjects. At some point we must return to sanity.

 

[jwright82]

I've never read a primary source book on the topic, but from what I understand by reading sources second-hand, Alvin Plantinga's attacks on epiphenomenalism & folk psychology could possibly provide a defeater for critical realism (CR). The main espouser of CR - Roy Bhaskar - argued that the scientific method, merely by explicating on a culture as precisely and honestly as feasible, could provide a criticism of said culture - thereby supposedly destroying the fact-value dichotomy. Now, epiphenomenalism is one of the most popular philosophies among intellectuals that are passionate about the science of human beings, and it dictates that "mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). If that's true, how could evolution (the dominant view of scientists) dispose of false culture criticisms and promote true culture criticisms instead, being only concerned with adaptive behavior, and not truth? And more relevantly, how could conscious criticism of a culture (a mental event) play a valuable, truthful part in its explication (a physical event), thus destroying the fact-value distinction like CR claims? To quote Alvin Plantinga in Warranted Christian Belief:

I have never heard of him until today. But I have been reading what I could on the internet. His view seems, and take everything I say with a big grain of salt, to be a corrective of classical Marxism. Classical Marxism died out to a degree after the failures of Russia and other communist countries. It changed and evolved into new areas.

But he seems to be offering a position that corrects, or at least attempts to, the problems inherent in classical Marxist theory. I think that the Critical Realism in the article is of the broad epistemological one.

I think this argument could apply well if Bhaskar were an advocate of the folk psychological view of the causal relations of belief & behavior as well. The problem lies with evoluton: since natural selection is concerned with adaption and not truth, & false belief does not necessarily equal maladaptive behavior, how could we trust CR? Says Alvin Plantinga again:


"Perhaps a primitive tribe thinks that everything is really alive, or is a witch or a demon of some sort; and perhaps all or nearly all of their beliefs are of the form this witch is F or that demon is G: this witch is good to eat, or that demon is likely to eat me if I give it a chance. If they ascribe the right properties to the right witches, their beliefs could be adaptive while nonetheless (assuming that in fact there aren't any witches) false."
I'd be curious to hear from a person more knowledgeable on CR on whether or not these arguments are valid.

From what I have read, and I have never read him or about him until today, he seems to be arguing along a more Lenin type of thinking. But regardless as far as culture goes he is trying to turn the social sciences into a more rigid science like physics. If the classical Marxist is correct than there must be underlying material and social forces that drive societies and cultures along. These in turn can be observed and it can be predicted where a society will go. This pipe dream failed for various reasons. But he seems to want to resurrect this idea along a different epistemological route than classical Marxism did and in theory avoid the same mistakes.

I don’t know where he goes from there to argue that he can along these lines critique a society. If you know of any particular papers or whatever in which he argues for this position than please post them. But until I can “see” his “logic” unfold I cannot answer your question. You seem to be on to something but again because of my unfamiliarity with him I cannot say.

 

[No Name #5]

I've never read a primary source book on the topic, but from what I understand by reading sources second-hand, Alvin Plantinga's attacks on epiphenomenalism & folk psychology could possibly provide a defeater for critical realism (CR). The main espouser of CR - Roy Bhaskar - argued that the scientific method, merely by explicating on a culture as precisely and honestly as feasible, could provide a criticism of said culture - thereby supposedly destroying the fact-value dichotomy. Now, epiphenomenalism is one of the most popular philosophies among intellectuals that are passionate about the science of human beings, and it dictates that "mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). If that's true, how could evolution (the dominant view of scientists) dispose of false culture criticisms and promote true culture criticisms instead, being only concerned with adaptive behavior, and not truth? And more relevantly, how could conscious criticism of a culture (a mental event) play a valuable, truthful part in its explication (a physical event), thus destroying the fact-value distinction like CR claims? To quote Alvin Plantinga in Warranted Christian Belief:

I have never heard of him until today. But I have been reading what I could on the internet. His view seems, and take everything I say with a big grain of salt, to be a corrective of classical Marxism. Classical Marxism died out to a degree after the failures of Russia and other communist countries. It changed and evolved into new areas.

But he seems to be offering a position that corrects, or at least attempts to, the problems inherent in classical Marxist theory. I think that the Critical Realism in the article is of the broad epistemological one.

That's true; it's some variation of neo-Marxism. Critical theorists like those of the Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, et al.) attempted to overturn the Messianic, absolutist principles of the Enlightenment that accompanied traditional Marxism and reinstate it instead with psychology/philosophy. Bhaskar appears to be trying to do something analogous, only without the scientific reductionism of the traditional and the psychological component of the Frankfurt School. He attempts to do it with an innovative philosophical and epistemological approach, which is actually the element of his philosophy I'm critiquing. (Ironically, I actually agree with Adorno and Benjamin's philosophical take on language, which is incredibly reminiscent of the Counter-Enlightenment thought of Hamann, even though I obviously adamantly disagree with their Marxism.)

I don’t know where he goes from there to argue that he can along these lines critique a society. If you know of any particular papers or whatever in which he argues for this position than please post them. But until I can “see” his “logic” unfold I cannot answer your question. You seem to be on to something but again because of my unfamiliarity with him I cannot say.

Like I said, I haven't read any primary sources, but there was a part of "Economics in the Shadows of Darwin and Marx" by Geoffrey Martin Hodgson which suggests that Bhaskar holds to the folk psychological view of human agency:

"As critical realism reproduces many of the strengths of longstanding discourses in philosophy and social theory, it also replicates some of their weaknesses. Consider its explanation of human agency. It typically relies on a prominent but defective 'folk psychology' in which all actions are simplistically explained by beliefs. Yet this 'mind first' concept of action is open to sustained criticism, particularly concerning its neglect of emotions, habits, instincts and other culturally or biologically inherited dispositions."

 

[jwright82]

That's true; it's some variation of neo-Marxism. Critical theorists like those of the Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, et al.) attempted to overturn the Messianic, absolutist principles of the Enlightenment that accompanied traditional Marxism and reinstate it instead with psychology/philosophy. Bhaskar appears to be trying to do something analogous, only without the scientific reductionism of the traditional and the psychological component of the Frankfurt School. He attempts to do it with an innovative philosophical and epistemological approach, which is actually the element of his philosophy I'm critiquing. (Ironically, I actually agree with Adorno and Benjamin's philosophical take on language, which is incredibly reminiscent of the Counter-Enlightenment thought of Hamann, even though I obviously adamantly disagree with their Marxism.)

Is he a communist? How close to classical Marxism is he? Later Marxists, Gramsci for instance, gave up the economic determinism of classical Marxism. And I don’t believe that the Frankfurt school endorsed armed revolutionary overthrow of society, but they did want to change it see Herbert Marcuse. How close to these developments is he and how close to communism is he?

Here is a website for anyone interested in Marxism (to study not to convert).
Marxists Internet Archive Library, Complete Index of Writers

Also I recommend this book and this entire series as introductions to anything.
Marxism: A Graphic Guide - Introducing Books
Introducing Books

 

[No Name #5]

Is he a communist? How close to classical Marxism is he? Later Marxists, Gramsci for instance, gave up the economic determinism of classical Marxism. And I don’t believe that the Frankfurt school endorsed armed revolutionary overthrow of society, but they did want to change it see Herbert Marcuse. How close to these developments is he and how close to communism is he?

I can't say with confidence, since I wasn't as personally interested in his political theory as I was his realist epistemology. If you want to learn more about it, I heard his book "Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation" is a good read. =]