Unless you get people to agree on definitions that define the problem away, but then you're just going to be using a different definition to pose the question that came up, because it will keep coming up.
Language is just a tool to express ourselves. It's not the fabric of existence.
The exercise is semantic in the sense that it seeks to describe and then connect sets of concepts to sets of beliefs in certain contexts.
So in that sense, it's analytically deep. However what tends to happen is that most casual students get to a certain depth in PM, say undergraduate level, give up on the complexity and then throw their hands up and say "nothing is real so I can create my won world that you need to conform to." That's the problem.
At some level reality itself may be an illusion and we can never be sure of time and space. However, if we concede that point, then we concede that potentially nothing exists then we cannot debate it because we don't exist either. So even by discussing a matter we are taking an assumption that we exist and that something exists for us to talk about, even if the precise meaning of the words isn't nailed down by anyone. At this point, postmodernism starts to look a bit weak, because to communicate we must assume some shared reality between two parties which is quite possibly going to be objective by both parties standards.
And in the framework of human endevour, there are a huge number of hypothetical realities we have ruled out by scientific experiment. It is overwhelmingly likely at this point that something objective exists and we've narrowed in on it quite a bit from, say, 10,000 BC.
"The limits of my language means the limits of my world."
Visuospatial thoughts are the easiest example. This even happens for things that aren't inherently spatial, like abstract concepts, if there is a useful spatial metaphor.
Edit: Language is fascinating, of course. However, I find the underlying mental layers that support it to be equally fascinating, if not more so.
You can wink, that wink can have meaning or it's just a wink or you got something in your eye. How do you determine what it is without having used language somehow to establish what a wink could mean? And that's just on the surface of the amgiguity.
It’s almost as though you don’t understand what he is talking about.
But the second they get expressed into language, philosophical analysis kicks in.
You can't express truth though but you can be it (i.e. you can wink)
Language simply isn’t the limit of anyone’s world.
It’s also plainly obvious that humans have access to many other ways of expressing themselves and communicating other than language, and some truth can certainly be expressed.
The second you start claiming things about how the world is through language I can access that and analyze it through ex. a postmodern lens.
You can certainly experience all sorts of things that is beyond language to express but then they are that personal experiences and highly subjective.
What Objective truth can be expressed through language? If you knew the answer to that one you would win a Nobel price and I would certainly do whatever in my power to make sure you got it cause that would be a big deal and fundamentally change EVERYTHING.
Which is why no one has taken me up on the offer to formulate such a truth. It's simply not a useful way to think about what language expresses.
And now you’re suddenly focussed on ‘objective truth’. Moving the goalposts because it’s obvious that truth can be expressed through means other than language.
Why not just admit that language is limited but it’s not the limit of our world, or our expression? Why is that so hard?
Is what this subthread is about.
Perhaps you should read what the people you are replying to are commenting on. Then you’ll understand the context.
If you’re replying to the comment I quoted, then my points clearly stand. Language is not the limit of anyone’s world unless they decide to limit themselves that way.
Magnificent philosophy.
there are many languages and each languages has many medium. There is no limit to communication. In fact we probably don't even speak the same native language, yet here we are communicating with each other.
In addition that Existentialism is after Wittgenstein's take on a analysis. Existentialism attempts to answer the questions that we care about such as how we live our lives and our own values.
Existential philosophy is also, in part, very readable opposed to the great difficulty of reading Postmodernism.
I've thought about it in similar ways, but I fear those are the words of the incumbent facing the disrupter (if you'll pardon an abused analogy). What you say is true if you start with the premise of the postmodernist. That is, in effect I see it as saying nothing more complicated than postmodernism is the outcome of postmodernist assumptions.
Typically, the disrupter has a different agenda, different goals entirely, which is why the incumbent can't understand them - it makes no sense in the context of the incumbent's goals. In this case, the agenda, the assumption, of postmodernism is a desire for the truth (which can't be had) or as realistic an understanding of it as possible.
An hypothesis, stealing a bit from the article: The psuedo-modernist, to use the word from the article, doesn't care about the truth, so all your postmodernism is in the trash. Their reality is whatever they create or believe in the moment. It's fake news, fake economics, fake science (climate denial), whatever is in their Facebook feed, whatever their sources or friends repeat over and over, whatever is said most loudly or with the most anger - whatever can be insisted upon - whatever makes you angry. (Remember when anger was a sign of irrationality? Now it's a sign of a new reality being created.) All authoritative sources are destroyed, including all work product of academia (if you believe some HN comments). Propaganda is reality, and to an extent that is true: Perception is reality, and people can maintain those delusions for a long time. (And yeah, that's pretty scary.)
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick (though I've never verified its provenience)
Wittgenstein is all about trying to work out how language works.
Postmodernism combines Nietzsche and Marx and then looks at text but ignores people who had been looking at text philosophically for decades.
You could equally claim that all postmodern philosophy is really just Zen Buddhism reinterpreted.
I don't think it takes anything away from anyone.
It also shows that Postmodernism itself is the second form of textual analysis in recent times which indicates that it is unlikely to be the final form of philosophy.
The other point about Postmodernism is that while texts are meant to be reinterpreted in any way the reality is that shallow readings of who the author was and what they like to do in the bedroom has been the primary result.
Hardly. There are plenty of psychoanalytical models (still being) explored that have more utility and the inevitable philosophies that extend from them will be just as final. The tools of measure are the roots of modern philosophy and postmodernism is little more than an ancient narrative about behavior that sprouts from mass media.
I'm wondering whether you'd agree with the following paragraph, even though my words aren't your words:
You and I are exchanging words right now. Those words don't really mean anything. Meanings are private to each mind, and everybody decodes words and interprets them as having different meanings. Those meanings, or perhaps those concepts, within each mind will give rise to some sort of worldview (or POV for short) which gives everybody their own uniquely-colored glasses through which the world's stage, players, narratives, and behaviors appear filtered, giving rise to new meanings and possibilities.
This paragraph was hand-written and spontaneous, but I think that you'd nonetheless agree with it because it is an attempt to capture common societal ideas about how English encodes meanings, and thus I think that most English-speakers will decode it to predictable concepts, and I think further that folks who have studied philosophy, not just postmodernism, will find concepts in it similar to the concepts that I've imagined.
Why this is fascinating: I think that this understanding of language decoding as a strange loop is totally overlooked by this crowd, but it could completely overhaul how giants in the field are read, in particular Hofstadter.
We both are brough up in a context where we understand the meaning of "the desktop" as a metaphor for computer UI unless (unless you haven't learned that then you think it's the other physical desktop)
See https://medium.com/swlh/anatomy-of-a-noob-why-your-mom-suck-... where I explore that.
In other words, we are using language as a way to communicate experiences of phenomena (an apple or a painting or a movie) but our experiences will never be exactly the same and we will never be referring to exactly the same but it's good enough statistically to be "a pattern"
So yeah I guess I agree if I understand you correctly.
But that's missing the larger point which is that perhaps we shouldn't look at things as being true or false but instead useful. In other words "there is no truth" is, of course, neither true nor false but just a perspective that's useful (just like believing in truth can be).
I am fine with the incompleteness of this perspective (i.e. it's never fully resolved) and I would argue that philosophically there is no way around it (I can take any claim you make about truth and deconstruct it) and show that it's based on an apriori frame of reference.
So you have to think about it differently than "Truth" to understand the point of postmodernism.
So I'm reduced to "what's useful for advancing my team". And it turns out that fake news, outright lies, and constant propaganda are useful for that. (Postmodernism doesn't recognize the possibility of real truth. Does it recognize that some things are still lies?)
In practice, therefore, postmodernism turns out to be rather destructive in its effect on the political system. One might even say that, in this area, postmodernism is not useful, at least in terms of the system as a whole.
Postmodernism is just a way to analyze "the claimed" and yes it destroys (deconstructs any claim) but a decision will be made, something will win over something else.
You downvote if something as an example is of topic or inflamatory or otherwise destroyes the conversation, not something you disagree with which is part of the discussion.
Never heard it was ok to downvote just because you disagree but would love to see the statement about that.
I still think it's a lousy way to run a discussion. (Too low a bandwidth - you only get one bit of information.) But it seems to be the rules here.