I recently had the unpleasant experience of reviewing a
manuscript with an extremely naive, but obviously heartfelt and
sincere, critique of postmodernism in its application to another
field I work in. I was constantly mystified (and eventually
annoyed) that every deviation from the author/s not very
sophisticated views about objectivity and realism got itself
labeled as a form of an equally naive 'relativism'. I think there
are some moderately sophisticated versions of both realist
objectivism and sociocultural relativism around (and some more
interesting critiques of the history and function of the
dichotomy, as in Latour's little _We Have Never Been Modern_),
but writers from the anonymous authors of that manuscript, to the
CMU Simon group, to Gross & Levitt, and a lot of even far less
sophisticated people than these, are not so much conservative
(not necessarily a bad thing to be) in their critiques as just
dated and downright simplistic.
I personally have relatively little patience for purely abstract
philosophical gamesmanship over these issues, but I do look for
genuinely new ideas, arguments, and viewpoints, especially ones
that can be of some use in research and practice, or ones that
are actually grounded in people's experience of doing something
other than either 'philosophy' or what the authors and I
presumably share in the way of daily experience. I don't find
much, on an annual average basis, but over a couple decades you
do learn to be more 'sophisticated' about some things -- by which
I mean that you can see issues from several genuinely different
points of view, and with some delicacy of categorization and
argument for each, and find ways to juggle these usefully for the
purpose in hand. It certainly means you've never met a dichotomy
you couldn't deconstruct.
My 'pure philosophy' aversions are no doubt partly subcultural,
and probably shared by people like Simon, Sokal, and Gross &
Levitt (like me originally trained as 'technical professionals'
in dominant U.S. culture), but there are occasional babies to be
rescued from all that philosophical bathwater, and undergraduate
Philosophy 101 from the 1940s-1960s needs to be updated by their
new generation. After all, I was taught logical positivism and
Chicago neo-Aristotelianism (touch of Plato) in the 60s, as being
the epitome of practically useful philosophy for a scholar or
scientist. (I managed to find someone to teach me Marx who
actually agreed with much of what Marx wrote, but he was attacked
with a hammer, had a bitter tenure fight, and soon left. But that
was taught as sociology, not philosophy.) As a graduate student
with an eye for promising intellectual infants, I heard about
structuralism, and read some. There were rumours of Barthes,
Foucault and Derrida (still in French). My University of Chicago
prided itself on being a world intellectual center.
(Unfortunately, at the time, the only world intellectual centers
seem to have been in Paris!) I was infected by cultural
anthropology at an early intellectual age and have been some sort
of relativist (hopefully a sophisticated one) ever since. But I
can easily understand how being very bright in America does not
in any way imply becoming broadly intellectually sophisticated --
quite the opposite, so far as I can see. JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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