Week 9: Postmodernism Flashcards
(20 cards)
What does postmodernism attack?
The unity of truth.
What is the postmodernist concept of truth?
Different views of the world may lead to truths that contradict each other.
What was the dominant idea before postmodernism?
Before postmodernism, the dominant idea was that all the truths can be combined into one big, coherent truth. Truth describes the world as it really is, and there is only one world that we all share. Therefore, this one world cannot contain contradictions and must contain one truth.
Richard Rorty
He attacks the correspondence theory of truth, and defends the pragmatic theory.
A theory is true if it is the best theory at helping us to achieve our goal (fits in with Kuhn’s paradigms).
Correspondence theory of truth
A sentence is true if and only if it describes what is really the case in the world
What do defenders of the correspondence theory of truth believe?
They believe that the world has a structure equal to the structure of language
Who does Rorty agree with?
Rory agrees with De Saussure and Nietzsche that the world does not inherently have a structure. Our language has a certain structure, and we project that structure onto the world. Therefore, the structure of the world is dependent on our language.
What does Rorty believe about language?
Rorty believes that language does not describe a structure that is already present in the world. Instead, language is a tool used to reach our goals.
Jacques Derrida
Defender of the postmodernist idea that there are a lot of different interpretations, all of which are equally good.
What does Derrida believe about language?
He agrees with Nietzsche and De Saussure that language projects structure onto the world, rather than describing structure already present. By extent, he believes that concepts do not exist in real-life objects: a tree in the real world does not carry with it the meaning “tree”.
What does Derrida believe about meaning?
Derrida thinks that meanings don’t exist in our minds either, because the full meaning of a concept includes its relations to everything else in the world, which is too big to contain in the mental lexicon.
On which idea does Hermeneutics rely?
Hermeneutics relies on the idea that you can come to the exact same meaning which the author intended. However, even the author themselves does not exactly understand what they are saying, because no one understands the structure of their language perfectly. No one ever knows with perfect clarity what they are saying, and therefore no one can be understood with perfect clarity either.
Traditional hermeneutics mistake
Nobody ever knows with clarity what they’re saying, so you can’t place yourself in anyone’s shoes because they don’t know it themselves. Even your own writing, are things that have to be interpreted.
Dominant perspective (traditional)
The one of white males (consciously, unconsciously, forcefully, peacefully).
Issues and problems of diversity/identity:
Ethnic minorities and women are rarely put in positions where they can publish their ideas and just have to accept ideas of white men.
Universalism
Equality, men are not better than women, Europeans are not better than Asians, there’s no difference between science done by a men and science done by women.
It’s also problematic to say a woman can give feminine truths in science, because it makes binary divisions between people that sexist views also make.
What if there are no essences?
Postmodernists deny the existence of fixed essences.
The meaning of man, woman, Muslim, is not determined by their content but by their (complex, changing) relations to other concepts.
Essence/essentialism
Essential to something, the properties that make something what it is.
The essence of femininity is “caring”. The essence of masculinity is being “strong and unemotional”.
Essentialism = an assumption shared by universalism and identity.
General idea of postmodernism:
Knowledge cannot be separated from specific people or groups: there is no neutral standard for justification. This suggests further that there may be no ‘neutral’ truth → attack on the unity of truth.
What is the opposite of universalism?
The opposite of universalism is what we may call identity thinking, which is the idea that you should perform research precisely from your own specific identity. In that way, the perspective of all groups can be represented in science.
