= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Dagon comments on Open thread 7th september - 13th september - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (146)
I think you'll need to do a fair bit of epistemic work just to get the claim into a state about which you can ask this question. What does it mean for a concept to be responsible for a change in society? What predictions do you make based on it?
But that's for your own beliefs. In terms of convincing (or having fun debating with) a professor, I'd ignore the causality and credit-for-popularity aspect and go "what in fuck makes you think 'live and let live' is postmodern, rather than classically liberal"?
Looking at the google n-gram chart for Live and Let Live, I'd say the idea got very popular in the first half of the 20th, but was around much longer. Unless the prof is claiming postmodernism started in the 1920s, I think he's in a tricky spot.
This is partly what I did say, and as mentioned, they think it can be both, and postmodernism is responsible for more recent changes. They also seem to be associating moral relativism with postmodernism.
It doesn't seem so far out to agree that postmodernism has this concept; a Google search for "postmodernism live and let live" has several books saying it's a postmodernism ideal.
From the third result (for me at least).
I don't think I'll win this particular debate by misdirection.
For a complete but not very useful answer, "the counterfactual in which postmodernist philosophy never came into being has less acceptance of those concepts". Or "there's a causal link from postmodernism to a substantial portion of the population accepting such concepts".
I'm not really sure of predictions to make; that's why I'm asking. Maybe polls would show a correlate between belief in specific ideas unique to postmodernism and " live and let live" (or proxies thereof)?
Still needs unpacking. What does "never came into being" mean for a belief cluster with many components that predate the label by a long way? "If these beliefs didn't become popular, they wouldn't be popular" is kind of hard to argue against. "novel aspect X of postmodernism caused faster/more complete acceptance of the classical liberal values" could be an interesting debate, and I don't know of any X that's a slam dunk to be both new with postmodernism and important to "live and let live" as a societal attitude.
Pretty much this, with X being "no objective truth" (or moral relativism.)