
Education Without Truth in Postmodern Perspectivism - webdva
https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContDeli.htm
======
cousin_it
> _I argue that post-modern perspectivism and the individualistic or
> collectivistic logic which nurtures its scope can be transcended through
> construction of hyperperspectivistic prisms based on alogic of interrelation
> animated by the interdisciplinarian spirit prevailing in the field of modern
> science. This latter serves as the leading thread for the foundation of a
> new canonicity which, without losing its historical and cultural character,
> can make claims to truth and validity of general acceptance. The
> hyperspectivistic canonicity deriving from such an interrelational logic is
> in a position to animate a new educational model capable of overcoming both
> idealistic and romantic versions of Bildung._

Come on, this is self-parody.

[https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html](https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html)

~~~
scooble
It doesn't strike me as obviously so. As I (probably mis-)understand it, the
author is saying that if we take seriously the idea that people can have
incompatible perspectives on the world then we can lose a notion of 'truth'
that applies across perspectives - and this undermines ideas like education
and learning. However, (it is claimed) science is special in that it can
transcend perspectives and, if so, form a foundation for us to make sense of
notions like education and learning while still taking perspectivism
seriously.

I suspect it is a bit of a reach, but if the author wants to take
perspectivism seriously without accepting the intuitive conclusions about
education and learning, then this could be a promising approach to take.

~~~
azhu
Agreed. What I get out of that is that we can get more useful info out of
perspectivism if we look beyond just the individualism-collectivism way of
framing perspective and consider how the fact that some scientists favor
holding interdisciplinary perspectives so that they basically have more
ingredients for their guts to cook up new hypotheses with implies that there
exists an area of study where you examine the relationship between holding one
or many perspectives and the conclusions that follow, which could serve as a
less subjectively constrained way of thinking about thinking.

I also agree that this is borderline self parody because it's much too thick
with itself to be an enjoyably stimulating read, at least for anyone who isn't
well versed in the vernacular already. It also has a ton of typos given the
level of language it's trying to use.

> This turn has been facilitated by the lack of technical kwoledge

> Strengthening of solidarity and conscesnsus

------
danharaj
This piece of writing assumes a very well read background on the authors it is
discussing and I don't think it does anything but bait the hackernews
middlebrow dismissal of postmodern thinkers.

~~~
illiilliiililil
The pomo people telling the anti-pomo they just haven't the understanding is
reminiscent of religious apologists/theologians telling atheist debaters they
just haven't ground to stand on because they haven't adequately digested a
sufficient body of obscure tomes to dismiss X religion. Or "You just haven't
read the Koran in classical Arabic! Understanding Islam is beyond you."

~~~
tuyjrtkfeldc
No man, the texts are available, go read them. It takes time, effort and
respect towards the perspectives of others to actually understand how complex
things work, such as theories about human mind and social order.

Would you encourage someone with no experience in chemistry to start mixing
chemicals without understanding potentially dangerous effects? Would you
encourage someone who is not an engineer to construct a bridge without
adequate preparation and planning? Experts can be authoritative because their
experience grants them the ability to know better than non-experts in their
respective fields.

~~~
illiilliiililil
Are you saying I should refrain from atheism until I have read Summa
Theologica?

~~~
tuyjrtkfeldc
No, I'm saying that you're conflating atheism with being an arrogant moron.

~~~
illiilliiililil
John Searle makes sense when wiriting on the mind. Jacques Derrida, who I have
read, does not. The post-modernists are obscurantist charlatans who en masse
form an institution that demands attention rather than the quick dismissal
like one would give a rambling bum on the street. Similar to religious
apologists they have created an enormous enterprise of bullshit. You are
confusing its nebulousness for profundity.

~~~
tuyjrtkfeldc
> The post-modernists are obscurantist charlatans who en masse form an
> institution that demands attention rather than the quick dismissal like one
> would give a rambling bum on the street.

Yes, like any legitimate discipline of proper research.

> You are confusing its nebulousness for profundity.

Where you see a nebulous blob, experts see an ordered set of ideas. Similar to
when an engineer sees a bridge as a series of forces and structures designed
to mitigate them, or as when a chemist understands complex chemical formulas
while a layperson may see a somewhat disordered series of letters and numbers.

Something isn't wrong just because you don't understand it.

~~~
illiilliiililil
Are you one of those who thought Sokal made good points in his submitted
paper.

~~~
tuyjrtkfeldc
Lol Sokal is a moron who doesn't actually know what postmodernism is. Are you
someone who believes that his work is actually legitimate research?

~~~
illiilliiililil
I mean, did the post-modernists who read his paper know what post-modernism
was?

~~~
danharaj
Why did Nature publish a proof that is widely considered to be fatally flawed,
i.e. not a proof?
[https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11709](https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11709)

How did the Bogdanoff affair happen?

The fact that bullshit is hard to separate from "the truth" is a very good
starting point for postmodern investigation.

------
mahemm
Lots of people ITT seem to have an incorrect understanding of the term
postmodernism. It basically boils down to the observation that history and
human experience don't really move towards a single goal, but instead consists
of lots of independent narratives going nowhere in particular.

These observations invalidate Modernist ideas that held that human historical
development lead toward specific outcomes or followed observable patterns. For
instance, postmodernist thought argues Marx was wrong in thinking that history
followed a dialectical pattern, and instead holds that history follows no
pattern.

~~~
ganzuul
I think that from mankind's innate curiosity and propensity to teach our young
it is impossible to conclude that culture is without pattern. Like so, all of
_that_ seems invalidated.

I think that the mistake that postmodernism made was analogous to painting
itself into a corner, where people fully studied culture from the outside
without immersing themselves in it. They built abstractions until they no
longer corresponded to observation and then concluded that there were
contradictions in the subject of their study when there was none.

It rocked my world when out of the blue Regular Car-guy about-faced from a
youtube hyuckster into a sleeper intellectual in relating the PT Cruiser with
the modern world in the context of postmodernism. Zeitgeist, dumbed down to a
car analogy without missing any of the salient points. It is some kind of
perfection.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c)

~~~
mahemm
A postmodern critique of this argument might start with your identification of
a single "culture" that has a pattern. Who decides what this culture is and
who its adherents are? What if there are exemplars of the culture that do not
fit this pattern; are they inherently excluded from the culture by the fact
that they do not fit the pattern? If so, it may be the case that we are
fitting a pattern we would like to see onto a culture that is in fact varied
and diverse, and which does not in fact have a particular direction.

~~~
ganzuul
I didn't mean to imply 'a' culture. I meant culture, like water.

Cultures don't have a name. Cultures are people. People sharing a history
probably disagree in subtle ways about what their culture is as it is a matter
of individual experience.

This doesn't validate postmodernism since there was no dichotomy to begin with
and nothing to deny. Our history isn't human history. 'We' go back 3.5 billion
years because we experience influence from then as a matter of evolution. The
pattern is much broader that postmodernism claims it to be. Life is not
anthropocentric.

~~~
mahemm
The ideas that "culture is a matter of individual experience" and that "there
was no dichotomy to begin with and nothing to deny" seem to affirm the
postmodern idea from my POV. That's basically what they argue.

By contrast, many Modernist philosophers believed that human history moved
inexorably towards more-just society or that human knowledge moved towards
perfect understanding of all phenomena.

Edit: not sure I understand what you mean when you say "The pattern is much
broader that postmodernism claims it to be. "; the project of postmodernism is
in part to show that there is no pattern.

~~~
ganzuul
I won't argue that Modernism is right. My position is that Modernism was
moving in the right direction, that I don't know where to go next, but
postmodernism definitely is not the right direction.

I think it is right to say that postmodernism was born out of the nuclear
shadow. I think it a degenerate expression of nihilism as I believe I
recognize certain philosophical missteps. Summa summarum one must adopt a
constructivist approach to logic and be very weary of double negation. "No
dichotomy and nothing to deny" is a double negation and certain conclusions
can not be made from it. We can in particular not conclude that all
information is of equal value from the equality of information channels. We
currently do not have the means to conclude that the medium is the whole of
the message, but postmodernism seems to claim we do.

Edit: That probably came off as a bit arbitrary. I'm not very good at
communicating this stuff outside of dialogue so please only see this as
something to frame a perspective with a fair bit of thought behind it, and not
as a convincing argument.

------
twomoretime
>More explicitly, according to Rorty, the schemes and patterns regulating
social relations do not derive from reason and its canonicity but rather from
self-images created by the community on the basis of solidarity of its
members. (7) In opposition to reason and its norms, solidarity does not need
any justification or legitimation given that the social bond expressed by it
is prior to any act of legitimizing claims to truth attempted by reason.

And this kind of idiotic thinking leads to a broken society where we are
conditioned from childhood to pretend that all cultures are equal and that all
differences are purely social constructions.

Except for the most pampered societies, cultural norms are at least partly a
manifestation of successful survival strategies in different environments.
They are emergent and based in the truths of reality that postmodernists
delude themselves into believing do not exist. No patriarchy necessary.

The modern deconstructive movements that were spawned by postmodernism have
effectively become rebellion for the sake of rebellion. Progress for the sake
of progress. Anything we do differently from our ancestors is automatically
superior - that's why these movements have such draw from young, vulnerable,
naive, college aged children. The only truth in these movements is deliberate
change - but thousands of years of development of civilization has infused our
various cultures with a wealth of heuristics which postmodernists (and modern
leftist movements which are postmodernist offspring) cannot acknowledge
because their definition of truth is backwards and, frankly, unscientific.

~~~
danharaj
> And this kind of idiotic thinking leads to a broken society where we are
> conditioned from childhood to pretend that all cultures are equal and that
> all differences are purely social constructions.

You don't read the thinkers you are calling idiots and you don't understand
what you cited.

> Truth is in mathematics

Of all the human activities concerning truth, mathematics has the easiest time
demonstrating its limitations, its inherent circularity, and the fact that in
its absolute form it is ultimately out of reach for human beings. Your vulgar
High Rationality is built on sand.

~~~
twomoretime
>You don't read the thinkers you are calling idiots and you don't understand
what you cited.

I am not calling these philosophers idiots, I am saying that they encourage
dangeous thinking.

The OP quotes:

>Patterns regulating social relations do not derive from reason.

And what I'm saying is that they partly do, as emergent adaptations to
reality, except in pampered cultures where comforts erase impetus.

I deleted the part about mathematics because it was no longer applicable to
what I ended up writing.

>Your vulgar High Rationality is built on sand

My high rationality is built on the observation that a large swath of people
actually believe that there is little value in the cultural norms of old. I
used to feel similarly. Then I grew up. My vulgarity is built on frustration
with the modern state of the world and the headstrong ignorance of the young
adult population in the US. Here's a case in point - ignorant young people
would be less uppity if they were taught to show amount some respect to
elders. Not blindly, but in the US we seem to have lost an appreciation for
the experience that comes with age.

~~~
ineedasername
_> young people would be less uppity if they were taught to show amount some
respect to elders. Not blindly, but in the US we seem to have lost an
appreciation for the experience that comes with age_

To me it seems like the pendulum shifted from something of a mandate for blind
respect of elders to the opposite end of blind disregard for experience and
expertise.

Such cultural pendulums are not uncommon though, and we're probably due for
this one to begin shifting its momentum back the other way over the next
decade or so.

