the language of postmodernism

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iambiguous
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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A Review of Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks
Matt McManus
The Enlightenment and Its Discontents

The book’s problems begin on the very first page, with Hicks’ list of seminal postmodern authors. He includes obvious picks such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard, three of Hicks’ four horsemen of postmodernity. But others—Richard Rorty and Jacques Lacan—have a debatable association with postmodernity and some of those included were even outright critics of postmodernism, such as the feminist legal scholar Catherine Mackinnon, author of “Points Against Postmodernism,” and Luce Irigaray, whose work is a frequent target of postmodern feminists due to its alleged essentialism.
Actually, the problem begins with the title of the book itself. It assumes that postmodernism itself can be explained such that it does not just involve the author's own accumulated collection of moral and political and philosophical prejudices. All rooted existentially in dasein given the manner in which the trajectory of his life predisposed him to one set of prejudices rather than another.

That's why I ask those like Satyr who embrace much of Hick's own political bigotries to explore an assessment of postmodernism in regard to a particular set of circumstances. Race, gender, sexual preferences, abortion, guns, the role of government. How are they encompassed in a postmodern frame of mind?

Or how about this:
These problems persist throughout the book. Hicks completely misinterprets Lyotard’s quotation about Saddam Hussein in his 1997 book Postmodern Fables. Lyotard claims that, “Saddam Hussein is a product of Western departments of state and big companies,” which Hicks interprets to mean that Hussein is a “victim and spokesman for victims of American imperialism the world over.”
Indeed, how does one go about examining American foreign policy in the Middle East as a postmodernist? As opposed to, say, a Marxist? Where from the Marxist frame of mind, the American government [Democratic or Republican] has always been utterly preoccupied with the oil there. Political economy in a nutshell.

To wit:

"The irony was that Saddam had been a close American ally ever since Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in Iran removed the Shah in 1979 and all through during the 1980s. Iraq was seen as an essential bulwark against the new Islamic Republic of Iran. The Americans had poured money and aid into Iraq to help it fight the Iranians during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988." WORLD

And, of course, the only reason that Iran became an enemy to the American government [Democratic and Republican] revolves around this:

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/69036340 ... -four-days

"On Aug. 19, 2013, the CIA publicly admitted for the first time its involvement in the 1953 coup against Iran's elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh."

We installed the autocratic Shah. Which eventually led to the Ayatollah Khomeini and this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution

Thus...
In fact, Lyotard’s essay discusses the early support Hussein received from the American government during his prolonged war against Iran in the 1980s. These interpretive problems immediately make one suspicious that this book may be less about explaining postmodernism in a liberal and charitable way and more about lumping together and dismissing all forms of left-wing criticism that may owe an intellectual debt to continental European thought.
Exactly. It's not postmodern thinking that is explained so much as why the right wing/conservative objectivists are clearly deemed more rational and virtuous than the left wing/liberal objectivists.

By Hicks. By Satyr.

By Alexis Jacobi here?
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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A Review of Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks
Matt McManus
Hicks claims that postmodernism is defined by four features. First, it is a metaphysically anti-realist position, which holds that it is “impossible to speak meaningfully about an independent reality.”
Of course, this takes us back to the mysteries of mind itself. The human mind in particular. And here there are any number of theologians and philosophers and scientists able to propose all manner of "explanations" regarding a reality independent of the human mind. Here I accept both "the gap" and "Rummy's rule" as the starting point. There are just some things we don't now know -- can't ever know? -- about the existence of existence itself and where and how and why mere mortals here on planet Earth fit into it.

So, given that, what's left? Well, to the best of our ability, to make that crucial distinction between what we believe [about anything] in our head and what we are able to demonstrate that other rational people are obligated to believe as well.

Here, Hicks then takes his own rooted existentially in dasein leap to the political prejudices embedded in the right, in capitalism, in objectivism. While insisting that those who do not are "one of them"...the fools!
Second, postmodernism is epistemologically skeptical of the possibility of acquiring objective knowledge about the world.
Again, here it all revolves around how far out on the epistemological/metaphysical limb you go. All the way to solipsism? to determinism? to sim worlds? to dream worlds? to the Matrix? to God?
Third, it is methodologically collectivist, regarding human nature as primarily defined by group affiliations.
Well, if you are a Marxist you note the evolution of human communities as revolving around the need to sustain a particular means of production...nomadic communities, slash and burn communities, hunter and gatherer communities, agricultural communities, feudal communities, mercantile communities, capitalist communities, socialist communities. It's not that these communities, down through the ages, using the tools of philosophy, decided that collectivism or individualism was more rational, more virtuous. It's that "we" or "I" simply made more sense historically given the nature of the community itself going about the task of subsisting.

Whereas, if you are an Ayn Randroid objectivist none that matters. No, instead, superior minds simply "thought up" capitalism as not only the best of all possible worlds but as the only possible world if you wish to be thought of as rational and virtuous. Hicks "the philosopher" embodies just another rendition of this mentality. As do those like Satyr here. They all simply start with a different set of political prejudices rooted existentially in the lives they lived. And then manage to convince themselves that dasein has nothing to do with it at all. No, their convictions are superior because as philosopher kings themselves, they are able to "think up" the wisest deontological/ideological moral narratives and political agendas.
And, fourth, postmodernism is politically committed to protecting those groups which postmodernists regard as victims.
Here of course what they do is to start with the assumption that there are no victims. Everyone has an equal opportunity to rise to the top. Racism? Sexism? Heterosexism? Classism? Nope. The only reason anyone comes to think of themselves and others as victims is because they refuse to accept the fact that it is always their own damn fault for not rising to the top.

Or, of course, those here who argue that if one is to be thought of as a victim it all comes back to genes. Yes, the white race is naturally superior to all other races. Men are naturally superior to women. Some men are naturally gifted with a superior intellect.

Nature's way let's call it.
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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A Review of Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks
Matt McManus
The Counter-Enlightenment

Perhaps the single weakest part of Hicks’ book is his account of the so-called Counter-Enlightenment. Hicks claims that Counter-Enlightenment thinkers attacked the foundations of reason, therefore laying the intellectual foundations of postmodernism. But his reading of many of these thinkers is very shoddy.
What did the Enlightenment revolve around first and foremost if not the historical advent of capitalism? And the need to create a superstructure -- social and political institutions -- much more in sync with these entirely new components of economic exchange. It's not as though a bunch of philosophers sat around during the Feudal era and "thought up" this new way of doing things. "Let's scrape the 'other worldly' Divine right of Kings running their feudal fiefdoms and, instead, create a market economy that would be sustained by a new kind of government that focused more on individuals competing with other individuals for market share."

This really is how those like Ayn Rand imagined the world unfolding. Great Men thinking it all into existence.

Instead, a burgeoning mercantile economy along with crafts guilds created and then sustained an equally bustling world trade that over time evolved organically into capitalism itself. And then right in line came the Reformation...a "spiritual"/"religious" frame of mind that reconfigured from thinking solely about saving one's soul on the other side of the grave to a "this side" frame of mind. The more you prospered here and now the more God actually favored you.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of Immanuel Kant, whom Hicks argues is somehow a Counter-Enlightenment thinker. This is all the more ironic, given Kant’s argument in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that, “man—and in general every rational being—exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be used by this or that will at its discretion.”
Come on. Kant may have thought this but only given his own rendition of a Divine theistic foundation. A transcendent font -- God -- commanding deontological moral prescriptions such that ultimately good and evil rested on the assumption that God Himself would be around and, on Judgment Day, save your soul for all the rest of eternity.

Take God out of the picture and what on Earth would motivate anyone to "do the right thing" categorically regardless of the consequences?
Hicks makes the baffling argument that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a skeptical epistemological attack on empirical realism and the possibility of true knowledge of the real world, designed to shore up Kant’s religious faith against the attacks of Enlightenment science. This is simply not true. Kant’s entire project was to show that empirical reason was an essential part of how human beings develop a comprehensive understanding of the world.
From my frame of mind, this is the sort of intellectual bullshit that all too many "serious philosophers" exchange here on a daily basis. What does any of it mean out in the world of actual human interactions.

Again, I challenge the "serious philosophers" here -- the Harry Bairds and the Alexis Jacobis -- to translate this world of words above into an assessment of a moral/political conflict that is of particular importance to them.

Empirical realism/reason in regard to what potent issue that has rent the species now for centuries?
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Re: the language of postmodernism

Post by popeye1945 »

iambiguous wrote: Sat Feb 05, 2022 5:13 pm Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website
Can language express truth? Can language give us a clear picture of reality?
Here of course what everyone will expect me to note is this: "given what particular context?"

Yes, that's my main "thing" when it comes to philosophy. And why wouldn't it be since, above all else, I come back to connecting the dots existentially in regard to this question: "how ought one to live in a world awash both in conflicting moral and political value judgments and in contingency, chance and change?"

Truth and clarity there.
Discussing Postmodernism has become almost prosaic given the intellectual climate of the 2010s. However, it has posed questions which directly challenge the most classical assertions of how we understand the world around us. For that alone it is worth responding to.

Postmodernism also remains relevant because much of current thinking is rooted in Postmodern ideas. This goes beyond just academic circles: it is easy to catch Postmodern ideas in everyday discourse. Nothing is unusual about hearing someone retort in an argument “Well, that’s subjective,” or if they are more well versed and a little bolder “That’s just interpretation, there’s never really any one meaning.”
Here, of course, it depends on how far you go with this. After all, think about your day to day interactions with others. Think about all of the countless times you don't stop to insist, "that’s just interpretation -- subjective -- there’s never really any one meaning."

Nothing much "postmodern" about the laws of nature, mathematics, the empirical world around is, human biology, the rules of logic.
These ideas originate from Postmodern language theory in particular. What is referred to as “Postmodernism” refers to a specific idea of language and how it functions. These ideas were shaped by numerous thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s: most popularly through French thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who took the core ideas on language and related them to concepts of power, oppression, and freedom.
On the other hand, the language that postmodernists use to deconstruct meaning and purpose in our lives necessarily includes their own arguments. For me, it still comes down to connecting the dots existentially between this or that "core idea" and this or that set of circumstances. Power, oppression and freedom out in what particular world understood in what particular way? That laborious, often futile task of separating what through language we claim to believe is true and what we are in fact able to demonstrate is true for all rational human beings. Postmodernism changed none of that.

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=175006
Truth to any organism is its experience of the world; language comes in when one wishes to related individual experience to like biologizes to gain perhaps the reassurance of a collective biological opinion on the subject. Language necessarily remains no matter how good the communication apparent reality in the abstract and perhaps twice removed. It is only in the abstract that confusion arises for generally speaking the issues concerned are not first-hand experience, but again it is the abstract which is debated. It seem somehow vital to me to remember that all knowledge, meanings and values are biologically dependent and with philosophizing in the abstract as it always is, one must occasionally land on the solid ground of personal experience even in its own fallibility.
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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Taylor Swift’s Liar Paradox
With the help of renowned logician Taylor Swift, Theresa Helke introduces four fundamental paradoxes: the Liar, Epimenides’, the Truth-Teller, and the No-No.
Consider the following statement:

“All the liars are calling me one.”

It’s a lyric. The singer-songwriter Taylor Swift sings it in ‘Call It What You Want’ from her album Reputation. In doing so, Swift states that all liars are calling her a liar. We shall call this statement ‘Swift’s Statement’.
What this exposes, in my view, is just one particular context in which human language gets all tangled up in its own inherent limitations. Like Nick Lowe suggesting that "all men are liars and that's the truth".

All the seeming paradoxes -- Swift Statements -- that can pop up:

* Save money by spending it.
* If I know one thing, it's that I know nothing.
* This is the beginning of the end.
* Deep down, you're really shallow.
* I'm a compulsive liar.
* "Men work together whether they work together or apart." - Robert Frost
* "What a pity that youth must be wasted on the young." - George Bernard Shaw
* "I can resist anything but temptation." - Oscar Wilde
* Here are the rules: Ignore all rules.
* The second sentence is false. The first sentence is true.

And on and on.

We can make sense of them given particular contexts, but they often prompt us to pull back and recognize the seeming contradictory point that is being made.

Or, in some cases, we can't make sense of them at all.
One might think that the lyric refers just to some personal spat. Au fait listeners may suspect that Swift is taking aim at Kanye West or Kim Kardashian West. Such listeners will know that the then-husband-and-wife claimed that Swift had done something which she denies doing [namely, approve a lyric).
I know absolutely nothing about this particular "spat" but it doesn't make how tricky human language can become in regard to encompassing things as they really are.

And then the part that I always focus in on: language that revolves around human interactions in the is/ought world. We all use the same words in defending our own moral and political value judgments, but we can never seem to pin down which dictionary definition of the words are most applicable such that one side or the other is able to demonstrate that their own understanding of the words reflects the most rational and virtuous assessment of an issue.

Then the part where philosophers explore all of this more...technically?
But more than a shallow pop issue, Swift’s Statement concerns a deep philosophical one: that of ‘ungrounded’ sentences. I shall use Swift’s lyric to introduce four famous paradoxes: the Liar, Epimenides’, the Truth-Teller, and the No-No paradoxes. I’ll also argue that while one might think Swift’s Statement is a version of the Liar paradox, it is in fact a version of the Truth-Teller paradox, and, when conjoined with another sentence, forms a version of the No-No paradox. In short, Swift’s ‘liar’ paradox is not the Liar, but it is nonetheless a paradox.
Now, our task here is to think about these paradoxes and attempt to situate them out in the world of our own interactions with others. At what point do we get "stuck" and recognize that there is no definitive understanding of things as they are objectively?

That, in other words, language itself can only go in so far in regard to establishing the most rational frame of mind.
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Re: the language of postmodernism

Post by Iwannaplato »

iambiguous wrote: Thu Jun 15, 2023 6:21 pm “All the liars are calling me one.”
I have my days of obtuseness but I don't see that sentence as paradoxical.
Like Nick Lowe suggesting that "all men are liars and that's the truth".
That strikes me as paradoxical because he includes himself in the liars - though one has to assume liars are people who always lie to make it a paradox.

But Swift's?

Some people are liars. Some are not. The liars say she is a liar. But she is asserting they are lying. So, they are lying and she is not. I don't see where the paradox comes in. Of course, she might be lying, but actual paradoxes don't rely on some contingency. The sentence must be a paradox in itself. It asserts something it negates and her sentence does not do that.
All the seeming paradoxes -- Swift Statements -- that can pop up:
* Save money by spending it.
Yah, I'm half with this one. But perhaps if you, for example, spend money on God, this is better, according to some economist than saving it in the bank, for example.
* If I know one thing, it's that I know nothing.
There's a paradox.
* This is the beginning of the end.
That's not a paradox.
* Deep down, you're really shallow.
That's just funny.
* I'm a compulsive liar.
If by compulsive it is all the time.
* "Men work together whether they work together or apart." - Robert Frost
It is playing on two meanings of together. One physically, the other as part of some greater project while distant.
* "What a pity that youth must be wasted on the young." - George Bernard Shaw
I suppose if we take it completely literally, but it does't rise up to the clarity of a liar's paradox. Since he's playing with one facet of youth - energy, vitality, health as opposed to 'that stage of life'.
* "I can resist anything but temptation." - Oscar Wilde
He can resist tyranny, threats, pressure - stuff he doesn't like.
* Here are the rules: Ignore all rules.
Paradox.
* The second sentence is false. The first sentence is true.
Paradox.

We can make sense of them given particular contexts, but they often prompt us to pull back and recognize the seeming contradictory point that is being made.
Ah, yes, good. If one can get a point out of them, then it's probably not a paradox.
Or, in some cases, we can't make sense of them at all.
And those are paradoxes or gibberish or grammatically or otherwise ambiguous etc.
I know absolutely nothing about this particular "spat" but it doesn't make how tricky human language can become in regard to encompassing things as they really are.
I hope there isn't anyone who thinks that all possible communication makes sense.
But more than a shallow pop issue, Swift’s Statement concerns a deep philosophical one: that of ‘ungrounded’ sentences. I shall use Swift’s lyric to introduce four famous paradoxes: the Liar, Epimenides’, the Truth-Teller, and the No-No paradoxes. I’ll also argue that while one might think Swift’s Statement is a version of the Liar paradox, it is in fact a version of the Truth-Teller paradox, and, when conjoined with another sentence, forms a version of the No-No paradox. In short, Swift’s ‘liar’ paradox is not the Liar, but it is nonetheless a paradox.
Now, our task here is to think about these paradoxes and attempt to situate them out in the world of our own interactions with others. At what point do we get "stuck" and recognize that there is no definitive understanding of things as they are objectively?

That, in other words, language itself can only go in so far in regard to establishing the most rational frame of mind.
I don't think the potential for language to create paradoxes is a problem except for those who think any grammatical sentence must convey something coherent, say.

But my favorite reframing of language calls into question our whole way of understanding both language and communication:
https://www.reddyworks.com/the-conduit- ... or-article
for a summary of the ideas around this...
https://www.thoughtco.com/conduit-metap ... on-1689785
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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Taylor Swift’s Liar Paradox
With the help of renowned logician Taylor Swift, Theresa Helke introduces four fundamental paradoxes: the Liar, Epimenides’, the Truth-Teller, and the No-No.
Getting Started

To show that Swift’s Statement is not a version of the Liar paradox (which I’ll introduce in a sec), I need to define two terms and acknowledge three assumptions.

Definitions:

A liar: someone who says only false things; and

A truth-teller: someone who says only true things.
Here of course I go back to the distinction I make between a truth and a lie pertaining to the either/or world or to the is/ought world.

In regard to the laws of nature, mathematics, the empirical world around us and the logical rules of language, something either is true or it is not. Only when we go all the way out to the very end of the metaphysical limb pertaining to the Big Questions in regard to the very, very large and the very, very small can ambiguities and uncertainties begin to pop up.

But...

In regard to the is/ought world, what of a truth and a lie then? Joe Biden is now president of the United States. That's true for all of us. Well, except for the MAGA crowd who insist that in fact Donald Trump is still president.

On the other hand, is it true or false that Joe Biden is a great president?

It's true that certain celebrities have had an abortion: https://people.com/health/celebrity-abo ... ela-jamil/

Is it true that their abortions were immoral?
One could examine the paradox with a different set of definitions: for example, a liar is someone who says some true things as well as some false things.
Same thing though. What things said to be true, what things said to be false.

Then the part I focus in on: The manner in which in regard to value judgments our convictions are rooted far more in dasein [as subjective, existential prejudices] than in anything that philosophers/ethicists can convey in the way of an essential deontological morality.
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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Taylor Swift’s Liar Paradox
With the help of renowned logician Taylor Swift, Theresa Helke introduces four fundamental paradoxes: the Liar, Epimenides’, the Truth-Teller, and the No-No.
Assumptions:

First assumption: Any sentence is either true or false. So for example, ‘I’m in Geneva’ is either true (yes, I’m in Geneva), or false (no, I’m not in Geneva). It can’t be neither true nor false: either I’m in Geneva or I’m not! It also can’t be both true and false: I can’t both be in Geneva and not be in Geneva. In logic, we call this assumption the principle of excluded middle. That is, any sentence has a truth value, and if the sentence is false, then its negation is true. So if ‘I’m in Geneva’ is false, then its negation ‘I’m NOT in Geneva’ is true.
Okay, how about this assumption...

That, for any number of moral and political objectivists among us, there is no real distinction made between the either/or world and the is/ought world here.

In other words, if they are discussing abortion as a medical procedure or abortion as a moral issue, they are still insisting that something being either true or false is applicable. So, for many of them, the statement "Mary had an abortion" and "abortion is immoral" are both deemed to be objective facts. Either derived from one or another God or No God moral font.
Second assumption: The set of ‘liars’ isn’t empty – there is at least one liar. This is important because otherwise ‘All the liars are calling me one’ would be vacuously necessarily true. In a world where there are no liars, obviously, there are no liars who aren’t calling Tay a liar. In such a world, we’re not in a position to point at any liar and say ‘See? She’s not calling Tay a liar’.
Here, I always come around to this: "We'll need a context, of course."

In other words, what is really important, aside from the spin I put on it above, is what anyone who is lying in a calculated manner or lying out of ignorance or not lying at all, is claiming that Swift is actually lying about. Is it something that can in fact be pinned down as a lie, or does it revolve around a subjective value judgment such that what is construed to be a lie by some is construed to be the truth by others. Something that ethicists themselves are equally divided in regard to.
Third assumption: in the universe within which we’ll be considering the truth value of Swift’s Statement, people are either truth-tellers or liars, and not both. So, if you say something false, you’re a liar. And if you say something true, you’re a truth-teller. Moreover, if it’s false that you’re a liar, then you’re a truth-teller; and conversely, if it’s false that you’re a truth-teller, then you’re a liar.
We'll need a context, of course.
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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Taylor Swift’s Liar Paradox
With the help of renowned logician Taylor Swift, Theresa Helke introduces four fundamental paradoxes: the Liar, Epimenides’, the Truth-Teller, and the No-No.
The Liar Paradox

The Liar paradox arises from the sort of statement which reads:

“This sentence is false.”

Here, we have a sentence referring to itself and saying it’s false.
And that's all it does: reference itself. Words pertaining only to other words. It's not a sentence about anything in particular such that it may or may not be possible to actually determine if something is true or false when the words are connected to the world around us.

At least with Swift's, “all the liars are calling me one”, it involves something she said that others she deems to be liars are indicating that, no, she is the liar.

But lying about what? Is it something we can pin down such that it is in fact determined that she either is or is not lying about it?
We shall call this statement the Liar Statement. It is paradoxical because if the Liar Statement is true, then the Liar Statement is false. And if the Liar Statement is false, then the Liar Statement is true.
Indicating that when we are considering only words referencing other words, things can get all tangled up because there is nothing concrete that the words pertain to. Other than the sentence itself.

To witless:
Now, for any sentence S to be a version of the Liar paradox, it has to satisfy what I’ll call the Liar Paradox Biconditional (LPB), like this:

‘Sentence S is true only if S is false.’
What pops into my head here are the lyrics from another song by The Tragically Hip: "It's so deep it's meaningless".

Okay, we note the paradox embedded in, “This sentence is false.”

But so what? What does it have to do with anything really pertinent to the lives we live? It indicates basically how language can be twisted into pretzel logic and we don't know quite what to make of it.

But then what?
Therefore for Swift’s statement to be a version of the Liar paradox, it would have to be the case that if it were true, then it would be false; and if it were false, then it would be true. So, if Swift’s Statement satisfied the LPB, that would make it a (non-identical) twin of the Liar Statement, since the Liar Statement is also true if and only if the Liar Statement is false.

However – unlike in the case of the Liar Statement – it’s not true that Swift’s Statement is true if and only if Swift’s Statement is false.
Great. In noting this we can avoid altogether tapping her on the shoulder and asking her what the lars are actually accusing her of lying about. It can stay up in the logical/epistemological philosophical clouds and remain "a non-identical twin of the Liar Statement".
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Re: the language of postmodernism

Post by iambiguous »

Taylor Swift’s Liar Paradox
With the help of renowned logician Taylor Swift, Theresa Helke introduces four fundamental paradoxes: the Liar, Epimenides’, the Truth-Teller, and the No-No.
Assume that Swift’s Statement is true. In other words, suppose that all the liars are calling Swift a liar. But because they’re liars (and we’ve defined a liar as someone who utters only false sentences), it’s false that Swift is a liar.
Yes, that's my point. If they always tell lies then they are actually saying that Swift is telling the truth. But, again, the truth about what?!!!

But what if they don't always tell lies? What if this time Swift is noting that in regard to what she recently said, they are lying about her being a liar regarding only that?

Are you and I then able to actually pin down if, in fact, any of them are telling the true about it? Otherwise it becomes basically a "philosophical" quandary in which we are confronted with how language in referencing only other language can from time to time cause us to take pause and wonder what is really being said.
So she’s telling the truth – which is consistent with our assumption that Swift’s Statement is true. In uttering her Statement, Swift is speaking the truth.
Then back to this: does Swift always tell the truth? Then back to the distinction I make between truth in the either/or world and truth in the is/ought world. The former rooted objectively in the laws of nature, mathematics and the empirical world around us, the latter subjectively in dasein.
So we see that if Swift’s Statement is true, then Swift’s Statement is true. So we’ve disproved one conditional which makes the LPB, namely, that it’s not the case that if Swift’s Statement is true, then Swift’s Statement is false. So Swift’s lyric is not a version of the Liar paradox.
Okay, let's all agree that technically not only is this true but it's a very, very important truth. I'll still need to know what specifically she said. And whether what she said can or cannot in fact be established "for all practical purposes" as the objective truth.
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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Taylor Swift’s Liar Paradox
With the help of renowned logician Taylor Swift, Theresa Helke introduces four fundamental paradoxes: the Liar, Epimenides’, the Truth-Teller, and the No-No.
Epimenides’ Paradox

One might think that Swift’s Statement is a version of the contingent liar, otherwise known as Epimenides’ paradox – and one would be right, inasmuch as Swift’s Statement can just be plain false.
Okay, but how would we go about determining that unless we are privy to what in particular she is claiming the liars are accusing her of lying about. After all, she is calling them liars too.

Let’s look at that now.

Epimenides’ paradox arises from a sentence which, supposedly, was uttered by the Cretan philosopher Epimenides:

“All Cretans are liars.”

Let’s call this ‘Epimenides’ Statement’. Depending on the circumstances, Epimenides’ Statement can be false. This happens if there’s at least one Cretan who isn’t a liar who also isn’t Epimenides. Indeed, in this case, Epimenides is speaking falsely – he’s lying – in saying that all Cretans are liars.
Just another example of a reference to truths and lies that revolve entirely around words that reference only each other. How to make sense of someone from Crete claiming that all Cretans are liars. It is true or false that someone is from Crete. But how can it be true that someone from Crete makes the claim that he is lying without that being a lie in turn.

Nope, I'll need a reference instead to something a Cretan might say that either can be or cannot be demonstrated to be true.

Though, sure, I am, once again, missing an important point perhaps?
Things work similarly when it comes to Swift’s Statement. Depending on the circumstances, ‘All the liars are calling me one’ might be false. In this case, Swift is a liar (from our definition), since there is a liar (other than her) who isn’t calling her a liar.
Bingo: "depending on the circumstances".

So, just out of curiosity, is there anyone here who might actually know if this lyric pertains to something Swift fans might be familiar with? The liars she is referring to and what they claim that she is lying about.
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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Taylor Swift’s Liar Paradox
With the help of renowned logician Taylor Swift, Theresa Helke introduces four fundamental paradoxes: the Liar, Epimenides’, the Truth-Teller, and the No-No.
The Truth-Teller Paradox

The Truth-Teller Statement is: “This very sentence is true.”

What makes it remarkable, indeed paradoxical, is that there seems to be no way to tell whether the Truth-Teller Statement is true or false. To quote Chris Mortensen and Graham Priest, “Indeed, it seems hard to see how there could even be anything to choose between the hypotheses. More particularly both hypotheses seem to be consistent: from neither hypothesis does there appear to be deducible a contradiction” (‘The Truth Teller Paradox’, Logique et Analyse, 24, 1981, p.381).
Yep, this more or less goes over my head too. The sentence itself becomes the whole point. But the whole point regarding what? If there was a sentence before it referring to something -- to anything -- such that it was possible to determine if it was true or false, okay, then. But the sentence "this very sentence is true" alone?
In other words, whether we assume that the Truth-Teller Statement is true, or whether we assume that the Truth-Teller Statement is false, we can’t derive a confounding conclusion such as ‘the Truth-Teller Statement is both true and false’.
A little help here please. What deep "technical" point am I missing?

Indeed, from my technically deficient frame of mind this...
Contrary to the liar case, to be a Truth-Teller paradox, a sentence S need not satisfy the LPB. Rather, it needs to satisfy the Truth-Teller Conjunction (TTC). This conjunction is the logical connective which in plain English we read as ‘and’. Here’s the TTC:

If S is true, then S is true; and if S is false, then S is false.

So it won’t be that the Truth-Teller Statement is true if and only if the Truth-Teller Statement is false. Rather, it’ll be the case that:

If the Truth-Teller Statement is true, then the Truth-Teller Statement is true; and

If the Truth-Teller Statement is false, then the Truth-Teller Statement is false.
...is basically just intellectual gibberish that in no way, shape or form can I relate to, say, the life that I actually live.
Returning now to Swift’s lyric. We can get a version of the Truth-Teller paradox if for example we suppose that no one is saying anything except Swift and Kanye West, and West is saying:

‘Swift is a liar’

Let’s call this ‘West’s Statement’. But Swift is still saying Swift’s Statement, ‘All the liars are calling me one’.
Okay, I Googled the Swift/West feud and found this:

"West famously stole the microphone during Swift's 2009 acceptance speech for Best Video by a Female Artist to voice support for Beyonce, and later included Swift in a sexually aggressive song lyric, which Swift objected to. While the two eventually patched things up, fans seemed to relish and prolong the drama." Forbes.com

So, are these the facts we can all agree on? On the other hand, should Beyonce have gotten the award for the Best Video by a Female Artist instead? Is it a lie to say that Swift deserved it more? How is it all not hopelessly subjective?

Would West have expected Swift to turn down the award and announce that objectively the true winner was Beyonce?

How is this...
Note that to be a liar, a person must speak, and again, here we’re assuming only Swift and West are speaking. Now, either Swift is telling the truth – Swift’s Statement is true – or she is not – Swift’s Statement is false. If she’s telling the truth, then West is lying, and Swift’s Statement is indeed true. But if she’s lying, then West is telling the truth, and Swift’s Statement is indeed false, since Swift is not calling herself a liar even though she is one. So in this scenario, Swift’s lyric is similar to the truth-teller sentence, in that if Swift’s Statement is true, Swift’s Statement is true, but if Swift’s Statement is false, Swift’s Statement is false, and moreover, there seems to be no way to determine which hypothesis – ‘Swift’s Statement is true’ or ‘Swift’s Statement is false’ – is true. To use the technical term, Swift’s Statement is ungrounded. That is, there’s nothing to make it true. It breaks what in logic we call the thesis of truth-maker maximalism, according to which ‘If a sentence is true, there’s something which makes it true’. Instead, here, the ungrounded Swift’s Statement is a version of the Truth-Teller paradox.
...applicable to Swift receiving the award instead of Beyonce? If we eliminate all possible actual existential contexts and focus in entirely on just the words "Swift" "West" "True" "Lie"...what does any of it really matter?

Though, again, I don't deny that I may well lack the technical sophistication to "get" this Truth Teller paradox.
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Storm
John Best tries to move beyond postmodernism.
Faced with the dire plight of modern culture, what are we postmodern humans to do? Well, before attempting to chart a course forward, it might be a good idea to back up and show how postmodernism put us in the fix we’re in.
Of course:

1] go to Goggle
2] type in "postmodernism definition"
3] get this: https://www.google.com/search?q=postmod ... s-wiz-serp
4] click on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism
5] Get this: 'Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism; rejection of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning; and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power. Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.'

Then, if you wish to discuss this further with me here, well, "we'll need a context".

Your own "grand narrative" pertaining to moral and political and spiritual convictions and my own "fractured and fragmented" perspective at the existential intersection of "identity, value judgments, conflicting goods and political economy".

Go ahead, you choose the context. That way we can move beyond the "future of theory" here and explore all of this pertinent to the lives that we actually live?

Postmodernism is a response to modernism. Modernism was a development of the ideals of the Enlightenment, which suggested that advances in human affairs were achievable through the use of reason, which established a secure foundation for authentic human knowledge.
Okay, but as I am fond of pointing out, in utilizing our capacity to be reasonable, mere mortals have chosen many, many, many different paths to Enlightenment, suggesting many, many, many different foundations for authentic human knowledge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... philosophy

But we'll still need a context to go beyond "theory" here. In other words, moving beyond intellectual contraptions of this sort:
Modernists believed the possession of that knowledge would enable genuine social progress, and ultimately, the perfectibility of humanity. The clearest manifestations of this ideal were seen in the scientific and mathematical discoveries sprung from that well of tidy orderliness that was the Newtonian physical world. Modernism perhaps reached its high point in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
And what of modernism today? What of your own understanding of it? What of your very own moral and political equivalent of the Newtonian physical world?

Again, given a particular context.
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Storm
John Best tries to move beyond postmodernism.
But modernism failed. The massive irrationality of the twentieth century included the horrors of the World Wars, with the unimaginable cruelty of the Holocaust, alongside all the other racially or ideologically-based attempts at mass extermination, as well as the continued suppression of some cultures through colonialism.
On the other hand, for those like the Nazis and other moral, political and religious dogmatists, success and failure does not revolve around rationality and virtue. They stay committed to their very own One True Path to Enlightenment. Instead, success and failure revolve around victory or defeat.

The Nazis were vanquished all those years ago. But that doesn't stop fascists today -- and now with a growing number of members from year to year in America and Europe -- from championing the 4th Reich. Or another rendition of fascism.

Indeed, we've got a few of them here, I suspect.
All these phenomena, and others, pointed to the imperfectability of humanity. Meanwhile, the discovery of the quantum world, with the consequent demotion of classical physics, seemed to undermine the modernistic hope that science would provide durable answers about reality.
Of course, I focus less on the imperfectability of humankind and more on those among us who insist that, on the contrary, perfection is within reach. Merely become "one of us". On the other hand, some here don't want you at all if you don't have the right skin color or are of the wrong ethnicity or sexual persuasion or have the wrong perspective on gender and God and government.
In pushing back against these forces of irrationalism, from the early twentieth century onwards, philosophy attempted to define its traditional problems (reality, existence, etc.) in linguistic terms, with the hope that increasing the understanding of and precision of language would permit conceptual surety.
Right, and look where that has got us. Rationalism revolving almost entirely around logic-chopping -- "using the technical tools of logic in an unhelpful and pedantic manner by focusing on trivial details instead of directly addressing the main issue in dispute" -- and "analytic" texts that can go on for page after page, chapter after chapter, book after book and scarcely bring the world of actual human interactions into the assessment at all. What Will Durant called "the epistemologists".

And we have lots and lots and lots of them here too
But whatever traction this ‘linguistic turn’ achieved, the cost was high. Instead of finding a way out of the paradoxes and conundrums that arose from modernism, each new philosophical turn seemed diminishing, with the scope of human reasoning and knowledge becoming less and less sure.
Now, I have my own rendition of that. Only I am careful to make what I believe to be an important distinction between the either/or world and the is/ought world.

I merely insist that in discussing this difference, it revolves around a particular set of social, political and/or economic circumstances.

And that includes any postmodernists among us.
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Re: the language of postmodernism

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Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Storm
John Best tries to move beyond postmodernism.
When the very concept of reality is undermined, the search for knowledge becomes quixotic, and any putative truths emerging from such a search are immediately suspect. The result has been paralysis. And so, we arrive at the postmodern person’s plight: Whom and what to believe? And why?
All I can do again here is to come back to that critical distinction between the concept of reality and the reality that we actually interact in socially, politically and economically day after day after day.

A postmodern mathematician? A postmodern physicist? A postmodern chemist? A postmodern meteorologist? A postmodern logician?
‘Metamodernism’ is an emerging movement in both the arts and the humanities. It is a continuation of some of the ideals of modernity, in particular with regard to notions of progress – if not perfectibility, at least the improvement of the human condition on a global scale, though, it is simultaneously, also a departure from what now looks like modernity’s somewhat naïve view of cultural indebtedness.
There can be no doubt that in regard to science, the progress has been by great leaps and bounds. Try even to imagine those who lived around the time of Aristotle being around today, gaping and gasping at the extraordinary advances in their own particular fields. On the other hand, imagine the ethicists of those times being around today. How could they not but be stunned, stupefied at how little progress was made in regard to conflicting moral and political value judgments. The horrors embedded throughout the 20th century alone would leave them completely deflated.
There is a frankly visionary undercurrent at work in metamodernism. Its longing gaze at a better future explicitly rejects postmodernism’s ironic playful passivity. In a kind of intellectual ju-jitsu, as Storm notes, “Postmodern doubt can be made to doubt itself”.
Or, perhaps, one or another Alan Sokal attempting to expose just how ludicrous the abstruse and inscrutable postmodern texts can often be.

Or try this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism_Generator

Or, for the "serious philosophers" here, this: https://andrewmbailey.com/Humor/Chart.pdf
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