Postmodern truth

In a review of Harry Frankfurt’s On Truth (a sequel to Frankfurt’s widely read On Bulls*** ), Oxford’s Simon Blackburn offers a neat summary of postmodern notions of truth. He questions the tendency to use postmodernism as a “whipping boy” against whom “many readers may feel that no insult is too gross to heap on it.” He doesn’t find “any recent philosophical movement that could have been stopped in its tracks by pointing out that it is easier to find your way about in daylight than in the dark, or that if someone tells you that a bottle contains gin and you act accordingly, you have a beef against him if it contains kerosene.” He admits that some individual writers “might have carelessly let loose remarks that seem to imply the opposite,” but suggests that “they probably misspoke themselves as they tried to say something more interesting.”

What is that more interesting something that postmodernists are after? Blackburn suggests that the fundamental assumption is “that man is the measure of all things.” If this premise is granted, then “there is no single way the world requires to be understood, and no process of science of history that is free from the engagement of the prepared mind. Even if the world were an open book – which it is not – books require reading; and reading requires intelligenc; and intelligence requires language, learning, acculturation, tradition, and their innumerable influences on our resulting nature. Postmodernism recognizes that many of these influences can be expected to vary from person to person, place to place, time to time, class to class, gender to gender, tradition to tradition. Books require reading, and what they can then expect to get are readings, in the plural.” There is no escape, Blackburn says, from the burden of judgment.

From this premise, some might conclude that “anything goes,” while others insist that this situation demand toleration and increased awareness of the provisionality of any particular reading. Blackburn himself thinks that scientific method provides “a field where we can hope for rational convergence.” Where science is the central concern, this promises to “flatt out any differences in the differently prepared minds that come to the problems of science.” When we get into political, religious, and moral issues, “convergence is less certain.”

Postmodernism has “at least in the popular mind, included the idea that what I have called the burden of judgment must inevitably paralyze judgment.” This “essentially adolescent” conclusion supposes “that with perspective comes illusion, or that with the recognition of the inevitable presence of perspective comes the conclusion that no view is as good as any view.” When anyone suggests that we must rely on “our most careful view formed by the methods that have proved themselves, over time, to be better at representating how things stand,” postmodernists object that the methods that have proven most effective “at best select beliefs which happen to commend themselves to us, or which enable us to cope, not ones that have any additional virtue of truth.” As Blackburn says, “That is an elephant that requires more than a pea shooter to bring it down.”