Discuss postmodernism here. I'd like to link this, which is against the popular use of the phrase "postmodernism".

In my opinion, the majority of postmodernist rhetoric concerning science is philosophically worthless on account of the fact that it is, essentially, extrapolating from the fact that science can't tell us absolutely how people perceive reality to try to claim that science can't tell us anything. I certainly think that science has its limits and that those limits need to be taken into consideration in the search for truth, but I don't see how all methods for finding truth can be equally worthwhile. An emotionally-based analysis of relativity, for example, will yield very little of any value; analysing scientific investigations with postmodern techniques is the height of idiocy. Is science a philosophy? Well, yes, but investigating epistemological methods with techniques for dealing with moral philosophies is pointless. Is it a literary work? No.

That is to say, postmodernism is attempting to analyse things it wasn't originally intended for. I think that postmodernism as an artistic mode of writing and a technique for criticism of writings is useful, but that using it to attempt to analyse a purely logical process (like a rationalist discourse or empirical deduction [the latter being science]) is meaningless, because language is there being used to describe something built on logical principles, which can be described in dozens of different ways from the flamboyant (see Nietzsche here) to the lifeless (mathematics, theoretical physics). That is to say, the process of logic is immune to literary analysis, for it describes something that can be expressed with any type of language, or even without language at all.

And on that note, does anyone know of any stories deliberately written to defy deconstruction in such a way that deconstructing them would give you nothing that makes any logical sense? Something that would lead a literary critic to conclude the writer was subconsciously expressing "The sky is blue. The sky is not blue." through the text, for example.

EDIT: Nearly forgot this absurd claim by a feminist writer, boiled down to basics: "E=mc2 is sexist because it gives "privilege" to the speed of light."

Postmodernism is so last year. Existentialism is what's in right now.

Don't mock me, young man, existentialism is a tree of which postmodernism is one offshoot.

Hey, I'm older than you. Anyway, I don't remember much about postmodernism. This doesn't have anything to do with that stupid "brain in a vat" thing, does it?

Well the really stupid postmodernists say it does (you're talking about the skeptical epistemological position, and they try to apply postmodernist theory to stuff like epistemology).

And you might be older than me but you're still a young man.

oh yeah epistemology. Shit's comin' back to me now. I shouldn't have thrown out my notes from my philosophy class because then I would have a lot more to talk about, but I really still can't remember much of it.

Foucault called.

(Ugh, I'm reading The Order of Things, ugh.)