Why I Am Not a Postmodernist

This is an actual entry from the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Clinical Disorders used by the American Psychological Association:

“Epistemology (description): Epistemology is a serious chronic mental problem for people who doubt that knowledge exists. (I mean, seriously, doubting knowledge? What’s wrong with these people?) Therapists are advised that it tends to spread from person to person, like a bad flu bug, and to be careful not to ‘catch any of that’ during therapy.

“Epistemology (diagnosis/symptoms):  Frequent symptoms of epistemology include a love of Sartre and extreme boringness at parties.  A common occurrence for therapists is to actually fall asleep during sessions.  (Although the reported case of a therapists’ brain attempting to escape her head due to boredom was grossly exaggerated in the media).

“Epistemology (cure): It has no known cure. Some preliminary research has achieved surprising success by numbing the knowledge instinct through violent video games, but skepticism in the medical community abounds for this method as a long-term cure. Maybe try some St. Thomas Aquinas.”

Well, despite multiple warnings from sensible people to avoid too much public discussion of epistemology, here I am, once again, writing about it.  (I note, with some dismay, that Apologetic Professor blog statistics suggest the epistemology posts are among the least popular.  What’s wrong with you people?) And this week I want to go into a little more detail as to why I don’t just throw up my hands and say “we can’t know anything!”…which leads us to postmodernism.

If you are a postmodernist, I’m not trying to pigeonhole you.  You may not believe the primary doctrines I’m calling postmodernism here: But these are the primary doctrines of people who call themselves postmodernists in my own field.  It is the doctrines, and not the name, that I’m attacking.  As a name, it’s kind of cool – reminds me of movies where the whole world is destroyed (like “post-apocalyptic”).  If you read my movie reviews, you already know that I like movies where large inanimate objects (for example, the Earth) get spectacularly blown up.

Postmodernism means something like believing that you can’t really know anything. Postmodernists in my field often say things like “because all psychological phenomena are idiographic and culture-bound, we can never make nomothetic statements about universal theories of the human psyche.”  I mean, they actually talk like that.  But then, so do people on my side, too, only they say we “…can make nomothetic statements.”  When all anyone is really arguing about is whether or not we can ever say we actually know something that applies beyond one person or context.

Being of a skeptical sort, I have some postmodern sympathies. I actually think, in as much as the movement limits itself to simply curbing epistemological abuses (e.g., people in my field are fond of making inferences about the human race from 100 freshmen at Harvard), it can accomplish a lot of good.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t often so constrain itself.

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Almost all postmodern statements are like that. I suppose I am too skeptical to believe such arrogant statements with certainty. Everything is relative – except, I suppose, the truth that everything is relative. We can never know anything – except, by strange coincidence, the truth that we can never know everything.  Well, call me crazy, but I have a problem with statements that are fundamentally self-defeating.  I don’t think logic is the be-all, end-all (see my comments on the ontological argument here), but I do demand at least that when a statement is made, it doesn’t obviously defeat itself in a clear direct way.  And the plain truth is that I can’t possibly believe we can never know anything because, if I believed that, I would never know that I didn’t know anything.  The moment I accept the statement, I accept something as true knowledge – but the statement itself says that can’t happen.  As a philosophy, it is hopelessly impossible.

(2) Of course, it may still be right – illogical things are often true.  But that was just problem number 1.  Problem number two is that it offers no explanation for the existence of science.  Now, like most Christians, I think science is a glorious thing.  And science has clearly accomplished all sorts of pragmatic achievements – the MRI machine, going to the moon, chicken nuggets.  It’s a long list.  As I was saying, I don’t think you can just dismiss the achievements of science. And then you have to ask why it has achieved so much?

Now the postmodernist has no answer to this question.  There is no such thing as postmodernist science.  Science is about understanding things – about accumulating knowledge through experiment and observation.  But postmodernism questions knowledge itself – it questions the very thing that science assumes.  It asserts that the mechanism by which science operates is not only partly faulty (it is), but it is impossibly flawed (it isn’t). So postmodernism cannot provide any reason for science to exist.  I like science, and so I think this is a real problem.

(3) Really, though, I’d go a long way with the postmodernists.  I believe, for example, in the following statement: We can never know for certain that any scientific theory is true.  Fair enough.  I also believe that the following statement is likely also true: Every scientific theory we know of will eventually be proven to be partially wrong. Fair enough.  But the mistake postmodernists make (in my opinion) is the following.  They say “we know Kepler was wrong, and then Newton was wrong after him, and then Einstein was wrong after him. So it is certain that modern String Theory of quantum physics is wrong, too. So we can’t trust String Theory.”  And my point is simple: It is true that String Theory is almost certainly wrong, but does it follow from that that String Theory is equally as wrong as Newton?  And does it follow that Newton was equally as wrong as Kepler?  And does it follow that Kepler was equally as wrong as people who said that the earth was the center of all gravitational forces in the universe?  And so on. 

And the obvious answer to all of those questions is: No.  Just because Einstein was not completely right, it doesn’t follow that he was as wrong as those before him.  That’s like saying that because Galileo was wrong about a lot of stuff (he was), we can’t make a confident statement about the likelihood that the flat-earth or round-earth theories are correct.  The statement “Einstein’s theory is closer to the truth than Newton’s” is a valid statement, even though the statement “we can never be certain that any theory is completely true” is also a valid statement.  We cannot of course be certain that Einstein was righter than Newton; but we can be pretty darn confident; as confident that the earth is round.  String theory is almost certainly wrong and will be replaced by a better theory of physics; but we can be pretty confident that it is righter than Kepler, Newton, and Einstein.

In a sense, the postmodernists merely punt on the difficulties involved in how we know things.  I do not admire this approach.  It is true that making a case for something like real knowledge is difficult; but it is not impossible; and it is far intellectually better than the alternative.   Absolute certainty is not possible; but reasonable confidence that you are moving closer to the truth is.

And that’s why I’m not a postmodernist.

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5 Responses to Why I Am Not a Postmodernist

  1. Shawn says:

    When I was at Cal, there was a student protest whose catch phrase was “Zero Tolerance for Intolerance.” This was stated without irony.

  2. I was already looking forward to the new edition of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual–I had heard this was to be the swimsuit issue–but after reading your quotes from it, I’m even more eager to read the whole thing.

    Since you’ve done a fine job (as usual) in making the distinction between healthy skepticism and “self-defeating” epistemological nihilism, I don’t have much to add. Other than to express surprise that you didn’t cite 1 Corinthians 13:12–”For now we see through a glass, darkly”–as evidence that Christians, among others, have long recognized that human “knowledge” is imperfect at best. Postmodernists didn’t invent skepticism (though they’d like to think so), nor is it the exclusive province of secularism; most religions, after all, teach us to be skeptical of the world’s fundamental values, priorities, and pretensions (while too often, unfortunately, encouraging us to suspend such skepticism regarding the claims of the religions themselves–but that’s another story).

    By the way: my reference Bible, the New International Version (1990, from Zondervan), translates the passage from 1 Corinthians as “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror”. I really need to get a better Bible.

  3. The Apologetic Professor says:

    Shawn,
    Fantastic! Yes, that’s the sort of thing I mean. I often feel that some extreme postmodernists do not “get” the irony, either. Thanks for the comment!

  4. The Apologetic Professor says:

    Jack,
    Thanks as always for the comment! That verse you cite is one of my favorites, along with other similar verses (e.g., “if a man thinks he knows something, he doesn’t yet know as he ought to know”) in the Bible. Very gracious of you to point it out!

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