In a rather predictable way, there have always been persons and even peoples at early stages of development (intellectual, moral, aesthetic, social and/or religious) who have perverted the meanings of humankind's latest authentic insights, inevitably twisting them to their transparently selfish (and puerile) ends of either avoiding pain (and fear) or pursuing pleasure (and security), above all other goals (otherwise, there's nothing intrinsically unworthy about those ends). To wit: Science sometimes devolves into scientism, faith into fideism, philosophy into rationalism, culture into provincialism, ritual into ritualism, law into legalism, dogma into dogmatism, common sense realism into fundamentalism(s) and the postmodern critique into postmodernism. What the critique had suggested is that the categories of our modal ontology be changed from 'possible, actual & necessary' to 'possible, actual & probable' and that our corresponding epistemic categories reflect a new semantical vagueness where such first principles as noncontradiction [NC] & excluded middle [EM] alternately hold or fold for each of those categories: possible [NC folds, EM holds], actual [NC & EM hold] and probable [NC holds, EM folds]. What postmodernism did is to change our modal ontology to 'possible, actual and whatever' and, in doing so, broke open a new epistemic category: 'huh?' [undecidability]. Now, undecidability is a valid working concept, proven, in fact, by Godel's incompleteness theorems, which tell us that we can have either consistency or completeness but not both. But, as even Stephen Hawking would later come to believe and point out - the good money's always been placed on consistency, while abiding with incompleteness. That is to say that postmodernism erred in betting all its chips on inconsistency, as if that were the 'complete ' non-answer. The postmodern critique properly (& hygienically) challenged our theory of knowledge, leaving our theory of truth untouched. Postmodernism challenged truth, itself, but only for all practical purposes, for there is no challenge to truth on theoretical grounds, employing logical arguments. However, while there is no logical adjudication of these alternate approaches, the normative sciences have always had other tools at their disposal, measures such as the practical and the absurd. http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/art/features/pomo-everybodys-doing-it2353050.html
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