Posted on 05/21/2005 2:42:12 AM PDT by infocats
Is there a more powerful modern Trinity? These reigning deities proclaim humanity's inability to thoroughly explain the world. They have been the touchstones of modernity, their presence an unwelcome burden at first, and later, in the name of postmodernism, welcome company.
Their rule has also been affirmed by their once-sworn enemy: science. Three major discoveries in the 20th century even took on their names. Albert Einstein's famous Theory (Relativity), Kurt Gödel's famous Theorem (Incompleteness) and Werner Heisenberg's famous Principle (Uncertainty) declared that, henceforth, even science would be postmodern.
(Excerpt) Read more at r-s-r.org ...
Postmodernism in that context then means, where people arrive after they come to doubt the knowledge claims of modernism, as well. Typically because they see no rigorous distinction between metaphyiscal and scientific knowledge, or they reduce both to opinion, or deny knowledge properly so called applies to either. Skepticism alone does not have to arrive here, but subjectivist idealisms often do, including skeptical idealisms. Relativism arrives here, historicism likewise. The basic diagnosis is the reason's attempts to reliably and exhaustively grasp a real external world fail. For logical reasons, or because of limits on knowledge or certainty, or because of subjective distortions, or because there isn't an unambiguous external reality to grasp in the first place, or because real relations don't have the necessary stability or determinism to be grasped unless we artificially impose it on nature, etc. Arguments of that sort.
In the continental philosophy tradition, modernism would end around Hegel and Marx (and later neo-Kantians) and post modernism would arrive with Nietzsche and Heidegger, and would include present day French versions of their thought like Foucault and Derrida. In the English philosophy tradition, modernism would include Russel and Whitehead and the early Wittgenstein, post modernism would come in with the later Wittgenstein, Quine, and Kuhn. In mathematics, Hilbert is the paradigmatic modernist and Godel passes for "post". In reality, Godel was a mathematical platonist who went back to pre-modern philosophy for his philosophic opinions, but he certainly rejected Hilbert's "constructivist" program to ground mathematics in logic. He thought it is essentially bigger. (In pure formal computation terms, he was right - basic logic is not Turing complete and Peano arithmetic is).
LOL!!! bttt
Perhaps you also could tell me
what comes after postmodernism?
I think the fight between positivists and post modernists is a case of both of them being wrong, while having sufficient arguments to show the other side is overstating its own case. A tradition that avoided both mistakes, in my opinion, broke of from both a century ago and is still alive and well - the pragmatic or "fallibist" tradition. Which means people like Peirce, Santayana, Popper, and Hintikka. Basically they drop the pretense of certainty but allow for the existence of something that deserves to be called knowledge without being certainty. They rehabilitate opinion, refusing to consider it a synonym for "error". We guess, our guesses are not blind but educated, then we iterate on our guesses - that is reason. All knowledge rests on faith, they aren't opposites. But some faiths are more reasonable than others, have the characteristics of knowledge rather than of wishing.
This is not a widely enough held opinion to constitute a period. It is more like a selective set of agreements and brickbats for the various contending parties the periodization refers to.
Yes the post moderns are right that positivism advanced indefensible claims about certainty, reduction of everything to supposedly unambiguous logic, the violence of its attacks on metaphysics (which recoil on itself when examined closely), etc. Enough logic isn't unambiguous, and all theories make use of things besides sense experience or logical reasoning, things that are not remotely certain, guesses. Yes there is fundamental ambiguity in the external reference of any formal structure, different ways any given picture can map onto the real world. Yes there are limits to logic (problems too large to be exhausted e.g.), to determinism, etc. But no, none of this means there is no knowledge only subjective opinions. "Subjective opinion" is not an adequate description of how space probes get to Mars.
Yes the modernists are right that there are real methods for arriving at reliable knowledge of real external world. But no, those methods are not infallible, they are not deductive-logical, they are based on more than sense data, they require philosophical constructs and leaps that are at bottom metaphysical opinions, if ones we are "programmed" for or that nature itself prompts in us. And nowhere is it written that they must exhaust the world. As a set, the knowable is not empty, but it need not coincide with the existent, either.
I hope this helps.
Boiled down to one sentence: Postmoderns suffer from cognitive dissonance (the mental confusion that results from actually holding polar opposite attitudes and beliefs simultaneously).
Quintessential example:
They don't believe that there is such a thing as "absolute truth", EXCEPT the absolute truth that there us no such thing as absolute truth.
Ding! Ding!
Such confused mentalities can be found on forums like Free Republic actually claiming to want to uphold and defend the Constitution --- which, of course, is a meaningless document unless it is actively guarding the absolute moral (self-evident) truth that man has inalienable (because they're God-given) rights.
Any who are foolish enough to think it is possible to use reason and logic in a debate with them are also suffering from cognitive dissonance.
Can someone tell me what postmodernism is??
Funny I was asking the same question this week and my good friend directed me to this outstanding essay.
http://www.summit.org/resource/essay/show_essay.php?essay_id=148
Me thinks you protest too much. LOL
Would it be too simple-minded to say
that Post-Modernism is a Western form of Buddhism?
(Somewhat watered down, perhaps)
IMHO: No.
Maybe if you see the similarity of what sounds like nonsense from postmodernism and what sounds like nonsense in a koan, then you could expand that to "both see the world as nonsense."
There are many forms of buddhism, but I think it would be accepted that all stress knowing beyond concepts - that enlightenment consists in seeing the universe without the prejudices and constrants of conceptual naming.
However, IMHO again, buddhists wouldn't say this enlightenment, or buddha mind, is subjective-only truth, varying with the observer. I believe they have spent a great deal of time in the certainty that it is the same, but not describable in words/concepts. They invite each to look for himself and see.
And I think a postmodernist would be lost without his plethora of high-sounding concepts.
BTW, the Western form of Buddhism is buddhism.
And psychology.
{^_^}
Well I would think an honest post-modernist would have to admit
that his plethora of concepts is merely the ship
he uses to cross the river.
If I may be so bold
I should like to give a definition of post-modernism here:
"Post-Modernism is Buddhism without Nirvana"
Sure it has. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem applies to any axiom system at least as strong as Peano arithmetic, as long as that theory is consistent and is recursively axiomatizable (which means that there is a computer program that would list precisely the axioms of the system, if allowed to run forever -- in other words, it means that you actually can tell what the axioms are). In fact, there are weak subsystems of Peano arithmetic that will do.
Anyway, this applies to Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, for example, as well as any common variant, extension, etc. If ZF is consistent, then the sentence that asserts "ZF is consistent" is neither provable nor disprovable in ZF.
That's what I thought too.
Incidentally
I've never understood why G's theorem is thought to be profound.
To paraphrase it slightly
it simply says that certain chess positions can not be reached
by a series of legal moves.
Ah. "The Way To Where There's No There."
Sort of like Christianity without the salvation part..
I agree with the post that describes post-modernism as two roads taken to excess. There's some truth in post-modernism, certainly something had to give after positivism collapsed, but I'm a believer in transcendent objective truths and values - something I don't see a lot of in post-modernism.
In its larger interpretation, if you substitute "knowledge of reality" for "chess positions" and "means of knowing" for "series of legal moves" is the conclusion that any and all axiomatic systems are forever limited in their scope of knowledge.
It's value is in its concreteness, IMHO, in demolishing scientism and rationalism as holy grails for All Knowing.
This doesn't happen with arithmetic because you can enumerate the theorems of arithmetic. If you try to enumerate the theorems of set theory in the same way, you hit a snag once you have sets of cardinality greater than the integers and start having theorems about each element of them. Sure you can set up some enumeration scheme, based on applying whatever operations are allowed in some definite order. But this enumeration won't be "onto" for the possible theorems of set theory.
If it were about chess, it would be of no great significance :-).
At the time Gödel proved it, the Incompleteness Theorem put to rest Hilbert's program of proving the consistency of formal number theory by finitary means.
If one is a Platonist, who believes in the existence in some sense of the mathematical universe (as Gödel himself did, notwithstanding all the discussion in this thread of post-modernism), then the Incompleteness Theorem says that solving some problems will require more than just proving things from a well-established set of axioms. We must use our mathematical intuitions to develop new insights into the mathematical universe; the idea is that these new insights will lead to new axioms that can be accepted as self-evidently true.
This approach led directly to the current situation where people have added various "large cardinal axioms" to Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. These large cardinal axioms tend to be statements that extremely large infinite sets exist, but, surprisingly, they have interesting consequences for arithmetic and analysis.
By the way, Gödel's work directly answered Hilbert's 2nd problem (in which Hilbert called for a finitary consistency proof of arithmetic) and partially answered Hilbert's 1st problem (the continuum hypothesis), but neither one in the way Hilbert intended. Gödel solved the 2nd problem by showing that there was no such finitary consistency proof. He half-solved the 1st problem by showing that the continuum hypothesis was consistent with the rest of set theory (assuming that set theory itself is consistent); Cohen later showed that the negation of the continuum hypothesis is also consistent. Of course, this leaves the continuum hypothesis itself unsolved; it's independent of the axioms of set theory, and we're waiting for further insight into whether it's true or false. (Incidentally, Gödel believed that the continuum hypothesis was false.)
It would be very surprising if ZF were not consistent. However, the point is that Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem applies to it in exactly the same way as to first-order Peano arithmetic: if the theory in question is consistent, then it cannot prove its own consistency.
If you believe that Peano arithmetic is consistent, then your reason for believing so must transcend Peano arithmetic.
If one believes that ZF set theory is consistent, then one's reason for believing so must transcend ZF.
This doesn't happen with arithmetic because you can enumerate the theorems of arithmetic. If you try to enumerate the theorems of set theory in the same way, you hit a snag once you have sets of cardinality greater than the integers and start having theorems about each element of them.
This isn't true. Your confusing the theorems with the subject that they're intended to be about. Theorems themselves are just finite strings of symbols from a finite (or countable) alphabet. The theorems of ZF can be enumerated in exactly the same way as those of Peano arithmetic. In each case, you start with the axioms (which can be specified very simply) and then systematically write down every possible proof; the last line of each proof is a theorem. This gives you a way to enumerate all theorems of the system. (You can write a computer program to do this.)
The catch is that there's no way to enumerate (via a computer program or algorithm) all the non-theorems.
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