Modernism vs. Postmodernism

And he completely misunderstands, or deliberately misconstrues, the very first "Postmodernist" statement he quotes.

Foucault is not making a truth claim about the nature of Rationality and Truth. Foucault is saying that the concepts and technical terms of "Reason", "Truth", rationality and so on cannot be understood outside of their cultural context.

It is meaningless to defend "Reason" not because somehow the validity of Reason has been objectively refuted, but because the term "Reason" does not actually mean anything in and of itself, outside of context.

We only ever "defend" specific reasoning, specific rationalities, specific argumentative constructions.


Despite all his praises of Postmodernists being somehow "brilliant", I'm not sure he actually understands (or can understand) what they're on about to begin with. He seems to take every single statement as a claim to universal objective truth without considering that the very point of Postmodern thought is that there is no such thing - and as such every single Postmodern statement has to be taken in its specific context, related to other statements made in that context.

He doesn't appear to be interested in engaging with Postmodern thought at any level beyond the most basic evisceration of statements taken out of their context. And the excuse "this is just a short Youtube video" doesn't cut it, because he has done basically the exact same thing on a larger scale in his book on Postmodernism, only with added conspiracy theories.

Is Foucault making a claim that is universally applicable? If he is, then he has contradicted himself. But if he isn't, then Foucault admits that there are cases when Reason, Truth, and Rationality can be understood outside of their cultural context. In other words, Foucault's claim is Self-Referentially Inconsistent. It contradicts itself. It's Incoherent.



What context is that? Social? So if enough people got together and said that the laws of Physics were different, then those laws would actually change?



Are you claiming then that there are no general rules of Logic? A lot of authors who wrote books on the rules of Logic are going to disagree with you.




What about connecting their claims to Objective Reality? Since the postmodernists don't do that, their claims are merely Floating Abstractions with no link to reality.



Can you give specific examples of statements he took out of context, and the context that it was taken out of?



I read his book and I didn't notice any conspiracy theories. Can you please give some examples of his "conspiracy theories" and the page number where they appear?

Bob

It's not just about not knowing any physics. It's also about not knowing how to make an argument or a hypothesis that physicists can work with. It's about speaking and understanding the language of physics.



I don't know? The postmodern philosophers I've read don't really concern themselves with that question.
Maybe there some postmodern thinkers have claimed this, but I haven't read or heard of them.

It's important to keep in mind that when an author calls science a set of cultural practices, or a social construction, they are not necessarily saying that science cannot produce true statements, or speaking about the validity of scientific methods in the first place.

For example, Foucault himself stated that the application of his ideas was limited to the humanities and the social sciences. His concern wasn't with the validity of their methods, but their effects on "the modern human soul".

Sure we can. But our certainty can only be a certainty within the limits of what we know right now, at this particular point in time and space.

And for all practical purposes, I really don't see a need for a notion of certainty that goes beyond that.



Kant was an objectivist (not in the Randian sense, but in the sense of that he believed in universal, objective knowledge) so he primarily saw this as a problem to overcome. He "solved" this by specifying categories of knowledge that are not entirely based on sensual experience, and therefore not subject to the same limitation. Mathematics was considered one such area, so Newtonian physics, a model of physics that Kant was an enormously supportive of, could still be regarded as universally true despite them ostensibly being based on empirical experiments.




Then you are not interested in epistemology, so I wonder what your motivation to read Kant (or, really, any of the 17th and 18th century epistemologists) would be in the first place? "Was kann ich wissen?" - "What can I know?" That question is, according to Kant, one of the important fields of philosophical inquiry.

The entire point of epistemology is to find and test the limits of human knowledge.



Even the earliest philosophers recognized that the sort of naive sensualism you propose here is limited in its application, and completely unworkable as a foundation for scientific methodology.

Your model refutes itself as soon as you step beyond your own personal subjective experience.
How can you believe what another person tells you if you haven't personally experienced it?
How can you disbelieve what another person tells you?






Of course. So why do you keep insisting on this notion of absolute certainty? It's impossible to prove, impossible to explain, and impossible to justify within the limits of modern human knowledge, and it is also completely unnecessary.

And even worse: If your knowledge is absolutely certain, why would you need science any more? You wouldn't. So the idea of absolute knowledge is actually harmful to research.


But all this is straying very far from our original subject of discussion.

Do we? Then what about your Spiel concerning absolute certainty, axioms etc.? It seems to me that you do need to believe that your knowledge is absolutely certain.



We know because according to Kant, we have objective knowledge outside of our perceptions, what he calls a priori knowledge: The laws of logic are such a priori knowledge. Categories of thought are a priori knowledge. etc.

By combining these with our perceptions, we can create objective empirical knowledge, so-called "synthetic knowledge".
This synthesis is what makes knowledge of reality possible.


This is where Kant is in opposition to the correspondence model of reality: Accurate perception is not enough to produce universal and objective knowledge, this perception needs to be tested and modified to produce logically consistent and mathematically correct statements about the world. Only then can we speak of objective knowledge.


The universality and objectivity our knowledge doesn't come from accurate perception, but from the universal and truthful quality of our a priori knowledge: We can make objectively correct models of the world because they are the product of logic and mathematics, which we know to produce universal and objective knowledge.



Do you believe that when you perceive a tree, you literally create this exact tree inside your brain?
Of course you don't.


There is no tree in your brain.


What's in your brain is information, or data, or experiences, or perceptions of that tree. Not the tree itself. That's what Locke means when he says that we are aware of our ideas.


The things in our brain are not identical with the things outside of our brain. They cannot be, because the things outside of our brain exist regardless of whether we think of them or not. The things inside our brain, not so much.


This is important, because your brain is not a supercomputer that immediately knows every single thing about whatever you perceive. You don't know whether a tree has leaves until you look at them. You don't know a tree's exact measurements if you don't measure it. That's why we need proper scientific observations: To gather information we wouldn't have if we just looked at a tree and thought a while about it.





Not my view. What you describe here is only perceptual awareness. Humans have the ability to form concepts. With conceptual awareness, we can go far beyond what we perceive. Indeed, out species already has.

True. But this has nothing to do with if we perceive things or only perceive our perceptions.[/quote]
Therefore...?


Is that claim an absolute truth as well? How did you arrive at this absolute truth, if only these two axioms are supposedly absolutely certain? How do you know that this is an absolute truth to begin with?

(You don't, of course.)

I only insist on absolute certainty in regards to the Axioms.

Is there an Objective World external to ourselves? If not, the no further discussion is possible because there is nothing real to discuss.[/quote]

You said yourself, we are perfectly capable of doing science with incomplete knowledge. Clearly, we are perfectly capable of reasoning and doing science, regardless of whether we know for certain that what we perceive is Capital-R Reality.

In practice, it is irrelevant whether there is an Objective World and whether we perceive it Objectively and with Absolute Certainty.

You are smuggling "consciousness" into a debate that wasn't about consciousness. How or why is "consciousness" connected to anything we previously talked about?