An Introduction to the Philosophical Origins of Postmodernism

an outsider. Only in the prison does Foucault argue that we can clearly see the fabricated society unmasked, with freedoms and barriers, and the consequences of each on the groups artificially created to oppose one another.

To shed light on the source of the criticisms of these thinkers, we must look more closely at the philosophical composition of their ideas. Any intellectual movement will make assumptions about human nature and values, metaphysics (i.e. the nature of reality), and epistemology (i.e. the means of perceiving reality). Although briefly stated here, these ideas will be further explored in later chapters.

Metaphysically, to be a postmodernist is to be an antirealist—to claim that reality has no objective basis because its meaning cannot be separable from its perceiver. We can see this in the quotation from Rorty given above about “this talk of correspondence.” Rather than speaking about reality, some postmodernists argue for a socio-linguistic constructivism, where language defines reality as rules define a game. Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher, similarly presented the idea of “language games,” where a change in the game (language) will change reality.

Epistemologically, since postmodernists insist there is no objective reality, they argue that one cannot use “reason” as there is no firm basis from which to reason. A postmodernist might say that we take for granted what we perceive, and yet the concepts we rely on are not objective but a biased accountthat perpetuates injustice. Instead, subjectivity is emphasized, where all perceivers inescapably use