today I'm going to be talking about some movements in philosophy during the 1960s primarily that pushed you might say the enlightenment Paradigm into its exact opposite that turned it on its head that denied all of the Enlightenment thesis 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 microparticles that are governed by physical law according to evolutionary theory it's really something at the level of well random mutation natural selection ultimately that's gets unified with genetic theory and so 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 n there is this idea of the will to power uh and so on and so forth well by the 19 1960s this had turned into structuralism and poststructuralism structuralism the idea that really things are determined by social structures the idea here originates in Marx when he talks about economic classes for Marx it's really an underlying economic level the structuralists extend that to a general social level in fact some of the most important thinkers in this uh in this school of thought are anthropologists people like Claud leby Strauss who say there are certain social structures and those social structures deter 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 of ourselves as acting for reasons we think of ourselves as having responsibility as acting rightly or wrongly virtu virtuously or viciously in 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 we're not even aware of more moreover since that's true we have no responsibility there's no real way to judge what we do as virtuous or vicious as right or wrong and so a reasons are really just mere rationalizations they have nothing to do with the causes of our actual Behavior well all of this was connected remember to these four thesis of the Enlightenment first of all truth there are Universal absolute truths for example the kinds of laws that were discovered in the Scientific Revolution secondly it is possible to attain objective knowledge J 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 that 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 of them well all of those end up getting denied by the postmodernist 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 postmodernism uh and you can see here in academic journals well this started off from a fairly low level 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 postmodernism was starting to fade a bit in Academia it sort of gained the popular imagination um 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 had a great deal of influence how do we Define what postmodernism is it's actually really difficult one of its Advocates Gary Alworth defines it this way a set of critical strategic and rhetorical practices employing Concepts such as difference repetition the trace the Similac and Hyper reality to destabilize other Concepts such as presence identity historical progress epistemic certainty and the univocity of meaning now don't 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 postmodernist movement to understand here are some things that are supposed to represent postmodernism works of art like that for example or this or that or things like that I love that one um or this negate the negation cross down 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 toward the California border they have this what is it called skw yeah the Skywalk where you go out over the canyon and it's built of that kind of material so you can look down okay now it's very carefully engineered and before you go out onto it they explain all the careful engineering and so on but still there are a lot of people who can't do it um 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 is a thinker at Yale who calls this a leaf as opposed to B Leaf well in any case it doesn't bother this kid who's right out there there is well all right I'll go with most sizl definition from The Simpsons weird for the sake of weird uh but that's kind of what these postmodernist thinkers do now it tends to mean different things in painting in architecture in philosophy in literature and so often I get the sense that what postmodernism is in all these fields is just something that 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 then kind of playing with them they're really trying to you might say put into practice nich's idea of the playful science something that involves going beyond the search for truth and doing something else well to understand where the postmodernists are coming from let's go back to Hegel and talk about what I've referred to as the myth of the given 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 but I'm not going to cuz I'm not disgusting but you know the the idea it feels to us like hey we've got a direct relation to the chair Hegel says wait that's far too fast 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 which you're looking at all of this you can think about this screen you can point to it you can even touch it you can use a definite description to refer to it the screen you could even give it a name anybody want to give a name to this screen screeny scen screeny well that's highly imaginative screeny okay you can say well screeny is pretty clean today highly reflective okay how you feeling screeny O A little chilly yes Etc 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 I several of you are talking at once I'm not sure what you're saying Hegel between me yeah right okay good yeah maybe that's true actually if you I I've sometimes wondered about that if it's sort of like bores and thinking about Clon if enough people become postmodernists does like it become true postmodernism itself stands between you and the screen I don't know anyway um the idea is supposed to be this it's not a direct link because in fact in between are Concepts now in fact if you think about what's going on in your perception what are you really perceiving K 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 in fact 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 the 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 the lines on the side and the reflections uh you can perhaps see yourself in the screen I can see myself okay and so you can sort of perceive all of and you realize actually this is very complicated when you look at it carefully it's very complex when I was in college actually the spring semester of my freshman year I took painting drawing and sculpture I did all this art stuff and you can tell when I scribble something in the Blackboard how much I got out of that um but here is one thing I did get out of it 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 pick that color what is that color big yeah something like beige institutional beige you know like nobody would put that in their house but in institutions people pick these colors they would never put in their house cuz they're like what I don't know but anyway yeah you think oh I just do that right but in fact you start looking at it more carefully and you realize wait look at the pattern of the light for example this section is actually quite light 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 have to actually use a lot of different colors and then if there are other objects near it you real well for example the telephone and the wire you realize wait a minute that's not only a lot darker but actually it has a 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 uh pencil sharpener and so on and so forth it's actually very complex and so the first level you can say wait a minute 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 auditor 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 to 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 that Hegel 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 a concept and that concept is what unifies things into an object so the idea is really this the mind is organizing the swirling M mass of mental acts I.E just perceptions feelings thoughts Sensations into a sort of unified perception of an object a screen Okay C refers to this says the synthesis of the manifold the manifold the the many okay are somehow put into one object by our minds well if that's right then the screen isn't just 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 Manifest image like chairs and screens and people it's true even of 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 Russell's perspective right the theory of description says that when we have talk 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 and asserts something very general about the world that there is exactly one object which is the president King of France for example 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 names and we'll come back to this after Thanksgiving according to Russell they're really descri disguised descriptions to too so I can't get around this by calling the screen screeny and giving it a name it turns out there are still Concepts there so objects in short as we think of them are always products of our own conceptual activity they're 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 up there and a picture of 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 can be an artist not so much none of them in here well the postmodernists take this one step further than Hegel and the other thinkers who were on this sort of page talking about the myth of the given they turn it to the self so let's go back to the enlightenment Renee dickart 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 taught 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 going to doubt everything I can possibly doubt so he 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 a room talking to a bunch of could I be wrong sure okay and we've talked about some of the reasons maybe I'm Dreaming maybe I'm hallucinating 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 okay there are all sorts of possibilities here um but dayart says wait 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 because the very doubt is a thought similarly 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 concluding that I think I am must be true every time their thought are 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 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 hallucinating yeah but could I be hallucinating that I exist could I be dreaming that I am or that I think no because dreaming is a kind of thinking I couldn't be dreaming unless I existed and so on and so he says actually I am given to myself more directly than anything else is given to me in between me and the screen in 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 access to 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 mind yeah I mean like sometimes you're not like thinking as you normally would like let's say you know like you're under the influence of something and then might not be thinking as you would oh okay yeah um you might say Okay alcohol could be been between me and myself uh 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 that okay and so you might say yeah that's a problem and other forms of drugs might be even more severe in dissociating you or 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 um 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 that might somebody might think they're Napoleon uh and not be let say and so they're pretty far removed from what actually is true about themselves yeah emot 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 say dude uh look at you um so yes you can get emotional and that emotion can interfere with your own perception of your state of mind you might really misperceive your state of mind like the person who's sitting there trembling saying I'm Not Afraid what do you mean I'm or that type of thing right emotions can interfere with your own self- knowledge so there might be things that can intervene now dekart would say no actually at least in certain kinds of cases like when I'm thinking that I think or thinking that I am nothing is in between you're right there as it were 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 applied 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 cleared or confused I I think I 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'm I have no cognitive impairments and in fact I had no clue what was going on right I 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 um she got mad about that by the way if you're in a car accident and you're married you should really call your spouse and let them know you've been in a car accident I mean it's bad for them to just show up because they found out 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 had tried calling and she didn't pick up her phone and it wasn't true um so there can be all sorts of things that interfere and so the the 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 decentering 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 of the picture Okay 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 and our own perception of ourselves so you can compare this to wienstein remember wienstein at one point says the limits of my language or the limits of my world and we talked about various ways of interpreting that well that might be true from a postmodernist point of view actually when it's read idealistically the limits of my language determine the limits of my world the postmodernists 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 revolve around you in your language and your thinking no you're not at the center at all so there's another image show but that's not as good because it doesn't have the interviewing window pain okay so the postmodernist says look you don't have direct knowledge of anything even of yourself even of your own states of mind your relation to yourself is mediated by Concepts and maybe 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 in so far 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 I'm very hard to Ang 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 and it got us in trouble with the administration so I went out and I banged on the desk but I didn't shout I didn't scream I just went out there and went crap okay went back to my office that was my biggest tantrum in 10 years of being um so and then I found out what it means to be in trouble with the I thought oh my gosh some faculty members is going to be paid blah blah blah no it just means some vice president somewhere has to press a button like oh I shouldn't have even bang the table with that 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 comparing yourself to other people who aren't well I am compar yes 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 notic you know some people get mad I don't tend to get mad so huh I will call that being not as even tempered did I think it up myself yeah experiences like your own personal experience well partly it's from my own personal experiences yes experiences of other people experiences of my own emotional reaction to things but still I put the label on it right I'm even tempered where did that come from yeah it's a word that's already been in existence good the word is already there right I was taught 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 Society right the people around me the community a part of and so really those concepts are things I inherit from my language I inherit my language from the society around me and so it's really the society that gives me the concepts I will use to understand even myself so I might try to understand language in all sorts of other ways here are just some books I happen to have in my office that 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 Jac dereda who may be the person who really put postmodernism on the map in intellectual terms this is one of his most popular books margins of philosophy and he has a particular variety of postmodernism which is referred to as deconstruction he's famous for saying everything is a text now that seems ridiculous right I mean margins of philosophy that's a text that's a work a literary work consists of words is this chair a text yeah 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 read since the link didn't work read this that's weird right it's like what do you mean read that I I don't know what to do with that and so at first clance this is a very strange thing to say um now what does he mean he often 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 Bartley right everything's a text I refute to use us boom and the Rock flies off you say see there's nothing written on that rock um but still he has a reason for thinking this okay there's an argument behind this language is a system of differences when I asked about being even tempered a moment ago somebody said well look 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-sc screens in order to have that concept and be able to use the term appropriate yeah does it kind of go hand in hand within when he says like the limits of my language are the limits of my world is that kind of like hand in hand together I 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 and 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 recognize by this system of differences and so you're absolutely right it's the difference that my language gives me that enable me to carve up the world into objects and so see it as consisting of certain kinds of things absolutely so if if there are certain things I can't differentiate in 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 to differentiate okay so screens is this a screen no is this a screen yes is this a screen on my iPad yes um are the lenses my glasses screens some of you aren't sure uh there can 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 distinguish walking no right walking no okay so you're good on those terms now I start throwing at you more complicated terms I say Similac right you probably go I don't know okay so that shows you don't have the concept Well Screen can mer you know can mean all sorts of things here is a theater called the screen on the green don't man you Stare at Goats or here's another screen on the green or here are a bunch of screens and then there of course window 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 can draw these distinctions it can give us a system of differences of interrelated distinctions but that's it so what does language do it establishes a structure and the same thing is true of any Theory Express language it establishes a structure this isn't a thought confined to postmodernism it's really I think part of vien Stein's perspective in the trus it's something that is implicit well may more than implicit in Rudolph carnap's book from 1926 inspired by the trus The Logical structure of language uh sorry The Logical structure of the world um The Logical syntax of language is a later book of his um yeah 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 carap and if you think about it wienstein actually don't answer that question carap says I can't answer it language can't do that and really if you go back to vien Stein and what he says about an object you realize he never tells us what an object is what are the basic objects of wienstein 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 anym 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 postmodernism so they say look that's what language does it can reveal or impose a structure but it can say nothing about what it's the structure of so here's a structure let's say but what do those nodes represent there's no way to talk about that that's something the language can't give you the language can draw all sorts of distinctions and so you can say what category that thing falls into but if I say no look 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 who are logically or mathematically minded you could 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 clear to you don't worry about it okay the idea is really thought and 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 structures of but there's no way within the language to talk about them so here's a structure that's actually a hyper Cube but now what are those nodes I don't know irrelevant a theory of hyper cubes can specify the structure but what is it a structure of what are those nodes 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 non-fiction all I'm doing is giving you a structure how does that structure relate to reality ooh that's something we can't talk about Okay so what's the difference between describing reality and just describing a system of signs a text of any kind language itself there's really no principal distinction between describing and imagining between fiction and non-fiction between actually reporting and just telling a story now that's a conclusion that Vicken Stein and carap would not draw they would say yeah I can say all sorts of things and elaborate a structure I can't really tell you what the nodes of that structure are but they wouldn't say so everything's a fiction or I can't tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction 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 postmodernist says what do you mean the world you'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 postmodernists end up denying all of those Enlightenment thesis 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 lby Strauss for example than just that skepticism objective knowledge is impossible Tony Cliff says that postmodernism is the theory of re theories yeah that sounds a little bit self-refuting doesn't it we'll come back to that they deny the thesis of Reason in fact they talk a lot about logos sensis putting Logic on a set of things they say reason is merely a tool by which certain empowered people mostly philosophy professors oppress other people that's a joke okay but anyway the idea is that it's the emotions and experiences of the oppressed that actually are better guides to reality than anybody's reason so somebody might have an elaborate argument explaining why this is the best social policy and if somebody especially an oppressed person says but man that's not the way I feel then it's like oh okay that sort of emotional reaction is a better guide um leotard puts it this way postmodernism 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 whole two-level idea and finally not a thesis of progress but of Liberation you've got to fight oppression by exposing the categories and metan narratives by which the empowered retain hegemony somebody a postmodernist some years ago about 20 years ago came to the English Department and gave a talk and it was all about hegemony someone in the back row at the end just stood up sort of naively and said I don't really understand your talk what's Hemy and the person did no uh like um well it just means domination okay so the idea is to Value authenticity what matters is whether I'm being authentic and really feel it not what kind of reasons I have because reasons after all is just rationalizations so Alberto EO author of the name of the Rose pictured there says the sense that the past is restricting smothering blackmailing us that's what postmodernism is it's breaking free from 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 Footwear and prohibited now there's something odd about this right I mean the chain 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 has gone wrong right our concept of a tornado maybe a social construct but it seems really weird to conclude that tornadoes are social constructs you might say huh it's just a social construct don't worry it won't blow you away uh no that that's wrong or cats right the concept of a cat met might be a social construct but cats aren't social constructs it's not like you can just change the concepts of your society and get rid of cats well I mean maybe you can but it involves killing lots of cats it doesn't involve just reconceptualizing them or what about a neutron our concept of a neutron is a social construct in this case constructed by Sir James Chadwick in 1933 but neutrons aren't social constructs so something weird has taken place here now there are a number of arguments against the postmodernist uh in addition to that one is that it is self-refuting um it is the theory that you should reject theories and that seems why not reject it right if if they give Arguments for their positions and if logic is a tool of oppression then isn't that at least hypocritical um isn't it a tool of Oppression also a lot of people complain it's just unintelligible there is online a postmodernism generator you can click on it you will get a different postmodernist essay automatically generated okay so here one deconstructing dered dah post-cultural Dem materialism in the works of blah blah blah in oh Echo yes in the works of echo a predominant concept is the distinction between ground and figure in a sense the main theme of Sergeant's model of the textual parad context is subcultural paradox and it just keeps going like this it's just like they just random sentences generated with all these terms in it okay and the puzzle is how can you differentiate that from actual postmodernist articles actually they're really compelling uh and they sound just the way others sound Alan Soo was a physicist who actually perpetuated a hoax he submitted a paper on quantum physics to one of these postm monist journals social text in 1996 and they publish it thought it was great and it was just utter nonsense I mean he purposely constructed it so it would be utter nonsense toward a transformative hermeneutics of quad gravity it just all bull okay and and they took took it they couldn't recognize the difference between Bull and actual science so I like this cartoon my hobby sitting down with grad students and timing how long it takes them to figure out that I'm not actually an expert in their field engineering our big problem is heat dissipation have you tried logarithms that takes about 48 seconds Linguistics ah so does this F yug family include say that's 63 seconds sociology yeah my latest work is on ranking people from best to worst that's four minutes and then literary criticism you see the deconstruction is inextricable from not only the text but also the self eight papers in two books and they still hav't come so finally some people have said look 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 well resort to power so is n a stressed where there's no truth there's only Power actually that's also from Harry Potter isn't it that's Voldemort yes ah so you end up with Voldemort well I now have about seven minutes to talk about Quine 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 of Wilfred sers sers writings are impenetrable but he was a fantastic lecturer quin's writings are exciting I would say thrilling by the standards of contemporary philosophy on the other hand to hear Quin actually talk he's un he was unbelievably boring so the writings are much better than hearing him speak um also he is as we'll see in many ways a postmodernist even though he hated postmodernism and in fact was one of the founding members of an organization set up to fight it now he was in many ways a philosophical hero superhero Willard gr Orman qu action figure with a web of belief with whack your enemies uh and he wrote a lot these are just books of his that I happen to have lying around my office now 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 but there's still plenty of room to dis agree 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 postmodernists argue language is a system of differences we can articulate structure but not what it's the structure of and Quin says that's exactly right what language is about what we ultimately refer to what we think there is in the world is radically indeterminate 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 the world consists in let alone what it really consists in or even what we believe it consists in there's a radical indeterminacy about all of this so here's the thought experiment imagine that you're a jungle linguist you're going to investigate the language of a tribe that has really never had its language studied before there are no existing dictionaries or translation manuals into any European language let's say um and by the way people used to 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 had never been studied before compile a dictionary and dictionary and a grammar and come back and defend that to your PhD committee so here's what's happening you're out there in the jungle you're there with a native observing his linguistic Behavior he says gavagai and you're thinking what does that mean you start noticing that he says gavagai only when there's a rabbit present so you think how do I translate gavagai rabit right but Quin says look it's more arbitrary than it seems so here you are in the jungle and you start notic go guy when and only when there are rabbits so you think ah gabag guy means rabbit but he says wait a minute wait a minute you don't even know whether it's a sentence or a term maybe it's a sentence like that Lo a rabbit or there's a rabbit or there we have a rabbit or Lo rabbit Hood again rabbits rabbit all of those are possible translations right it might be look it's rabbiting again there it's rabbiting I searched for the cutest picture of a budny 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 temporal segment of a rabbit after all the Buddhists think now Quin would say I can't really say this without a great deal of arbitrariness but Buddhists 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 means that or maybe it refers to undetached Rabbit parts or maybe to the platonic form of rabbit Hood so there Gaba guy rabbit or maybe it's plural right maybe it's like one of the rabbits and gabag really means rabbits or maybe it means rabbit stage my go guy in motion I took one of my bridge things of of the horse running right and just put in the budy rabbit course it doesn't do anything so it's prob I not really very much in motion um or undetached rabit parts or the platonic form of rabbit the essence of rabbit and who knows maybe that's what it is right made point the app oh the form of rabbit exemplified again now how could we tell which of those the native means is the native a platonist is the native a 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 he says it makes no real difference that the linguists will turn bilingual and come to think as the natives do whatever that means for the arbitrariness of reading our objectifications into the Heathen speech reflects not so much the inscrutability of the Heathen mind as that there is nothing to scrot in other words there is nothing this linguist can find out about Native Behavior that will indicate whether this means rabbit or it's rabbiting or unattached rabbit parts or temporal stages of a rabbit or whatever you want might want to put 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's something in the native's 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 platonist and you just can't tell from Behavior the fact is there 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 unattached 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 provential ways of positing objects and conceiving 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 pone 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 to everybody else's he 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 even there's nothing for such a correlation to be right or wrong about he says I philosophize from my own conceptual scheme and scientific eepic of a no no P so in the end he's a radical relativist about