the language of postmodernism

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Belinda
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Re: the language of postmodernism

Post by Belinda »

Iwannaplato wrote:
There is no unity amongst modernists (my sense of the word) nor is there one amongst postmodernists around abortion. They are not moral stances, though both can have morals. Both can be moral realists or not depending. Postmodernists would be more likely to question science in a broader way than modernists, but I think, generally, both would acknowledge the physical facts of the procedure.
Historical relativity is more of thing for pomos than for modernists. However modernists too grant that historiography is a product of time, place, and cultural values.I agree with Iwannaplato.

Liberally educated pomos and mods all understand and to a significant degree must accept cultural relativity unless they are intellectually and emotionally attached to medieval notion of God as all-powerful moral Authority.
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iambiguous
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
In Jacques Derrida’s words, “[t]he fact of language is probably the only fact ultimately to resist all parenthization.” That is to say, we cannot get outside of language. Language is an “internal,” self-referential system, and there is no way to get “external” to it—although even to speak of “internal” and “external” is also meaningless on postmodern grounds.
Once again: go about the business of living your life from day to day. A "normal day."

Now, how many times in regard to the language you use to communicate with others is the "intellectual contraption" above going to come up?

Get back to us on that.

Language as a "self-referential system" is perfectly coherent when the self itself is perfectly coherent. Doing things wholly in sync with the meaning that we give to words to encompass our day-to-day interactions with others. In the family. At school. On the job. On the baseball diamond.

What on earth is the significance of deconstruction and semiotics then? Premodern, modern, postmodern interactions...your words and mine generating little or no ambiguity or confusion or conflict.
There is no non-linguistic standard to which to relate language, so there can be no standard by which to distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical, the true and the false. Deconstruction is therefore in principle an unending process.
Same thing. Take this obtuse assessment out into the world with you. Only not "in principle", in reality. The standards that transcend human language are mathematical and scientific laws, nature, biology, demographics, empirical facts. Words and worlds almost entirely in sync. Meaning often conveyed by and large on automatic pilot.

On the other hand, in regard to value judgments....

How are premoderns, moderns and postmoderns not equally impaled on the arguments I make above and elsewhere?
Unmasking does not even terminate in “subjective” beliefs and interests, for “subjective” contrasts to “objective,” and that too is a distinction that postmodernism denies. A “subject’s beliefs and interests” are themselves socio-linguistic constructions, so unmasking one piece of language to reveal an underlying subjective interest is only to reveal more language. And that language in turn can be unmasked to reveal more language, and so on. Language is masks all the way down.
Are you a postmodernist? Know any postmodernists? Bring them on board.

Then, given a particular context let's discuss our respective "beliefs and interests" in regard to how effective human beings either can or cannot be in communicating a sense of reality.

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=175006
Belinda
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Re: the language of postmodernism

Post by Belinda »

iambiguous wrote: Sun Jul 24, 2022 6:18 pm How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
In Jacques Derrida’s words, “[t]he fact of language is probably the only fact ultimately to resist all parenthization.” That is to say, we cannot get outside of language. Language is an “internal,” self-referential system, and there is no way to get “external” to it—although even to speak of “internal” and “external” is also meaningless on postmodern grounds.
Once again: go about the business of living your life from day to day. A "normal day."

Now, how many times in regard to the language you use to communicate with others is the "intellectual contraption" above going to come up?

Get back to us on that.

Language as a "self-referential system" is perfectly coherent when the self itself is perfectly coherent. Doing things wholly in sync with the meaning that we give to words to encompass our day-to-day interactions with others. In the family. At school. On the job. On the baseball diamond.

What on earth is the significance of deconstruction and semiotics then? Premodern, modern, postmodern interactions...your words and mine generating little or no ambiguity or confusion or conflict.
There is no non-linguistic standard to which to relate language, so there can be no standard by which to distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical, the true and the false. Deconstruction is therefore in principle an unending process.
Same thing. Take this obtuse assessment out into the world with you. Only not "in principle", in reality. The standards that transcend human language are mathematical and scientific laws, nature, biology, demographics, empirical facts. Words and worlds almost entirely in sync. Meaning often conveyed by and large on automatic pilot.

On the other hand, in regard to value judgments....

How are premoderns, moderns and postmoderns not equally impaled on the arguments I make above and elsewhere?
Unmasking does not even terminate in “subjective” beliefs and interests, for “subjective” contrasts to “objective,” and that too is a distinction that postmodernism denies. A “subject’s beliefs and interests” are themselves socio-linguistic constructions, so unmasking one piece of language to reveal an underlying subjective interest is only to reveal more language. And that language in turn can be unmasked to reveal more language, and so on. Language is masks all the way down.
Are you a postmodernist? Know any postmodernists? Bring them on board.

Then, given a particular context let's discuss our respective "beliefs and interests" in regard to how effective human beings either can or cannot be in communicating a sense of reality.

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=175006
There are non-linguistic modes of communication. How is pomo of language similar to pomo of architecture or fine art? Or for that matter how does pomo affect poetic language as distinct from explicit language? Afer all pomo buildings can be lived in, and poetic language causes affects that are not self referential.
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iambiguous
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
For the modernist, the functionality of language is complementary to its being cognitive. An individual observes reality perceptually, forms conceptual beliefs about reality on the basis of those perceptions, and then acts in reality on the basis of those perceptual and conceptual cognitive states.
In other words, for the moral and political objectivists among us, the functionality of language in the is/ought world is interchangeable with its functionality in the either/or world. One can use language cognitively to determine the morality of abortion as readily as one can use it to describe abortion as a medical procedure. They just employ different fonts, God or No God, to nail down the objective truth.
Some of those actions in the world are social interactions, and in some of those social interactions language assumes a communicatory function. In communicating with each other, individuals narrate, argue, or otherwise attempt to pass on their cognitive beliefs about the world. Rhetoric, then, is an aspect of language’s communicatory function, referring to those methods of using language that aid in the effectiveness of cognition during linguistic communication.
Again, all revolving around the limitations of language in regard to cognition -- "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses" -- itself.

After all, are or are not social interactions down through the ages and around the globe communicated [more or less successfully] assuming very, very different sets of premises regarding what is or is not rational and virtuous? And if language [modernist or otherwise] was there to provide us with the most reasonable and moral options, how to explain the ceaseless conflicts? Well, the objectivists of course insist that the problem revolves precisely around those who are not "one of us"...those who don't cogitate about the world we live in as they do.

You, perhaps?
For the postmodernist, language cannot be cognitive because it does not connect to reality, whether to an external nature or an underlying self. Language is not about being aware of the world, or about distinguishing the true from the false, or even about argument in the traditional sense of validity, soundness, and probability. Accordingly, postmodernism recasts the nature of rhetoric: Rhetoric is persuasion in the absence of cognition.
Over and again: how ridiculous is this? Do we really live in a world where postmodernists are able to show us that in regard to our interactions in the either/or world, our words cannot revolve around the same "external nature", the same empirical facts?

What point do I keep missing here?

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=175006
Belinda
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Re: the language of postmodernism

Post by Belinda »

I think sometimes the form and the meaning are very close together. For instance an abstract painting or sculpture merges form with meaning. The form itself is the meaning. Or for instance when language is mediated through calligraphy the form is the meaning to a large extent, and the actual performance of fine calligraphy is its own meaning.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is e.g. what I type now as I am trying hard to separate my meaning from the limitations of the electronic typewriter and from my own bias.

Spinoza famously tried to keep his meanings devoid of formal bias by writing as if he were Euclid.

The postmodernists are right in that ultimately you can never separate form and meaning. Language is a social activity, as Wittgenstein well knew. His Blue and Brown Books are social interactions with students, to a significant extent. Modernist tradition is that truth is to be discovered. Mathematical formulas are as abstractly pure meaning as is possible to man.
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iambiguous
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
Richard Rorty sees a great deal of pain and suffering in the world and much conflict between groups, so language is to him primarily a tool of conflict resolution. To that end, his language pushes “empathy,” “sensitivity,” and “toleration”—although he also suggests that those virtues may apply only within the range of our “ethnocentric” predicament: “we must, in practice, privilege our own group,” he writes, which implies that “there are lots of views which we simply cannot take seriously.”
Go ahead, see if you can reconcile these two opposing social, political and economic inclinations. Aside from suggesting that all rational men and women are obligated to embrace your own language. Your own definitions and meaning.

Also, "a great deal of pain and suffering in the world and much conflict between groups" results from those who use language precisely in order to sustain it. The ruling class using code words to pit different demographic groups against each other. Ethnocentric or otherwise. MAGA in a nutshell for many.
Most other postmodernists, however, see the conflicts between groups as more brutal and our prospects for empathy as more severely limited than does Rorty.
I don't use words like "brutal" or "severely limited" myself, but in having become "fractured and fragmented" in regard to these conflicts, I'm just as pessimistic. To me these conflicts are part and parcel of what Rorty encompasses in "ironism":
* She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered;

*She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts;

*Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Richard Rorty
Just choose a context.
Using language as a tool of conflict resolution is therefore not on their horizon. In a conflict that cannot reach peaceful resolution, the kind of tool that one wants is a weapon. And so given the conflict models of social relations that dominate postmodern discourse, it makes perfect sense that to most postmodernists language is primarily a weapon.
Is the language I use here a weapon?

Obviously: Yes, no, maybe.

After all, why wouldn't "I" be just as fractured and fragmented about this as well?
Belinda
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Re: the language of postmodernism

Post by Belinda »

Conflict resolution and world view are alike mediated by language. This is because language is a symbolic system which , as symbolic, can refer to abstract qualities such as quantity and value.

To weaponise language you'd need to lack or pretend to lack shared symbols.
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iambiguous
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
This [my post above] explains the harsh nature of much postmodern rhetoric. The regular deployments of ad hominem, the setting up of straw men, and the regular attempts to silence opposing voices are all logical consequences of the postmodern epistemology of language.
Right, like the premodernist and the modernist objectivists among us don't employ ad hominems, straw men and censorship as "logical consequences" of their own "epistemology of language". In fact, in insisting that what they and only they know about practically everything under the sun, they seem [to me] far more likely to employ them.

Here for example.
Stanley Fish...calls all opponents of racial preferences bigots and lumps them in with the Ku Klux Klan. Andrea Dworkin calls all heterosexual males rapists and repeatedly labels “Amerika” a fascist state. With such rhetoric, truth or falsity is not the issue: what matters primarily is the language’s effectiveness.
Okay, but I say at least double it in regard to the authoritarian dogmatists who use Bibles or manifestos to anchor their own language in. And "postmodernists" of my ilk, in being fractured and fragmented regarding the language available to them, react quite the opposite. They are often anything but adamant and coarse in labeling those who don't share their own political prejudices.
If we now add to the postmodern epistemology of language the far Left politics of the leading postmodernists and their firsthand awareness of the crises of socialist thought and practice, then the verbal weaponry has to become explosive.
Sure, but what about the modernist epistemology of the MAGA crowd and their firsthand awareness of more traditional Republican thought and practice? What, they don't have their own renditions Of Fish and Dworkin when it comes to creating political effigies?

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Belinda
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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iambiguous wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 3:23 pm How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
This [my post above] explains the harsh nature of much postmodern rhetoric. The regular deployments of ad hominem, the setting up of straw men, and the regular attempts to silence opposing voices are all logical consequences of the postmodern epistemology of language.
Right, like the premodernist and the modernist objectivists among us don't employ ad hominems, straw men and censorship as "logical consequences" of their own "epistemology of language". In fact, in insisting that what they and only they know about practically everything under the sun, they seem [to me] far more likely to employ them.

Here for example.
Stanley Fish...calls all opponents of racial preferences bigots and lumps them in with the Ku Klux Klan. Andrea Dworkin calls all heterosexual males rapists and repeatedly labels “Amerika” a fascist state. With such rhetoric, truth or falsity is not the issue: what matters primarily is the language’s effectiveness.
Okay, but I say at least double it in regard to the authoritarian dogmatists who use Bibles or manifestos to anchor their own language in. And "postmodernists" of my ilk, in being fractured and fragmented regarding the language available to them, react quite the opposite. They are often anything but adamant and coarse in labeling those who don't share their own political prejudices.
If we now add to the postmodern epistemology of language the far Left politics of the leading postmodernists and their firsthand awareness of the crises of socialist thought and practice, then the verbal weaponry has to become explosive.
Sure, but what about the modernist epistemology of the MAGA crowd and their firsthand awareness of more traditional Republican thought and practice? What, they don't have their own renditions Of Fish and Dworkin when it comes to creating political effigies?

https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 1&t=175006
The Bible gets a bad reputation sometimes. This is because The Bible is used as a book of explicit rules. When The Bible is used as literature especially poetic language it's full of wisdom, some of it close to Heideggerian Dasein theory.
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iambiguous
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
When theory clashes with fact

In the past two centuries, many strategies have been pursued by socialists the world over. Socialists have tried waiting for the masses to achieve socialism from the bottom up, and they have tried imposing socialism from the top down. They have tried to achieve it by evolution and by revolution. They have tried versions of socialism that emphasize industrialization, and they have tried those that are agrarian. They have waited for capitalism to collapse by itself, and when that did not happen they have tried to destroy capitalism by peaceful means. And when that did not work some tried to destroy it by terrorism.
And what does this emphasize if not the gap -- the chasm -- between words carefully calibrated and then ordered theoretically in a manifesto and attempts to take these definitions and deductions out into the numbingly complex reality of actual human interactions?

Isn't that why any number of objectivists [political or otherwise] here prefer to keep their own ideological/deontological arguments up in the clouds?

And, indeed, where nihilism often comes into play here is not over ends but over means. Everyone who is "one of us" agrees that this or that "ism" is the One True Path. But not everyone agrees to embrace "by any means necessary".
But capitalism continues to do well and socialism has been a disaster. In modern times there have been over two centuries of socialist theory and practice, and the preponderance of logic and evidence has gone against socialism.
Of course, what is this assessment itself if not another "general description intellectual contraption"? Your "logic and evidence" embracing capitalism or their "logic and evidence" embracing socialism.

Or my own "logic and evidence" suggesting that it is entirely reasonable to be "fractured and fragmented" in confronting both.

Only I tend to eschew logic here and note how each side is more than capable of providing both reasonable arguments and ample historical evidence to make their case.

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iambiguous
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
Kierkegaardian postmodernism

In Chapter Four, I sketched one postmodern response to the problems of theory and evidence for socialism. For an intelligent, informed socialist confronted with the data of history, a crisis of belief has to occur. Socialism is to many a powerful vision of the beautiful society, one that envisages an ideal social world that will transcend all the ills of our current one. Any such deeply held vision comes to form part of the very identity of the believer, and any threat to the vision has to be experienced as a threat to the believer.
Socialism/Communism are trickier objectivist fonts. Why? Because unlike any number of idealists, materialists actually attempt to be more empirical in their analysis and assessment. "Scientific socialism" they call it.

What Marx and Engels did was to explore the actual historical evolution of human economic interactions. And then to connect the dots between that and the social and political "superstructure". Nomadic, slash and burn, hunter and gatherer, agriculturists, mercantilist, captialist, socialist. In that exact historical order by and large.

As opposed to, say, Ayn Rand who rooted capitalism in philosophy itself. To be a free-market capitalist was to literally embrace the most rational and virtuous understanding of yourself in the world around you. A "metaphysical" grasp of the One True Path. No thesis, antithesis, synthesis for her and her ilk.

But either way, the "psychology of objectivism" generally pertains. Thus, "any such deeply held vision comes to form part of the very identity of the believer, and any threat to the vision has to be experienced as a threat to the believer."

Sound familiar?

To wit:
From the historical experience of other visions that have run into crises of theory and evidence, we know that there can be a powerful temptation to block out theoretical and evidentiary problems and simply to will oneself into continuing to believe.
You "will" yourself to see what you believe. Everything contrary to the One True Path is explained away. And everything that others argue that is contrary to your own authoritarian dogma merely demonstrates their own foolish ignorance.

On the other hand, what to do with someone like me? I'm not arguing against them so much as encouraging them to explore how [existentially] they came to acquire their dogmatic convictions in the first place. And how these convictions may well revolve more around the psychological satisfaction -- the comfort and consolation -- that comes with of having found an objectivist font to anchor I in.

Then choose your "methodology":
Religion, for example, has provided many such instances. “Ten thousand difficulties,” wrote Cardinal Newman, “do not make one doubt.” Fyodor Dostoevsky made the point more starkly, in a letter to a woman benefactor: “If anyone had written to me that the truth was outside of Christ, I would rather remain with Christ than with the truth.” We also know from historical experience that sophisticated epistemological strategies can be developed precisely for the purpose of attacking the reason and logic that have caused problems for the vision. Such were part of the explicit motivations of Kant’s first Critique, Schleiermacher’s On Religion, and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.
God and religion by and large, but, "deontologically", philosophers have come up with their own "theoretical" contraptions.

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iambiguous
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
By the end of the eighteenth century, religious thinkers had available to them Kant’s sophisticated epistemology. Kant told them that reason was cut off from reality, and so many abandoned natural theology and gratefully used his epistemology to defend religion.
No, seriously, I challenge someone here to note a particular context they are familiar with...note how Kant might have explained how, in that context, reason was cut off from reality. How we can use epistemology in our choice of language to propound moral obligations when the context involves conflicting goods.
By the middle of the twentieth century, Left thinkers had available to them sophisticated theories of epistemology and language that told them that truth is impossible—that evidence is theory-laden—that empirical evidence never adds up to proof—that logical proof is merely theoretical—that reason is artificial and dehumanizing—and that one’s feelings and passions are better guides than reason.
Left, right, in between. What thinkers either have or do not have available to them is a choice of language that allows them to differentiate moral from immoral behaviors. After all, left, right or in between, language abounds that permit all of us to access objective truths in the either/or world.

Indeed, that's why, in my view, so many here prefer to keep the value judgment exchanges up in definitional logic realm of the theoretical.

And, as though our feelings and passions were no less the existential embodiment of dasein out in a particular world historically, culturally and personally.
The prevailing skeptical and irrationalist epistemologies in academic philosophy thus provided the Left with a new strategy for responding to its crisis. Any attack on socialism in any form could be brushed aside, and the desire to believe in it reaffirmed. Those who adopted this strategy could always tell themselves that they were simply functioning as Kuhn said the scientists themselves function—by bracketing the anomalies, setting them aside, and then going with their feelings.
More "intellectual" gibberish?

And, as though there is not the politically correct equivalent of this on the capitalist Right.

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Iwannaplato
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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Belinda wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 10:34 pm The Bible gets a bad reputation sometimes. This is because The Bible is used as a book of explicit rules. When The Bible is used as literature especially poetic language it's full of wisdom, some of it close to Heideggerian Dasein theory.
For example?
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iambiguous
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
In postmodern discourse, truth is rejected explicitly and consistency can be a rare phenomenon.
His postmodern discourse. In mine, the objective truth still seems to be an entirely reliable component of our interactions with others in the either/or world. Though perhaps not in yours.
Consider the following pairs of claims.

On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is.
On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.
Values are subjective—but sexism and racism are really evil.
Technology is bad and destructive—and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others.
Tolerance is good and dominance is bad—but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.

There is a common pattern here: Subjectivism and relativism in one breath, dogmatic absolutism in the next.
That's why the single most important factor in regard to the words we choose revolves around the extent to which we can demonstrate that what we think or believe or claim to know is true "in our head" is in fact true "out in the world" in regard to our interactions with others.

What in particular are you attempting to be absolutely dogmatic about? Whether Joe Biden is president of the United States or whether he is doing a superb job. Whether Uma Thurman had an abortion or whether abortion is immoral. Whether Johnny Unitas played on a professional baseball or football team or whether baseball or football is the better sport.
Postmodernists are well aware of the contradictions—especially since their opponents relish pointing them out at every opportunity. And of course a postmodernist can respond dismissingly by citing Hegel—“Those are merely Aristotelian logical contradictions”—but it is one thing to say that and quite another to sustain Hegelian contradictions psychologically.
Hegel? Why go there or to Aristotle? Given a particular set of circumstances, you can either demonstrate that all truth is relative, that all cultures are equally deserving of respect, that values are subjective, that technology is bad and destructive, that tolerance is good and dominance is bad, or you can't.

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Re: the language of postmodernism

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The Limits of Language?
Ronin Winter
“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein
Of course, in regard to the language employed by those involved in the physical sciences, new discoveries often bring about a new language...new words for new things that had 1] previously never been known or 2] had never been grasped fully. But what's crucial is that the words invented to describe these brand-new discoveries are applicable to all of us. We are all in the world together and the laws of nature excludes none of us. So if there are still limitations, they are likely to revolve around how these new discoveries are used politically.
The common notion is that language is a means of communication; it enables us to retrieve and convey information of the world. The special ability of language seems to be what sets humans apart from other animals.
No, what really sets us apart from the rest of the animal world is how our own communication often breaks down. With "lesser" animals, it's all about instinct and drives. Biological imperatives that evolve through random mutations that are completely beyond the control of life on Earth itself.

So: why, over and again, do we come toe to toe, eyeball to eyeball with this: https://youtu.be/qYe8cGy9TeI

Thus:
While other animals are able to communicate and elucidate certain responses and behaviours no such example has been able to match that of a human’s ability. Animal communication comes in many forms such as the auditory cues of songbirds, the facial expressions of a chimpanzee, to the pheromones of an ant colony.
Many forms. But no is/ought world for them, right? No value judgments or conflicting goods. No being authentic. No dasein. No "fractured and fragmented" sense of existence.

Unless, of course, we live in a wholly determined universe such that even our own "failure to communicate" is but the psychological illusion of actual autonomy.
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