Leslie Allan - Postmodernism and Relativism are Wrong

The self-undermining paradox of postmodernism and relativism is that they steadfastly propagate the absolute truth that there exists no absolute truth. This contradiction is the ultimate absurdity in their philosophy, a self-defeating axiom that undermines its own premise. Their insistence on the relativity of truths, paradoxically, becomes its own grand narrative, thus contradicting the core tenet of its philosophy. In discounting objectivity, they discount the collective exploration and validation of reality, an endeavor that forms the bedrock of science and human progress. Truth, by its nature, seeks universality, not relativity. In a cosmos striving for clarity, knowledge must always seek to illuminate, not obfuscate, our understanding, standing firm against the relativistic dilution of fact.

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[ianstorey]

We have been lucky that political power structures are such that we have had the privilege of understanding why relativity trumps the Newtonian universe. But the difference is very small. I figured that in our daily experience the longest object travelling at the greatest speed would be a jumbo jet at its highest cruising speed. I calculated that the effect of relativity would “shorten” the jet by less than the distance between atoms. It is completely outside our daily experience -- our daily “intuition”. So Euclidian/Newtonian geometry is quite “incorrect”, even though its axioms are clear and it works beautifully in engineering. This is a victory of experiment over “intuition”, of empiricism over the dialectical philosophers. (Boy, am I going to pay for that.)
What power/political forces allow us to appreciate this? I can only speculate. I just hope that those forces are still at play as we move into an increasingly automated future.

[marnig]

Im good with, if It's measurable it is real❤

[Khannea]

I came out of university philosophy in 1992 a total failure and I felt intensely stupid. Like, I wasn't smart, I didn't even compare, I felt like a dumbass. So I took whatever crumbs of philosophy that tick to my clothes and became nihilistic and relativistic for a few years, largely to pretend to myself I had actually learned to parrot some Foucault or Descarted or whatever. I had a phase which at the time was pretentiously analogue to that thing we so often see in humanities universities these days. I feels uncannily familiar. It is a shame based response. All this posturing is an outcry of self-pity when you realize you still have a lot of learning about life to do and you are far far away from anything approximating a solid, stable world-view.

[flyagaric]

I'm with Bob...
"Relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you’re using, and where that instrument is located in space-time. So there is no vantage point from which ‘real’ reality can be seen; we’re all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels.”--Robert Anton Wilson, Maybe Logic.