Postmodernism

today I'm going to be talking about some movements in philosophy during 1960s primarily that pushed you might say the Enlightenment paradigm into its exact office that turned it on its head that denied all of the Enlightenment theses that we've been talking about so to remind you we've been talking about certain kinds of intellectual trends that the 20th century inherited from the Enlightenment we've been talking about for example the idea of a two-level theory that postulates a manifest image of things more or less as they appear to us and then some scientific image an underlying hidden level which actually explains the behavior of things at the manifest level so our idea was well a lot of theories have this basic shape they say that the objects of the manifest image of everyday life the things that we ordinarily experience including ourselves are actually in some sense fictions everything that goes on that level is really determined by something happening at another hidden level what that hidden level is may vary according to enlightenment materialism it's really just the realm of micro particles that are governed by physical law according to evolutionary theory it's really something at the level of well random mutation natural selection ultimate back skin gets unified with genetic theory and so it becomes a sort of modern evolutionary biology there are versions that are for example Freudian psychology suggesting that there's something at the subconscious level that's driving everything then there are other versions in late Nietzsche there is this idea of the will to power and so on so well by the 1960s this it turned into structuralism and post-structuralism structures the idea that really things are determined by social structures the idea here will originate in Marx when he talks about economic classes for Marx it's really an underlying economic level the structuralist extend that to a general social level in fact some of the most important thinkers in this in this school of thought are anthropologists people like Claude lévi-strauss who say there are certain social structures and those social structures determine the roles that we play and in fact determine most of what we do now we've talked about this before so I just want to lightly remind you the manifest image is that surface level we think of ourselves as free we think sells exacting the reasons we think of ourselves as having responsibility as acting rightly or wrongly virtuous virtuously or viciously and the scientific image there's a depth level a hidden level that in fact determines what we do so we aren't really free we're entirely determined by factors that were not even aware of moreover since that's true we have no responsibility there's no real way to judge what we do is virtuous or vicious that's right or wrong and so our reasons are really just mere rationalizations they have nothing to do with the causes of our actual behave well all of this was connected remember to these four theses of the Enlightenment first of all truth there are universal and absolute truths for example the kinds of laws that were discovered in the Scientific Revolution secondly it is possible to attain an objective knowledge of third a thesis of reason the best way to do that is to use reason on the basis of experience and finally a notion of progress that if we do not we've got a key to leading to human progress the best way to achieve progress is in fact to determine these universal and absolute truths by the use of reason and thereby attain objective knowledge well all of those end up getting denied by the post modernist it's a movement that starts in the 60s but as you can see here it really attained its popularity much later these are articles that mention post-modernism and you can see here in academic journals well this started off from a fairly low level and even in the late 80s and peaked around 1997 but then in the popular press it really took off around that time so just as post-modernism was starting to fade a bit of academia it sort of gained the popular imagination in any case it's something that I think by now has started to become boring to people but for several decades was something that has a great deal of influence how do we define what post-modernism is it's actually really difficult one of its advocates Gary Ellsworth defines it this way a set of critical strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference repetition the trace the simulacrum and hyper reality to destabilize other concepts such as presents identity historical progress have a stomach certainty in the UN paucity of me know write that down that's unintelligible right does anybody understand that okay eventually we'll get to the point where I think we can understand parts of this but actually yeah that's not very helpful it uses a lot of terms of art that you really have to be thoroughly into the post modernist movement to understand here are some things that are supposed to represent post-modernism works of art like that for example or this or that or things like that I love that um or this negate the vacation Carsten or I love that photograph that's entitled that's my house and there's actually a building in Toronto that has that as part of its upper floor so you can go out onto this glass shelf by the way have any of you been to the Grand Canyon actually it's a remote part of the Grand Canyon sort of for the California border they have this what is it called yeah the Skywalk where you go out over the canyon and it's built of that kind of material so you can walk down okay now it's very carefully engineered and before you go wild under what they explained all a careful engineering and so on but silver a lot of people can't do it because you're just over the canyon okay it freaks people out there are philosophical papers about this it's like I believe that I'm not going to fall but nevertheless my body won't believe what I believe right so there's a thinker at Yale who calls this a leaf as opposed to be leaf well in any case it doesn't bother this kid he's right out there is a as well all right I'll go with Moses lacks definition from The Simpsons we enter the sake of weird but that's kind of what these post modernist thinkers do now it tends to mean different things in painting architecture and philosophy and literature and so often I get the sense that what post-modernism is in all these fields is just some it breaks sharply with the past okay takes elements from the past but without really endorsing them dealing with them sort of ironically and that's something that you might say the various artworks philosophical works literary works all have in common they're taking themes and kind of playing with them they're really trying to you might say put into practice Nietzsche's idea of the playful science something that involves going beyond the search for truth and doing something else well to understand where the post modernists are coming from let's go back to Hegel and talk about what I've referred to as the myth of the Gibbon okay he attacks this idea of immediacy of there being a direct relation between us and the world it seems as if there is that sort of direct relation as if I can directly say look here is a chair and I can grip it right I can even lift it up I can knock on it and see what it sounds like I could lick it and taste it I'm going to pack because I'm not disgusting but you know that the idea it feels to us like hey we've got a direct relation of the chair Hegel says wait that's far too fat in fact thought and language don't relate to the world directly in that sort of way imagine well the chair or we could think about this screen right look at this screen on what you're looking at all of this you can think about this screen you can point to it getting a touch it you can use a definite description to refer to the screen you could even give it a name anybody want to give a name to the screen yes green iam green screen II that's I'm your magic screen okay you say well screen he's pretty clean today highly reflective okay how you feelin screening oh a little chilly yes etcetera now all of that feels like a pretty direct way of relating to the screen but Hegel says not so fast now why why does he think I can't in fact directly link to the screen in my thought in my perception in my language what's in between me and the screen but I several or you're talking at once I'm not sure what you're saying Hegel's between me yeah right okay good yeah maybe that's true actually if you I've sometimes wondered about that it's sort of like more Kaizen think about Swan if enough people become post modernist does like it become true post-modernism itself stands between you and this great I don't know anyway um the idea is supposed to be this it's not a direct link because in fact in between four concepts now in fact if you think about what's going on in your perception what are you really perceiving caught in a section of the critique of pure reason elaborates this in great detail and says look there's an act of synthesis going on here about three acts of synthesis what's happening well first of all if you're looking at this you're receiving in fact a very complex mix of sensations right it's not just one thing it's not like there is one thing that is a visual object in your field of vision and it's got screen in fact there's this complicated picture you're getting right consisting of the words that are on the screen that image of Hegel and then lines on the side and the reflections you can perhaps see yourself in the screen I can see myself okay and so you can sort of perceive all of it and your eyes actually this is very complicated when you look at it carefully it's very complex when I was in college actually the spring semester my freshman year I took painting drawing and sculpture I did all this art stuff and you can tell when I scribble something on the blackboard how much I got how's that um but here is one thing I did now if you're going to paint something like I don't know that wall what do you have to do the naive person just thinks oh you pick you picked that color what is the color B yeah something like beige institutional beige nobody with that in their house but institutions people picked these colors they would never put in their house because they're like what I don't know but anyway yeah you think oh I just do that right but in fact you start with you know more carefully and you realize wait look at the pattern the light for example this section is actually by flight here but here it's a little darker up there it's much darker and so if you're going to paint that so that it looks realistic you actually use a mantra for colors and then if there are other objects near it you real purple for example the telephone in the wire you realize wait a minute that's not only a lot darker but actually it has a little bit of the tone of the phone and so you've got to use something with a bit of red in it and the same thing is going to be true with the shadow under the pencil sharpener and so on and so forth it's actually very complex and so the first level you can say wait a min my eye is taking a bunch of actually very complex and highly varied color patches and putting them together in some sort of way and then I'm putting that together with the other senses so that I'm recognizing that in my scene here is yes certain visual impressions but also auditory impressions and if you think about it you're aware of sitting in these hard uncomfortable seats and perhaps you're hungry and you're thinking about that or maybe you're having sensations connected to what you ate for lunch all of these things are going together right and somehow presenting a mix of sensations you and then you're recognizing this thing as a scream you're actually unifying it under the concept of scream it's that last bit of unity the hey go really wants to focus on in between you and your perception of the screen is really your categorization of that object as a screen in short what's in between you is not only a very complex pattern of synthesis but also in the end concept and that concept is what unifies things into an object so the idea is really this the mind is organizing this swirling Mac maths of mental acts ie just perceptions feelings thoughts sensations into a sort of unified perception of an object screen ok cop refers this as the synthesis of a manifold the manifold but the many ok are somehow put into one object by our minds well if that's right then the screen is interests given to us it isn't just data which means given it's the product of conceptual activity so the idea is that in between us and the objects in the world are concepts and that's true of the objects of the matter skinnet like chairs and screens and people it's true even ourselves it's also true of the objects of the scientific image after all how do we recognize something as an atom or a molecule or a wave or any of that sort of thing the answer is well through conceptual activity in fact in that case the sensation part since we don't directly perceive them isn't really there it's all conceptual activity well the same thing is true from Brussels perspective right the theory of description says that when we have talked about the present King of France or the present Queen of England that doesn't simply connect us to an object in the world it's not a direct connection it's highly indirect insert' something very general about the world that there is exactly one object which is the present king of France and so that's something that actually isn't a very direct relationship either so in between us and objects are always concepts okay now the same thing Russell says is true of named and we'll come back to this after Thanksgiving according to Russell they really describe the skies descriptions - - so I can't get around this by calling the screen screening and giving it a name it turns out there are still concepts there so objects insurers we think of them are always products of our own conceptual activity there are concepts between us and the things that's my favorite picture that illustrates this it's like somebody's bathroom window and a pigeon sat out there and so to confirm it it's cool well yeah more more foggy pictures by the way getting a good picture like this is actually a lot harder than you would think one rainy day I just took a bunch of pictures out of my windows with water on the screens thinking I too could be an artist not so much none right here well the post modernists take this one step further than Hegel and the other thinkers who were on this sort of page talking up a myth of a gibbet they turn it to the self so let's go back to the Enlightenment Rene Descartes started modern philosophy really by using a method of doubt he starts the meditations by saying you know there were all sorts of things that I was talked were true when I was a child now I look and I say I don't think those things are true I've been so often deceived so often come to some kind of conclusion only later to decide I was wrong that I want to put knowledge on a secure foundation so I'll tell you what I'm gonna doubt everything I can possibly doubt so says can I doubt for example the evidence of my senses you bet is it it seems to me right now I'm standing in that room talking to a bunch of people could I be wrong sure okay and we've talked about some of the reasons maybe I'm dreaming maybe I'm loosening maybe this is a very clever thing UT administration has decided they want to shut me up so they put me in a room and it's very convincing it looks like I'm talking to students but in fact it's just an empty room and you're all holograms etc etc there are all sorts of possibilities here um but Descartes says great there's one thing I can't doubt I think I am my very doubting is an act of thinking and so I can't really doubt whether I think cuz the very doubt is a thought some way I can't doubt that I am if I doubt that I am who's doubting me so I must be okay so he ends up in Louisville I think I am must be true every time they thought or uttered those I can't doubt now here's what he concludes first of all I am a thing that thinks secondly that that's actually essential to me I am essentially a thing that thinks but the thing that matters most to us now is oh there he is hey over here talking to the Queen in Sweden where he was a tutor but he thinks I know my own mind more securely than I know anything else could I be dreaming that you all are here could I be loosen a ting yeah but could I be hallucinating do I exist could I be dreaming that I am that I think no because dreaming is a kind of thinking I couldn't be dreaming unless I existed and so and so he says actually I am given to myself more directly than anything else's given to me in between me and the screen and between me and the chair might be some kind of active synthesis might be some kind of concept but in between me and myself the contents of my own mind there's nothing okay at least I have accessed the theater of my own mind and the things that are going on there I have access to directly okay now is he right about that could something get in between you and your own thinking you and your own mom yeah for me like sometimes you not like like let's say I go into the influence of something you might not be like ooh okay yeah you might say okay alcohol could be in between me and myself in fact yeah one of the problems with things like drunk driving is that you know by the time people are trying to make the judgment am i sober enough to drive safely they're drunk they're not very good judges of fact okay and so you might say yeah that's a problem and other forms of drugs might be even more severe in dissociating you are creating a barrier between you and yourself and making your you not very aware of what's happening in your own mind yeah having a mental illness okay good having a mental illness that might interfere right there are all sorts of things you might think that get in the way of your own self-knowledge and yes mental illness might be something like it might somebody might think they're Napoleon and not be let's say and so they're pretty far removed from what actually is true love themselves yeah emotions okay good you're highly emotional and so you get very excited right like the person who's shouting saying I'm not angry I'm not angry I said dude did you so yes you can get emotional and that emotion can interfere with your own perception of your same mind you might really miss perceive your state of mind like the person is sitting at trump saying I'm afraid what do you mean or that type of thing right emotions can interfere with your own self knowledge so there might be things that can injure now they cart would say no actually at least in certain kinds of cases like what I'm thinking I think we're thinking that I am nothing is in-between you're right there is where you know yourself directly but that's what the postmodernist denies the postmodernist says it's a mistake to think you have that kind of direct access to yourself actually you don't when you think about your own states of mind you are using concepts in the same way that you use concepts apply to the outside world you're thinking of yourself as being angry or not angry being afraid or not afraid being in love or not in love you're thinking about yourself as being clear minded were confused I I think I've told you about after my car accident when people kept saying well how you feel do you feel okay I kept saying yes I feel fine I I have no cognitive impairments and in fact I had no clue what's going on right I thought I was absolutely clear headed but I had no perception of time passing I thought I was convinced I had called my wife when I hadn't she got mad about that by the way if you're in a car accident you're married you should really call your spouse let them know you've been to the car accident I mean it's bad for them to just show up because they found up from one of your children and they find you in an ambulance um but I was convinced I had tried I really was I was sure that I tried calling and she didn't pick up her phone it wasn't true so there can be all sorts of things that interfere and so that the postmodernist says look um it is a mistake to think of you as having yourself is having that direct access to your own mind it's not that simple they refer to this as D centering the idea is don't take for granted yourself the self has the same role to play you might say as the chair or the screen and our access to it our knowledge of it is really no more direct so I like this picture there's a screen intervening and she's not in the middle impatient Hey so from the point of view of the postmodernist that's what our self-knowledge is like okay we're not even in the center of the picture and there's this screen that intervenes between us at our own of ourselves so you can compare this to Vidkun son remember if it inside at one point says the limits of my language with the limits of my world we talked about various ways of interpreting that well that might be true from a post modernist point of view actually when it's read idealistically the limits of my language determine the limits of my world the post modernists I think would agree but would seek to caution you're not at the center of that world okay don't imagine that it's a world where you have access to yourself at the center and that's clear and then the other things are revolve around you and your language and your thinking no you're not at the center at all so there's another image but that's not as good because it doesn't have the interview window hey okay so the post modernist says look you don't have direct knowledge of anything even of yourself even if your own states of mind your relation to yourself is mediated by concepts and may be mediated by all sorts of other things emotions and various other things that can affect your own mental states well what they really stress is not the medical side of this there might be something going wrong in that sort of way they don't really stress the conceptual side for that matter except insofar as they say look where do I get my concepts I've got the concept of myself for example as Placid as even-tempered which I ordinarily am a very hard time I remember once in 10 years when I was chairman I really got angry somebody purposely didn't do what I asked them to do it got us in trouble with the administration so I went out and I banged on the desk I didn't shout I didn't scream I just went out throwing crap Hey look my office that was my biggest tip from the ten years later um so and then I found out what it means to be in trouble with it I thought oh my gosh some faculty members are gonna pay bubble bubble no it just means some vice-president somewhere has to press a button I shouldn't even bang the table with it but anyway you might say look I have this concept of myself as even-tempered now where am I getting that concept of being even-tempered yeah other people's marked well I am compared yes so that's a good point I'm comparing myself to other people who aren't and is that something that just occurred to me you know at some point I was just going along so some people get mad I don't tend to get mad so huh I will call that being even-tempered uh-huh did I think it up myself yeah well partly it's from my own personal experiences yes experiences other people experiences of my own emotional reactions to things but still I put the label on right I'm even-tempered where did that come from yeah good the word is already there right I thought to speak English or at least some variant of it and and even-tempered was one of the words in that language and so I've got a concept ready-made that concept comes from my language that language comes from what society right the people around me the community I'm a part of and so really those concepts are things I heard from my language I inherit my language from the society around me and so it's really that society that gives me the concepts I will use some stand even myself so I might try to understand language and all sorts of other ways here are just some books I happen to have in my office they give you theories of language there are lots of different ways of trying to do that I actually know most of the people who wrote those books but now yeah we're going to look at the theory of one particular person jump Derrida movie maybe the person who really put post-modernism on the map in intellectual terms this is one of his most popular books margins of philosophy and he has a particular variety of post-modernism which is referred to as deconstruction he's famous for saying everything is a text now that seems ridiculous right I mean margins of velocity that's a text that's a work the literary work consists of words is this chair a text can i well he says yes right good he'll say yes but in our ordinary way of thinking is this a text suppose I say all right you want to know what you're supposed to since the LinkedIn work really desk that's weird right it's like what do you mean read that but I don't know what to do with that and so at first glance this is a very strange thing to saying um now what does he mean the Yelp and says things like yeah there's nothing outside the text and you can imagine Samuel Johnson refuting him by kicking the rock just as he did with Bishop Berkeley right everything's a text I refute you toss boom I had the rocks lies obvious I see there's nothing written on that rock but still he has a reason for thinking this okay there's an argument being like this language is a system of differences when I asked about being even-tempered a moment ago somebody said well well part of what it is to understand that is to be able to distinguish evil even-tempered people from people who are not even tempered so what is it to have that concept and be able to use the term it's be able to be able to differentiate between those who are even-tempered and those who are not what about screens well I have to be able to distinguish screens from non screens in order to have that concept and be able to use the term appropriate yeah well I think so because you're right it's going to turn out that these differences that I can notice are the things that allow me to identify objects and so actually I'm going to be given certain of these differences that I am trained you might say by my language in my society to identify and then I can use those to identify objects and to use categories for thinking about them but what will constitute my world those objects that I recognized by this system of differences and so you're absolutely right it's the differences but my language gives me that enable me to carve up the world into objects and so see it is consisting of certain kinds of things absolutely so if there are certain things I can't differentiate my language I won't be able to recognize there as being different objects in the world and so in that sense yes my language will determine the limits of my world it won't be able to contain objects that go beyond the bounds of my language did French cheese okay so screens is this a screen no this is a screen yes is this a screen on my iPad yes um or the lenses my glasses screens who some of you are sure there could be vague boundaries to these things so we shouldn't think of these as always sharp differences sharp cut offs but now walk yeah I have to be able to see with walking's from non walking's walking yes walking no right walking no okay so you're good on those terms now I start throwing at you more complicated terms is a simulacrum all right if you're really good okay so that's so you don't have the concert well screen can Merrick you know can mean all sorts of things here is a theater called the screen on the green the measure stearic codes or here's another screen on the green or here a bunch of screens and then of course windows screens and all sorts of other things like that the idea is this language establishes a structure it's a system of these differences and that's really all languages it control these distinctions they can give us a system of differences of interrelated distinctions but that's it so what does language do establishes a structure and the same thing is true of any theory expressed in language it establishes a structure this isn't a thought can find a post-modernism it's really I think part of Vidkun Stein's perspective in the truck taught us it's something that is implicit well made more than if the implicit in rudolf carnap s-- book from 1926 in fired by the tripod us the logical structure of language sorry the logical structure of the world a logical syntax of language is a later book of his yeah draaga shell found event that is something that really elaborates language as giving you a structure well that means we can talk about how the nodes of a structure relate to each other how the various distinctions we draw relate to each other but what are the nodes what are the elements of the structure well Carta and if you think about it Vic ensign actually don't answer that question Carnap says I can't answer language can't do that and really if you go back to Vidkun stein and what he says about an object you realize he never tells us what an object is what are the basic objects of it consign system I don't know scholars debate that but I think the real answer is all language can do is give you the structure it can't tell you any more about what those objects are so what are those little nodes how do they relate to reality language by itself cannot tell us that and it's not only those analytic philosophers who think that that's a main element of post-modernism so they say well that's what language does it can reveal or impose a structure that it can say nothing about what it's the structural so here's a structure like say but what do those nodes represent there's no way to talk about that that's something the language can't give you by which can grow all sorts of distinctions and so you can say what category that thing falls into but if I say no I don't want to know just how it relates to other things and what category it falls into I don't I want to know what it is all by itself there's no way language can answer that well yeah for those of you are logically or mathematically minded you'd say language and thoughts determine things only up to isomorphism that makes it suddenly clear to me but if it doesn't make it suddenly figure you don't worry about okay the idea is really thought language can't distinguish two worlds that have exactly the same structure exactly the same logical form because they'll have the same structure they might differ in what those structures are the structures up but there's no way within the language to talk about that so here's a structure that's actually a hypercube but now one of those nodes I don't know irrelevant a theory of hypercube should specify the structure but what is it a structure of what are those nodes yeah could be anything well here's now what the postmodernist distinctively says if that's right then there is really in principle no difference between fiction and nonfiction all I'm doing is giving you a structure how does that structure relate to reality mmm okay so what's the difference between describing reality and just describing a system sides a text of any language itself there's really no principled distinction between describing and imagining between fiction and nonfiction between actually reporting and just telling a story now that's a conclusion that Vidkun Stein incarnate would not drop they would say yeah I can say all sorts of things and elaborate a structure I can't really tell you what the notice of that structure are but they wouldn't say so everything's a fiction or I can't tell the difference between fiction and nonfiction they would think that's a very odd conclusion to draw it's a question of whether that structure Maps into the world from their point of view but the post monitor says what are you being the world they're going to have a description of that world right and so in fact you're just relating two different descriptions but that means you're relating a text to a text there's no way to get at that underlying world and to talk about the correspondence between your structure and the world itself okay so the postmodernist end up denying all of those Enlightenment theses they're relativists they say no truths are absolute truths are just social constructions and they tend to think they depend especially on race class gender and generally power status or for the structuralist well some kind of social structure it may be much more elaborate in leve Strauss for example than just that step to sysm objective knowledge is impossible Tony cliff says that post-modernism is that the area of rejecting theories that sounds a little bit self-refuting there we'll come back to that they deny the thesis of reason in fact they talk a lot about logo centrism putting logic of the center of things they see reason is merely a tool if I were certain empowered people mostly philosophy professors have oppress other people that's a joke okay but anyway the idea is that it's the emotions and experiences of the that actually are better guys reality than anybody's reason so somebody might have a little aberrant argument explaining why this is the best social policy and if somebody especially at a press person says but man that's something I feel that's like oh okay that sort of emotional reaction of their guide um you know Todd puts it this way post-modernism is incredulity toward meta-narratives meta-narrative is a story about stories and so really it's just not believing stories about stories being suspicious of them recognizing that they're really hiding something else which goes back to our old two-level idea and finally not a thesis of progress but of liberation you've gotta fight oppression by exposing the categories and meta-narratives by which the empowered retain hegemony somebody a post about it is some years ago about 20 years ago came to the English department gave a talk it was all about hegemony someone in the back row at the end and just stood up sort naively and said I don't really understand your talk what's hit Germany the person didn't know ah like oh well it just means domination okay so the idea is to value authenticity what matters is whether it being authentic and really feel it not what kind of reasons I have because reasons after all is just rationalizations so compare do I co-author of the name of the rose picture there says the sense the past is restricting smothering blackmailing us that's what post-modernism is it's breaking free for all of that well they tend to conclude that everything is a social construction society gives us our language which gives us a system of differences that gives us concepts and that gives us our objects and as you can see things can get screwed up foot wearing prohibit now there's something odd about this right I mean the chains in that that bit of reasoning each one seems to make a certain amount of sense and yet by the end you can get the sense something gone wrong right our concept of a tornado may be a social construct but it seems really weird to conclude the tornadoes or social constructs you know I said oh it's just a social construct over a it will blow you away no that's wrong or cats right the concept of a cat that might be a social construct cats aren't social constructs it's not like you can just change the concepts of your society and get rid of cats I mean maybe Ken but involves killing lots of cats it doesn't it's all just reconceptualizing this or what about a neutron our concept of inter-process a social construct in this case constructed by Sir James Chadwick in 1933 but neutrons aren't social constructs so something weird is taking place here now there are a number of arguments against the post modernists in addition to that one is that it is self refuting it is the theory you should reject theories and that seems hood why not reject it right if if they give arguments for their positions and if logic is a tool oppression then isn't that least hypocritical is it a tool of oppression also a lot of people complain it's just unintelligible there is on line a post-modernism generate you can click on it you will get a different post modernist essay automatically generated okay so here it so I deconstructing Derry da post cultural D materialism in the works of blah blah blah is a lack oh yes in the works of echo predominant concept is the distinction round and figure in a sense the main theme of sergeants model of the textual Arab context is self cultural paradox and it just keeps going like this it's just like they just random sentences generated with all these terms into the thing and the puzzle is how can you differentiate that from actual post modernist articles actually they've really compelling and they sound just the way other sound Alain Tocqueville was a physicist who actually perpetuated a hoax he submitted a paper on quantum physics to one of these post modernist journals social text in 1996 and they publish it thought was great good it was just utter nonsense I mean he purposely constructed it so it would be utter none that's toward of transformative hermeneutics should want gravity and it's just all full ok ahead and they took took it they couldn't recognize the difference between alive actual science so I like this cartoon my hobby sitting down with grad students at I me how long it takes them to figure out that I'm not actually an expert in their field engineering are big problems heat dissipation have you tried logarithms that takes about 48 seconds linguistics ah so does this fellow you Brooke family include say click on that's 63 seconds sociology yeah my latest works on ranking people for best or worst that's four minutes and the literary criticism you see the deconstruction is it X trickable for mulling the text but also the self 8 papers and 2 books and they sell em so finally some people have said what this is ultimately a fascist way of thinking I mean if reason is just a tool of oppression then if you and I disagree can we argue about it can we sort it out rationally no there's nothing to talk about actually all we have to do is 12 resort to power so it's neat to stress where there's no truth there's only power actually that's also from Harry Potter isn't that's Baltimore yes uh-huh you're going to put Baltimore well I now have about 7 minutes to talk about quiet who is an interesting figure he was my hero when I was an undergraduate he's a weird case because his writings are he's the opposite Wilfred sellers sellers writings are impenetrable but he was a fantastic lecturer wines writings are exciting I would say thrilling by the standards of contemporary philosophy on the other hand to hear quiet excellent talk he's he was unbelievably boring so the writings are much better than hearing him speak also he is as we'll see in many ways a post modernist even though he hated post-modernism in fact was one of the founding members of an organization set up to fight it no he was in many ways a philosophical hero super hero willard van orman quine action figure with a web of belief with love your enemies uh and he wrote a lot these are just books of his that I happen to have lying around my office no he is a relativist and a skeptic um and even about the most basic questions maybe the most fundamental question of philosophy is what is there well he says in a way it's an easy question everything yeah but there's still plenty of room to disagree about cases and so let's get more specific he really ends up arguing there is no fact of the matter about what there is well we've seen post modernists argue language is a system of difference we can articulate structure but not what it's the structure of and Quine says that's exactly right what language is about what we ultimately refer to what we think there is in the world is wrath leash and determined so if we imagine that we're describing somebody else and saying what is their metaphysics what is their philosophy what do they think the world really consists in the answer is indeterminate we can't even say what somebody else believes a little consistent let alone what it really consists in or even what we believe it consists in there's a radical indeterminacy about always so here's the thought experiment imagine that you're a jungle linguist you're going to investigate the language of a tribe that is really never had its language study before there are no existing dictionaries of translation manuals into any European language let's say and by the way people use have to do this to get a PhD in linguistics you'd have to go out into the field for at least a year study a language that never has been studied before compiled of dictionary and dictionary in a grammar and come back and defend that to your PhD committee so here's what's happened you're out there in the jungle you're there was a native observing his linguistic behavior he says gavagai and you're thinking what does that mean you start noticing they says gavagai only when there's a rabbit present so you think how do I translate gavagai rap right Mike wins this book it's more arbitrary than at sea so here you are in the jungle and you certain oats come guys we'll only when there are rabbits sitting ah got a guy needs rubber but he says wait a minute wait a minute you don't even know whether it's a second sport term maybe it's a sentence like low a rabbit or there's a rabbit or there we have a rabbit or low rabbit again or rabbits rabbit us all of those are possible translations right it might be look it's rabbit again there it's rabbit äj-- I searched for the cutest picture of a bunny I could find okay it could be a term though it might be a noun right so maybe in fact it means rabbit or maybe it means a temporary segment of a rabbit after all the Buddhists think now point would say I can't really say this without a rattles a great deal of arbitrariness but Buddhist tend to think that everything in the world is really just a continuing series of these momentary objects so really just think of those temporal slices temporal segments of rabbits maybe it is that or maybe refers to undetachable parts or maybe to a platonic form of rabbit wood so there gavagai rabbit or maybe it's poor oh right maybe it's like good one of the rabbits and copper guy really means rabbits or maybe it means rabbit stage I got a guy in motion I took one of my bridge things of the horse running right and just put into the buddy rabbit first it doesn't do anything so probably not really very much it motion um or and attached rubber parts for the Platonic formal gravity the essence of rabbits uh-huh and who knows maybe that's what it is right the major point the acquaintance oh the form of rabbit exemplified again now how could we tell which of those the native means is the native of light inist is the native of Buddhist is the native sort of somebody who believes in the manifest image of objects as we do or maybe an event metaphysics of its rabbiting again look she says it makes no real difference that the linguist will turn by and when we come to think as the natives do whatever that means but the arbitrator's are reading our objectification of the heathen speech reflects not so much the inscrutability of the heathen mind as that there is nothing to scroot in other words there is nothing this linguist can buy doubt about native behavior that will indicate whether this means rabbit or its rabbiting or under taps rabbit parts or temporal stages of a rabbit or whatever you want might want to put it in here there's nothing I can possibly find out and you might think well okay maybe it's not manifest in behavior but maybe there is something in the natives mind that tells which it is says no there's nothing there that will determine it there is no fact of the matter it's not like the native is this hidden Buddhist or hidden platanus and you just can't tell from behavior the fact is there's nothing to determine it you could describe things in one way you could describe things in another way there is no way to really tell so which of those is real the others have rabbit parts the rabbit stages the rabbit hood the rabbit there's no way to determine there's just is no fact of the matter even about what the native thinks there is well if that's true it's even more so with us he says look you might think that we have provincial ways of positive objects and conceding nature maybe you could best understand them by standing off and seeing them against a cosmopolitan background of alien cultures but the notion comes to nothing for there is no clue stone there's no place to stand he's thinking of Archimedes oh if only I could stand somewhere I could somehow see how our conceptual scheme relates everybody else's says no there's nowhere to stand like that we're stuck in our own conceptual scheme and so we could know every language we still wouldn't know in fact we could come to the end of science and we still wouldn't know what science said there is let alone what we think there is or anybody else thinks there is so in the end relativity begins at home there's just no fact of the matter about what there is or what we believe in then there's nothing for such a correlation to be right or wrong a path he said my philosophize for my own conceptual scheme at scientific effort on the nono pen so in the end he's a radical relevance above

Channel: Daniel Bonevac

Views: 368,428

Rating: 4.8828912 out of 5

Keywords: Postmodernism (Literary School Or Movement), W. V. O. Quine

Id: we6cwmzhbBE

Length: 46min 51sec (2811 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 25 2013