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Postmodernism

irishguitarlad

So I have an exam on Monday about Feminist Literature. Now the things is I would consider myself a feminist yet I have severe doubt about the theory on which the majority of their theory is based on ie.Postmodernism. Now Postmodernism itself got it's idea from the father of linguistics Ferdinand de Sausurre who's theory on language has since been debunked by Chomsky. Also it goes against one of the fathers of modern science and modern philosophy, Renee Descartes who said " I think therefore I am" ths comfirming it as an absolute truth and beginning from there to establish other truths. However, postmodernist theorists believe that there are no absolute truths. I think this is a dangerous way of thinking as it goes against science who's practice is to search for the absolute truth of something, find it and use it to make our lives better and the lives of further generations.

Anyways, am I wrong AH? Should I not question it at all?Also, is this postmodernist theory only accepted as "fact" in literature courses or is it like that in philosophy and psychology ones as well? I have to say, it's in other modules as well in my literature course.By the way I am not some crazy Jordan Peterson fanboy, I do however like some of his psychology.

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Franz Von Peppercorn II

I on the other hand think that any intelligent alien would have something like pythagoras‘ theorem in their mathematical belt.

Fourier

Franz Von Peppercorn II wrote: »

I on the other hand think that any intelligent alien would have something like pythagoras‘ theorem in their mathematical belt.

Do you mean this to say mathematics is "true out there" independent of minds or just that aliens will probably think and use concepts of space etc like we do. The latter I can see, the former I find hard to square with things like Godel's theorem.

Franz Von Peppercorn II

Fourier wrote: »

Do you mean this to say mathematics is "true out there" independent of minds or just that aliens will probably think and use concepts of space etc like we do. The latter I can see, the former I find hard to square with things like Godel's theorem.

I don’t know much about Gödel, however what I am saying is that if I ever am caught by aliens who look like they are going to eat me, working on the assumption that they won’t eat intelligent animals I’ll write something like Pythagoras’ theorem in the dust. A right angled triangle with 5 dots beside the hypotenuse and 3 and 4 dots as appropriate on the other sides.

They’ll say:

“ it knows ziggüërts algorithm. We can’t eat it”

Franz Von Peppercorn II

Of course they’ll probably just make me a sex slave. But I won’t be eaten.

Fourier

Franz Von Peppercorn II wrote: »

Of course they’ll probably just make me a sex slave. But I won’t be eaten.

Let's just hope they don't take the dots as your description of how many orifices you've got :eek:

JupiterKid

Notwithstanding the debate on the merits and role of postmodernist theory and philosophy, within the arena of architecture there is a very definite postmodern category, basically buildings designed and constructed after the golden era of modernism, which prevailed from the 1920s until the 1970s.

Architects and town planners in the early 1970s began to question and critique the effects of modernist architecture on cities and towns in the developed world - like the Corbusian “ideal” of tower block cities where form and function trumped aesthetics and the cold mechanical efficiency of clean lines clashed with historical buildings of architectural merit and the human scale of historic urban cores, narrow streets, squares, lanes which were being cleared away in favour of urban motorways which severed communities and diminished the urban fabric and high rise tower blocks of flats, so beloved of planners in the 1960s, which failed on a human level and led to decay, crime, and a dehumanizing sense of alienation.

So postmodern buildings were a reaction to modernism, involving a reappreciation of the warmth of brick elevations, pastiche, decoration, and bold experiments in design.

Here are a few examples...

Stantonbury Secondary School Campus, Milton Keynes, UK (1972-74).

A return to sloping roofs, timber framed windows, brick elevation and an attempt to create a major school campus on a more human scale. Stantonbury was groundbreaking in having no uniforms for students, teachers being called their first names and an emphasis on creative arts and personal development in addition to academic achievement.

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Pompidou Centre, Paris, France (1977)
Designed by Piano and Rogers, this building was revolutionary in placing all the services outside the structure.
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AT&T Tower, New York, USA (1984).
A reaction to the cool, clinical skyscrapers of the post WWII era, the building was clad in stone and has an ornate roof style reminiscent of Chippendale furniture. AT&T Tower was very influential on an entire generation of skyscrapers built in North America and Europe in the 1980s and 1990s.

Lloyds Building, London, UK (1987)

30 St Mary Axe, aka The “Gherkin ” London, UK (2004)
A very distinctive landmark of the City of London, this building incorporates many design aspects with respect to more sustainable environmental impacts and energy efficiency.

INNTel Hotel, Zaandam, Netherlands (2010)
Replacing a brutalist 1960s office tower block, this building is a play on traditional vernacular Dutch architecture, and especially the green painted wooden houses of the Zaan region, located just north of Amsterdam.

The Burj Khalifa, Dubai, UAE (2011)
The world’s tallest building, this structure is as striking as it uses the Burj flower as a starting point for its design.
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Wibbs

I'd be with you J, though would personally see the Pompidou as modernist and the bookend on that. Then again I would bookend Modernism of most types between the opening of the Eiffel Tower and the opening of the Pompidou Centre. And like many art and philosophical movements it began and ended in Paris, so it kinda fits for me.

Though postmodernist architecture generally leaves me cold. I find it decided to go back to the ornamentation that the Modernists generally hated and avoided, at least the Corbusian types*, but instead of ornamentation as art or skill or reverence, they instead went for whimsy. Whimsy can only ever be a passing pleasure.

Or many of them simply ran out of ideas, new ideas with few antecedents they might be accused of copying and called this "post modernist". I suspect there's much in that.

*though I would consider Gaudi very much a Modernist and he was all about the ornament and he wasn't alone there, GV art nouveau and deco, both within Modernism)

[Deleted User]

Fourier wrote: »

Bernard d'Espagnat was a French physicist who thought about this sort of stuff. If there were aliens who could just grasp the things we can't, could they communicate it to us. Does our non-analytical side sometimes grasp stuff genuinely not captured by the analytic side, i.e. maybe there is some "truth" captured by finding a sunset beautiful that mathematics doesn't. Once you open the door of mathematics and science not having access to the "truth" you naturally open these questions.

Hard to know.

reminds me of that short story. by your man. eh

story of your life!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life

nkl12xtw5goz70

Fourier wrote: »

In light of Godel's theorem and other results very few people today in mathematics are Platonists, i.e. believe mathematics exists "outside of space and time" and view that as being as silly as saying "English exists outside of space and time". The vast majority take the view riffmongous and Wibbs expressed above, i.e. that it is simply a language.

Gödel himself was a mathematical platonist, and did not see platonism as incompatible with his incompleteness theorem. He certainly did not view it as "silly."

Fourier

Perla Full Urination wrote: »

Gödel himself was a mathematical platonist, and did not see platonism as incompatible with his incompleteness theorem. He certainly did not view it as "silly."

He was originally. Not toward the end of his life and this was largely as a result of his theorem and work following from it like that of Paul Cohen's. This is directly confirmed in correspondences especially around 1952 onward.

Godel's incompleteness theorem itself makes Platonism "hard" to maintain but still somewhat feasible. It's really what followed it, namely the area known as model theory. It's stuff like this that means most mathematicians today are not Platonists.

Fourier

Franz Von Peppercorn II wrote: »

I don’t know much about Gödel, however what I am saying is that if I am am ever caught by aliens who look like they are going to eat me, and working on the assumption that they won’t eat intelligent animals, I’ll write something like Pythagoras’ theorem in the dust. A right angled triangle with 5 dots beside the hypotenuse and 3 and 4 dots as appropriate on the other sides.

They’ll say:

“ it knows ziggüërts algorithm. We can’t eat it”

I just needed to check with a few books to make sure I wasn't mistaken. I knew there was somebody who had a view like yours.

There's another French physicist Roland Omnès who thinks that although mathematics is a mental creation and ultimately doesn't fully describe reality (as we know from QM) that any sentient race would possess mathematics. So it would be a universal "toolkit" as you put it, it would have limits on how well it could describe reality but be shared by all.

The Sci-Fi writer Olaf Stapledon also made similar remarks that aliens would probably have the same mental tools as us, or at least translating between theirs and ours could be done. This is because we'd be on the same scale of size, made of similar chemicals, but most importantly shaped by the same force of darwinian selection. This is in his "Last and First Men" and "Star Maker"

However since maths has limits, I'd love if there were beings like Wibbs mentioned who actually do just "get" the truth.

If I met them though they'd probably just tell me I wouldn't get it! "Oh you're one of those lads that only has language and maths, sorry you really need Zharg to get how it all fits together. Your descdents in ten million years will have brains big enough to Zharg, you head home"

sbsquarepants

Fourier wrote: »

Probably not in my opinion. In my opinion even scientifically there often isn't an absolute truth, though in most cases this doesn't matter or is a technicality.

Surely it can't be that the absolute truth doesn't actually exist, just that we haven't figured it out yet?

I've read your posts about quantum mechanics and it looking increasingly more likely that at it's core it is just "unknowable" (if that's a word:D) But would you not be inclined to think that maybe that QM is just not the right tool to describe whatever the absolute base reality is?

You can do a pretty good job of nailing two pieces of wood together with a heavy spanner, but a hammer does it better, a nail gun ever better again, but in a world where only spanners existed you could be forgiven for thinking that was as good as it gets.

Maybe we do need zharg, we might never get it but that doesn't mean there isn't an absolute base level of reality. I just can't wrap my head around the idea that there wouldn't actually need to be one hidden somewhere

nkl12xtw5goz70

Fourier wrote: »

He was originally. Not toward the end of his life and this was largely as a result of his theorem and work following from it like that of Paul Cohen's. This is directly confirmed in correspondences especially around 1952 onward.

Can you indicate which letters written by Gödel back that up? It's my understanding that saw his incompleteness theorem as supporting mathematical platonism rather than undermining it.

BeerWolf

modernism

Fourier

Perla Full Urination wrote: »

Can you indicate which letters written by Gödel back that up? It's my understanding that saw his incompleteness theorem as supporting mathematical platonism rather than undermining it.

Two fairly straight forward examples:

Quaker Fellowship Princeton Collection Box 8 wrote:

In mathematics, [the] question is to find out what we have perhaps unconsciously created.

Complete works of Kurt G&#246 wrote: »

The method for the foundation of knowledge is then psychoanalysis.

Also note that his original view wasn't really Platonism either, but a complicated philosophy that's hard to pin down. Closer to what is today called "Intuitionism" rather than "Platonism".

Even more importantly though is that Gödel's views aren't that important since he didn't live to see most of the results from model theory that are hard to square with Platonism.

Isaac Newton similarly thought that his laws of gravitation described how the planets orbited, but that it was only the mind of God who could reveal how they were set up that way. Today we have the theory of planetary nebula formation. The views of "original founders" aren't crucial in any sense.

The more important point is that the majority of the mathematical community today is not Platonist, with many of the strongest arguments coming after Gödel's death.

nkl12xtw5goz70

Fourier wrote: »

Two fairly straight forward examples

Those examples don't actually contradict the Platonist position. The debate over Gödel is whether his views constituted a "strong" or "weak" Platonism — but there's little support for the belief that he actually ever rejected mathematical Platonism.

It would be more accurate to say he was mostly Platonist about some areas of mathematics, but not all.

So Platonist mathematics do exist? That's the whole point of this discussion — do there exist abstract mathematical objects that are eternal, independent of physical incarnation, and not dependent on symbols or language used to represent them? If so, the postmodernist position, which would reject such ontological claims, falls apart.

The more important point is that the majority of the mathematical community today is not Platonist...

So you claim, but mathematicians such as Reuben Hersh believe otherwise, and I don't believe there's any clear evidence for asserting what "the majority of the mathematical community" believes on the subject.

In any case, pointing to a majority belief is a clear instance of the argumentum ad populum logical fallacy of the form "Most people believe x, therefore x is true."

Fourier

Perla Full Urination wrote: »

Those examples don't actually contradict the Platonist position. The debate over Gödel is whether his views constituted a "strong" or "weak" Platonism — but there's little support for the belief that he actually ever rejected mathematical Platonism.

Perla Full Urination wrote: »

So Platonist mathematics do exist?

No Gödel thought of some areas of mathematics in a Platonist way. That's not the same as saying "Platonist mathematics exists". Even that phrasing is odd. The debate over Godel is not about whether he was a strong or weak Platonist, it's about what school of mathematical philosophy he fell into especially toward the end of his career. The Platonist/Nominalist division is not relevant today.

So you claim, but mathematicians such as Reuben Hersh believe otherwise, and I don't believe there's any clear evidence for asserting what "the majority of the mathematical community" believes on the subject.

Of course "the majority" means there are some who don't. I can name several who are still Platonists.

So you claim, but mathematicians such as Reuben Hersh believe otherwise, and I don't believe there's any clear evidence for asserting what "the majority of the mathematical community" believes on the subject.

Do you consider surveys to constitute clear evidence if I were to provide them?

In any case, pointing to a majority belief is a clear instance of the argumentum ad populum logical fallacy of the form "Most people believe x, therefore x is true."

I expected this lazy statement. Nowhere did I say it was "proof" that formalism was true, which is what would be required for it to be a logical fallacy. It's a statement of fact. Most mathematicians are formalists today. The point of saying this is that it means your statement of Platonism isn't something only rejected by flaky "Postmodernists" but by the majority of actual working mathematicians and thus it isn't a clear cut issue.

No offense Permabear, but having argued with you before I know your style. And from other threads it seems many are familiar with it. You're googling terms as we speak which is clear to me as a professional mathematician where your phrasing is slightly off. I first noticed this in an older argument about computer science. It was clear you were rephrasing articles you found. I even later found the articles. When cornered you resort to silly rhetorical tricks like the logical fallacy "gotcha" above. Eventually when utterly disproved you'll simply never respond or come back or admit any error, just like earlier threads from your previous incarnation where you denied Climate Change.

I might go one or two posts more on this but I'd much rather the more productive discussions like sbsquarepants post above.

Fourier

sbsquarepants wrote: »

But would you not be inclined to think that maybe that QM is just not the right tool to describe whatever the absolute base reality is?
...
I just can't wrap my head around the idea that there wouldn't actually need to be one hidden somewhere

Good question. First let me be clear what I and the majority of physicists* think. Yes there is a base reality and QM is not the right tool to describe the base reality.

The issue then is what is the right tool. The original hope would be that it would be another mathematical theory, like we've had in the rest of physics, but that seems very unlikely today.

So let's say the basic idea is there is a base reality, but it's outside analytic/scientific understanding.

Now what do physicists actually think.

The idea with Quantum Theory is that it describes things from the point of view of an observer. You plug what they've seen previously, what object they're trying to look at now and how they're trying to look at it. It'll then tell you how that object might respond. This was recognised very early on, see this 1931 letter from Erwin Schrodinger explaining QM to Arnold Sommerfeld:

Schrodinger wrote:

Quantum Mechanics forbids statements about the what really exists, statements about the object. It deals only with the object-subject relation

Another thing you'd hope is that you could combine the different ways of looking at something to get a complete picture of what is going on. Like taking a photo of a tree from head on and above can be combined into a total 3D image of the tree.

Unfortunately you cannot. The different way of looking at something contradict each other. This is known as "Complementarity". It's a bit like taking a photo of a garden. You can choose foreground and background focus. When you choose foreground focus you see a blurry purple tree in the background. When you switch to background focus there is no tree there at all. So it's not possible to combine the photos into a single accurate picture of reality.

There's also the issue I mentioned above with the observer trying to view themselves, i.e. you can't put yourself into quantum theory. This seems to lead to paradoxes and a breakdown of the theory. This is no surprise as since QM is about a subject looking at other things, something has to be the subject doing the viewing. It can't be a subject and an object, like an eye trying to look at itself.

When QM is applied to an everyday object like a stone strictly speaking what it says is that every way of looking at the stone does make sense together, can be combined, there's no real uncertainty about what you'll see in any given way of looking at it and every observer will see the same thing. So you can just drop the whole talk about observers, looking and ways of looking. You have a clear objective picture of the stone.

The one mystery is why this is, why can't you get a clear picture of things. There's a famous diagram by probably one of the greatest physicists of the past fifty years Asher Peres:

The basic idea is that in Quantum Theory everything is a physical system, but everything is "autonomous/free". Nobody can gain a complete objective description of something or predict it perfectly.

Franz Von Peppercorn II

riffmongous wrote: »

Hm I can use mathematics to make theories that I know are not true in our universe, even though they are rigourous

Economics major?

riclad

String theory is postmodern ,in that its composed of vague theorys
that cannot be proven .
we do not have the technology to prove it exists, at all .
Since in theory it exists in many dimensions .
It says that all objects and forces, like gravity ,energy,nuclear energy
can be explained by one theory which is present in many dimensions ,
theres no proof it exists ,its pure theory.
We can show that einsteins theory of physics are correct
by observingthe movement of planets gravity and measuring the speed of light .

Franz Von Peppercorn II

I like David Hume oh metaphysics.

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

To be honest the whole idea of platonic idealism seems absurd to me, the kind of philosophy which thinks we are discovering mathematical forms that were always there in some ill defined abstract place divorced from reality seems worthless.

On a weaker level though, as I was suggesting in the alien captive story, intelligent beings will use similar mathematical tools. Any intelligent and scientifically advanced alien would recognise some of our science and some of our mathematics, even if their knowledge is more advanced. They may however have none of our philosophy or religion, and entirely different social organisations, but to get anywhere scientifically they would have some understanding of gravity, electricity, forces and so on, and not only that but their formulas and mathematics describing these things would be largely the same, albeit with different symbols.

Therefore at that nexus of maths and science there is some universal truth, which is precisely what post modernism (as I read it) denies.