News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It. Parent comment

Re:The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It by poszlem on Saturday December 03, 2022 @03:09PM (#33846821)
The "truth era" wasn't the era when everything was true, but when we actually believed that there is such a thing as "the truth". I would argue that up until the time when "Applied Postmodernism" took hold in some of our most important institution we could say that we lived in the "truth" era.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It by wwweston on Saturday December 03, 2022 @04:22PM (#33847514)
Postmodernism is reckoning with the problem, not the problem. It recognizes epistemological difficulties and how different power interests or ideological preferences are often tied up with claims of "the truth."

The people who dislike it the most tend to be either those who've been effectively manipulated by power interests, or those who find reckoning with the difficulty of finding the truth inconvenient.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It by akiselev on Saturday December 03, 2022 @04:33PM (#33847608)
> It recognizes epistemological difficulties and how different power interests or ideological preferences are often tied up with claims of "the truth."

Down the nihilistic rabbit hole we go!

That's this layman's understanding of where postmodernism almost invariably ends up.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It by wwweston on Saturday December 03, 2022 @05:51PM (#33848317)
If you're equating the elaboration of difficulty with the declaration of impossibility, then the nihilism is inside you.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It by akiselev on Saturday December 03, 2022 @06:26PM (#33848592)
That’s exactly what a nihilistic postmodernist would say.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It by wwweston on Saturday December 03, 2022 @06:42PM (#33848744)
I mean, I guess your pithy comeback is a sentence someone could say if they were all in on posture and casual in their nihilistic contempt for semantics and substance.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It by akiselev on Saturday December 03, 2022 @06:57PM (#33848867)
We should start a podcast!

No one will be able to tell if we’re serious, trolling ourselves, trolling each other, or trolling the audience.

The essence of postmodernism is actually plausible deniability.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It by adolph on Saturday December 03, 2022 @08:57PM (#33849752)
> The people who dislike it the most tend to be either those who've been effectively manipulated by power interests, or those who find reckoning with the difficulty of finding the truth inconvenient.

Excellent way to avoid engaging with an idea you might find disagreeable, a tip of a straw hat to you

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It by naasking on Saturday December 03, 2022 @10:45PM (#33850382)
> Postmodernism is the reckoning with the problem, not the problem itself. It recognizes epistemological difficulties and how different power interests or ideological preferences are often tied up with claims of "the truth."

Which is fine for "claims to truth", but it's not fine when people think this entails that there is no such thing as truth, or sometimes that all claims to truth are equally valid.

[ Parent | on HN ]