BTW, one of my favorite takedowns of postmodernism is this one.
Thanks for the link. I skimmed the article and it seems well written and quite informative; I’ll read it in full later.
In my opinion, there are some good insights in postmodernism, but as someone (Eysenck?) said about Freud, what’s true in it isn’t new, and what’s new isn’t true. In a sense, postmodernism itself provides perhaps the most fruitful target for a postmodernist analysis (of sorts). What these people say is of little real interest when taken at face value, but some fascinating insight can be obtained by analyzing the social role of them and their intellectual output, their interactions and conflicts with other sorts of intellectuals, and the implicit (conscious or not) meanings of their claims.
If I remember correctly, you’re Russian? Those Slavic double negatives must be giving you constant distress, if you’re so bothered by (seeming) deficiencies of logic in natural language.
It technically is redundant, though, because it has the form (A=>~B)&(B=>~A), while A=>~B and B=>~A are equivalent to each other. It doesn’t need to be symmetrized because the statement was symmetric in the first place, even if it wasn’t stated in an obviously symmetric form such as ~(A&B). (Going to have to say I like the redundant version for emphasis, though.)
Yeah, don’t get me started on continental philosophy.
BTW, one of my favorite takedowns of postmodernism is this one.
lukeprog:
Thanks for the link. I skimmed the article and it seems well written and quite informative; I’ll read it in full later.
In my opinion, there are some good insights in postmodernism, but as someone (Eysenck?) said about Freud, what’s true in it isn’t new, and what’s new isn’t true. In a sense, postmodernism itself provides perhaps the most fruitful target for a postmodernist analysis (of sorts). What these people say is of little real interest when taken at face value, but some fascinating insight can be obtained by analyzing the social role of them and their intellectual output, their interactions and conflicts with other sorts of intellectuals, and the implicit (conscious or not) meanings of their claims.
The logical redundancy in this phrase has long bothered me.
If I remember correctly, you’re Russian? Those Slavic double negatives must be giving you constant distress, if you’re so bothered by (seeming) deficiencies of logic in natural language.
It’s not redundant; it’s a more witty and elegant way of saying that there are some new things, some true things, but none that are both.
It technically is redundant, though, because it has the form (A=>~B)&(B=>~A), while A=>~B and B=>~A are equivalent to each other. It doesn’t need to be symmetrized because the statement was symmetric in the first place, even if it wasn’t stated in an obviously symmetric form such as ~(A&B). (Going to have to say I like the redundant version for emphasis, though.)