From: Walpurgis (walpurg@myrealbox.com)
Date: Thu Jul 25 2002 - 02:31:02 MDT
> What bothers many critics is how postmodernism defies
> elementary logic.
Good. Logic is not the only way one can/must think. Non-logical
statements, emotional statements have their own validity.
> Consider the statement "Everything is subjective." This idea is
> nonsensical, anti-postmodernist Thomas Nagel has written, "for it
> would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can't
> be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it
> can't be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective
> claim, including the claim that it is objectively false."
and
> Postmodernist Paul de Man, for example, believed literary theory
> should uphold "a radical relativism": No interpretation of a text is
> better than another, because language is inherently unstable. He
> conceptualized his approach in a sentence that used "sign" to refer to
> language: "Sign and meaning can never coincide." But de Man's theory
> breaks down when applied to his own words. They are themselves signs,
> used to mean something. To communicate his method, he has to draw on
> the property of language he denies it as having.
This isn't a postmodernists problem. The logical positivists had the
same difficulty with their (very logical) "verification principle". the
problem here is one of language and self-reference, not logical or
lack thereof.
Dismissing such a disperate movement as "postmodernism" in its
entirity doesn't seem very rational to me.
Walpurgissss
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