DaFranker comments on Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms - LessWrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (134)
From Wikipedia:
If "postmodernists" have this opinion as stated, I suspect that when they aren't using the word "true" to attack or criticize other philosophical ideas, they would be using it as a form of emphasis on a particular interpretation, or to assert the dominance of a particular interpretation, as this interpretation then literally becomes more "true" (in their model, according to my model of their model).
I think the next paragraph is a bit more accurate:
The key point of political theory post-modernist is that certain social norms are claimed to be true or universal when that is not the case. Further, binary distinctions (black/white, capitalist/proletariat) are inherently misleading, organizing the world in particular ways in order to advance particular moral agendas.
Thanks, I shall update towards most postmodernists being less of the extreme philosophical kind and more about practical matters like those.
Most self-titled "postmodernists" I've encountered and discussed with were more of the extreme philosophical kind - the kind that would claim ontologically basic mental entities or some other really weird postulate if asked "But where did the first 'reality' come from if there never was any objective reality for us to base our own ones on?"
As a discipline, postmodernism seems unusually terrible at producing competent practitioners. The average academic chemist is a better scientist than the average postmodernist is as a philosopher.
That said, a lot of conventional wisdom in fields like sociology or Legal Realism have very strong postmodern flavors. Honestly, a lot of the meta-type analysis of norms is using scientific data to show what various humanities thinkers had been saying all along.
Some are some aren't. Furthermore, it's impossible to say anything without using distinctions.
Not all moral distinctions are on-off buttons. Some (most?) are sliding scales.
I don't expect king-of-postmodernism-is-nonsense and mister-I-think-postmodernism-makes-good-points to come to agreement, but I'm interested in where exactly we disagree.
Do you think some agents could gain advantage by treating a sliding-scale moral quality as discrete?
Do you think some agents could gain advantage by treating a discrete moral quality as sliding-scale?
What sort of evidence is useful in deciding whether a particular moral quality is discrete or sliding scale?
First binary distinctions aren't just for moral systems.
If we restrict to moral distinctions, most moral distinctions are Schelling points.