Talk:Is postmodernism a pseudo-philosophy?

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It seems like so much 'philosophy' is either nonsense or a bastardized interpretation of results from some other STEM field. I don't understand what "postmodernism" is or why it's at all relevant. I suppose I'm inclined to say "pseudo-philosophy" but I really don't understand such terms as postmodernism in the first place. It seems like a very narrativized interpretation of culture and intellectual progress. I don't like it one bit. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 15:12, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Hah, I just looked at Alan Sokal. I like him already. Though I can't say I feel "postmodernism" really deserves to be so distinguished in the first place. I suppose we need a name for it and all the bs it seems to entail, but at the same time I have caution about shallow critique along the lines of "that's bs", as tempting as it sometimes is to say just that. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 15:26, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Frankly though, I don't consider it a comedy. It's a rather serious thing that the social sciences have all adopted this lexicon of nonsense and idiom. I might give Sokal's book a read but I hope he's not some annoying comedian. On the one hand it's low-hanging fruit to criticize this sort of language superficially, because it is nonsense. Yet that's not particularly satisfying. Why is such language being used? Who started it? What sort of viewpoint is it being used to promote? How does it seem to do so without withering under scrutiny? These are the interesting questions one must answer. It's easy enough to joke around and say it's all a bunch charlatanism and quackery. It is, but that's hardly the full story. I suppose I'll have a look and see what he has to say, and hope he doesn't make light of it. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 15:51, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

For instance, I believe that much of this has to do with the idolatry of abstract concepts, particularly via nominalizations. A quick search through the book doesn't turn up the word nominalization, which could just be faulty OCR but he probably doesn't mention it. In other words, "postmodernism", i.e. modern cultural critique is essentially debased and overly abstract, enabling authors to write ad nauseam without really saying anything. Sokal might address this in some manner or another, but I think a true doylist critique requires one to escape this idiom altogether and treat the language itself as the subject of analysis. Once one really starts keeping an eye out for bs and quackery, one begins to understand it's the norm and not the exception. You could spend a lifetime nitpicking all the different ways in which the modern "liberal media" narrative is bogus, and so it seems important to find a common thread here and ask why so many authors adopt this style. What do they have to gain from it, besides that it's easy and cheap? AP295 (discuss • contribs) 16:00, 10 December 2023 (UTC)