Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "
Citing it is going to be difficult, even the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says "That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism." I'm forced to site philosophers who are opposed to it because they seem to be the only ones willing to actually define it in a concise way. I'll just reference this essay by Dennett to start with.
I'm not sure I understand what you're referring to here.
That's called lying.
You know exactly what I mean when I use that term, otherwise there would be no discussion. It seems that you can't even name it without someone saying that's not what it's called, it actually doesn't have a definition, every philosopher who is labeled a postmodernist called it something else, etc.
If I can't define it, there's no point in discussing it. But it doesn't change the fact that the way the mainstream left has absorbed the philosophy has been in the "there is no objective truth" / "all cultures/beliefs/creeds are equal" sense. This is mostly the sense in which I refer to it in my original post.
I'd like to hear more about this. By "Bay Area rationalism", I assume you are talking about a specific list of beliefs like the likelihood of intelligence explosion? Or are you talking about the Bayesian methodology in general?
To which the glib answer is "that's because it isn't true".
Dennett gives a concise definition because he has the same simplistic take on the subject as you. What he is not doing is showing that there is an actually group of people who describe themselves as postmodernists, and have those views. The use of ... (read more)