A Thinking Reed

Against epistemological extremism

Written by

Lee M.

in

Millinerd has an excellent post that almost exactly matches my take on “postmodernism”:

DesCartes’ all-or-nothing philosophy thought that any knowledge not based on absolute certainty was worthless. And because Descartes thought he could establish such certainty, the light switch of absolute knowledge was flipped on… yielding the Enlightenment. Postmodernists swing to the opposite pole, claiming that because Descartes was wrong (which he was) the only possible solution is to turn the light of knowledge completely off.

Funny, in summer months in the Ford Focus when I turn on the air conditioner full-blast my wife says “You know, there is a middle setting.”And she’s right. The espistemological light does not have to be on or off. There’s a dimmer switch, called humility, that can carefully consider our claims to knowledge without putting us completely in the dark. Sure there are those who continue to claim absolute Cartesian knowledge is a possibility. They give rise to postmodernists who insist on no knowledge (except of course for the startlingly ambitious claim to know that we have no knowledge). Between them are those who neither claim purely objective knowledge nor deny it completely.

Read the rest.

Comments

4 responses to “Against epistemological extremism”

  1. Eric Lee

    Nice!

    So, I can’t help but ask: is Verbum Ipsum now an image-laden blog? I don’t think I’ve seen a single image in VI’s history, and now three in one day! 🙂

    Peace,

    Eric

    Reply
  2. Eric Lee

    As per what I think on the linked blog post, I tend to agree. I definitely think the official “postmodern” peeps (derrida, foucault, lyotard, et. al.) have a few useful tools to offer, but there are definitely many things that are absolutely worthless in their corpus of writing.

    I followed the whole Thinktank discussion that Millinerd linked to in his post and chimed in a time or two, but it was mainly in response to one of the “all or nothing” comments on there. As far as I know, the people on that blog who actually do read the “postmoderns” (emergent/RO’ers) are the first to admit postmodern fallacies.

    Peace,

    Eric

    Reply
  3. Lee

    Heh! Either I didn’t realize how easy it was to upload images on Blogger, or they added a new feature that makes it really easy. I never gave it much thought til I saw a couple other people using Blogger who had images and I thought “I wonder if I can figure out how to do that.” Turns out it ain’t hard.

    Reply
  4. Lee

    Regarding the po-mo stuff – I’ve always come at this stuff from a slightly different angle. I learned to be critical of “foundationalism” (the bête noir of postmodernists) by reading people like Alvin Plantinga (who’s about as far from a postmodernist as you can get), so it never occurred to me to draw all these wild, relativistic conclusions from that critique.

    And actually, if you read Pascal, he provides one of the most incisive critiques of Cartesian epistemology. Talk about ahead of your time!

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